It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

This happened at my previous job where I worked for a dating app. It was at a time where the CEO was trying to turn the dating app into “more than a dating app” by adding tons of social features. We always had “interests” which allowed users to see what interests they had in common with another person, but he wanted to take the social component even further.

So with that, he decided we needed an “activity feed.” The activity feed would show what various Facebook connected users were liking on Facebook, posting on Facebook, etc. On a dating app. Where the majority of the audience was > 50 years old. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and everyone but the CEO knew it was destined for failure before we started building it.

But that’s not the best part. The best part was when we launched the activity feed component. We launched it late on day and went home shortly after. The next morning, we came in, and checked on the activity feed to see what was doing. It was literally all spammers liking porn/sex related stuff on Facebook. It was a complete disaster. All garbage but not just boring garbage - completely obscene garbage.

And just like that, the activity feature came and went in the course of a few days.

Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

Forbes has, by far, the shittiest and most user-unfriendly website I've ever gone to, in this gigantic clusterfuck we call the Internet. I honestly don't understand how they felt their site design is OK. Fuck their dev team manager.

Let's run down some of its worst offenses, shall we? FORCED ANTI-ADBLOCK, shitton of ads (some of which are extremely invasive and dangerous), autoplaying sidebar video WITH SOUND ON, that fucking social sidebar & collapsed navigation, and their mind-bogglingly irrelevant, frustratingly obnoxious, & totally pointless Quote of the Day, which itself has ads and A FORCED COUNTDOWN to go to the fucking article you went there to read to begin with.

The articles themselves on Forbes are solid, so why do they have to ruin it with this shit? I will never go to a Forbes link again. No article is worth facing their torture chamber.

TLDR: Fuck you Forbes, your site is absolutely the shittiest on the entire web (which is quite a feat).

This isn't really a hacking story but it does remind me of something I did as "revenge."

In middle school, this one fool kept bullying me. Always tried to harm me, always tried to insult me, always tried to make me fall during PE.

I hated him a lot, so instead of trying to kill him as planned, I did a harmless little keylogger prank thing.

I installed a keylogger on the school's laptop before class. (I did it during break, and when class started, I placed it on his desk.)

He took the bait, and instead of doing work, he logged onto his social media accounts. Now I had his passwords and everything.

When I went home, I logged onto his social media. I checked his messages so I can get some dirt on him, didn't find much except for the fact he snuck out a few times, and smoked before.

I changed his profile picture to some cringy anime thing and messaged one of his friends (the one who always copied my test answers in History and would steal my homework) and I said, "tell --- that if he doesn't stop being an asshole, I'll do worse than "hack" his social media."

It freaked them both out a bit, but didn't change their behavior, which is a shame because my threat was empty. It's not like I was able to do anything more than that in middle school. To this day, they still have no idea who did that.

This was about 4 years ago.

Weirdest co-worker was a loner(he prefers to be left alone) and he has no social skills.
One day, everyone in the office received an invitation letter. All of us were invited to our weirdest co-worker's wedding!

After that, everyone became his friend :)

Social let's-help-female-programmers warriors piss me off.

The other day a massive email thread at work on how women are misrepresented in tech and how we need to help them and how using words such as "guys" is intimidating and generally patronising shit like "let's advertise jobs on websites like femaleprogrammers.com instead stackoverflow because there's too many white males on stackoverflow."

99% participants in this topic were guys.
One girl sent a message saying she doesn't want to be helped and she wants to know she has been picked for her skill and not filling in diversity numbers.

...would you believe she has been schooled on problems women in tech face by those lads too.

Like "woman, please... we speak diversity here"

So annoying....!!

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Biggest hurdle for me is living with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. A neurological disease which affects the way my body makes melatoline. Basicly I have a set wake/sleep pattern which is extremely hard to deviate from. My sleeptime is 7am and wake up time 4pm.

I worked for 8 years forcing myself to be at the office at 9am because thats the social norm. Got 2 burnouts due to being sleepdeprived, various other issues and whatnot.

Finally discovered whats wrong with my body 3 years ago and found a awesome job at a company where I develop very complex systems which communicate with various stock exchanges.

Best part is that I work on my own and have the deal that I work about 3 to 5 hours a day on site. Then I go home have dinner, do some netflix and chill with the misses and after that I have the whole night just for me. When the world is asleep I am writing code, developing a complex system with NOBODY around me who can annoy me!

For me, this is the biggest hurdle I've overcome.

Today was Mother's Day. Everybody was posting their photos with their mothers, so I had to stay away from social networks for today to not feel sad.

It's been almost a year without mine, really miss her.

I love her, and I never showed her how much. I've not been the best son a mother could have, I'm so sorry for that. She thought me how to be strong, she was the strongest, but I'm feeling so weak now without her.
Please never miss a chance to let your mother know how much you love her, give her a hug whenever you can, talk to her every time you need somebody to talk to, listen to her stories from when she was your age. She's the most precious person you'll ever have in your life. I realized that when it was too late, don't make my mistake.

I miss you mum ❤

Roommate: I thought you aren't into social media...

Me: This is devRant, it's different.

Roommate: How so.

Me: It's for like minds, very well structured and has this fun feature which let's me create myself as a cartoon for my profile pic.

Next Day..........…......……

Me: (walks into the room) Why are you laughing and why are you using my phone.

Roommate: I THINK I LOVE THIS APP. I might actually download it.

Note: Roommate is a musician who studied CS in school.

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

I thought there was no worse freelancer site than fiverr.

*insert "Boy you were wrong" here*

freelancer.com

No. Just No.

- Limited to 8 bids as a free account
- You get 1 bid back every 90 FUCKING HOURS
- CLIENTS ARE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN ON FIVERR
- HALF OF PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SELL YOUR UPWORK ACCOUNT TO THEM
- 5€ FOR 2000 WORDS OF TRANSLATION? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? END YOURSELF PLEASE
- "Design a custom social network (video chat, chat, forum, shop and payment gateway) quick!!!" for 100€, within one day.

What the fuck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

!dev, more about social media
(and suicide)

ugh. social media.

recently a girl from a nearby high school committed suicide. it's sad, and i know what i'm about to say is going to be controversial, but i think it shouldn't be on social media. maybe her close friends posting it on instagram, to remember her, but that's it.

of course, that's not what happened. people started posting "❤️" on their snapchat stories, and theyre saying they are raising awareness. (they don't know this girl or why she did it or anything, they're just doing it because their friends did it.)

this awareness, is well, temporary.

the point of snapchat is that all the pictures go away, so why would they talk about suicide prevention on there? do they want suicide prevention to go away? this is most prevelent on snapchat, but on others, too.

trend after trend after trend.

thats what people turned her death into. a trend.

just like #prayforparis, and others, but on a local scale.

the problem with social media is that things go away. in a day or two it'll be like this never happened. she won't be remembered like she would if she weren't on social media.

i know what you're thinking. they're just "raising awareness." but for how long?

well, until another trend comes.

people disagreeing with me are extremely welcome to comment.

and any ideas on how this problem can be fixed?

One colleague was that good, that he did the job of 3 people without bteaking a sweat...
He put up with shit from the client, where others would have gone on a killing spree.

One day he was blackmailed by a colleague and a project manager.
And then he had enough... This 100kg guy went kratos -spartan rage mode- yelled at all the guys who deserved it... Came to the office, where i was placed. We shook hands, he wished the other competent guys and me the best of luck and fare thee well...

Then there was an argument, which resulted in including lawyers between him and the company... He had to support us for 2 months in order to fulfill his contact... Which he did with as much detest as possible...
He didn't come into office once... Home-Office all the time...
We are still talking over social networks... Learned/learning a lot from him...

Aspecially not to take all the shit...

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

The head of the software department of a company I did an internship at once said:

'the stereotype that programmers sit in a dark room all day with empty pizza boxes on their desks is wrong. They are very social and communicate a lot'

Me: yeah, for sure ...

Weekend weekend weekend. Yay!
After hard week at uni, took a day off and I am in bed since morning 😁
So I decided to find some kind of "dev social app" and got this. Not bad at all!

I am also fairly new at web development, using Python - at the moment Flask, later on Django so I am looking forward to meet some Flask/Django users here :)

And I just wanna add some wisdom here:)

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?

I just had a 2 hours long company lunch followed by a 1 hour meeting with the whole team. And I still have a big problem to discuss with two colleagues. Too much social interaction for one day for me. Damn, how my head hurts.

This is not facebook, but somehow yhis site has attracted who are virtually, mentally incapable of differentiating between their script kiddy hacker facebook group and anything that can be called a social media platform.

Sorting by recent and daring to toggle on jokes/memes is a pure shitshow of freshly created accounts who post "memes" of the same purity as their mother. And to finish it off they add that super relatable comment "hahah", "funny" and a couple of emojis. Totally makes me wonder if I end up being called comedy god for posting "peepee poopoo" on the site they "shared" it from.
Yes, shared and not stolen for the sake of that little dopamine rush when they see that 4 other people who try to escape their shitty form of reality thought you deserve to be proud for those couple of finger movements you used to put this on devrant and not to jack off.

Not even that spares you from their awful humor, because thanks to their disability to red, they think they can just smash that big red button and post their garbage in the wrong category, yet somehow they have the obligation to add an absurd amount of tags telling you that they've tried to post a joke and I honestly feel sorry for the database table who has to store so variations of "jokes/meme" for this shit.

Thr quality of these memes degrades with each time I open devrant, just like my patience for these shitposters.

I've seen a couple of people who cancled their monthly subscription for devrant, to show their discontent with these user and my urge to do the same has gotten stronger recently.

DevRant as it is right now is on it best way to stray away further from what it meant to be every day

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

There should be a devrant Meetup one day. Basically The community just gets together, rants about stuff to each other but in person so we all meet our social interaction requirements for the year. Then we could buy swag and sit on our computers and work on our personal/group projects. It would give devs a great excuse to take a vacation once a year.

My startup boss took away our teams chat because we needed to "let everyone see our conversations for context". i said that's more like paranoia. then he told us we had to use company portraits and logos on LinkedIn and Social Media. and to post company ads and links on social media at least once a day. im not a social media manager, im a programmer MF'r. is this normal?????

For each day on devrant I feel this place more like a community than a social media. And damn thats good. Thank you all for making my day

Getting told that technology is bullshit and that humans have forgotten how to interact with each other (meaning being social) by people from the same age bracket that throw a fit because they can't use said technology is both hilarious and infuriating.

Seriously, aren't these old farts more concerned with things such as starbucks not putting "merry Christmas" on their fucking red cups? Am I supposed to take their shit seriously? No the fuck I am not, and neither should you.

If your old ass can't work how your fucking smartphone works, or have a haaaaard time trying to select Netflix from your smart tv app selection then the problem is not my generation. Its your dumbass for not keeping up.

Its fine if you don't want to use technology, fuck if I care. But you ain't winning this shit because of your preferences regarding technology.

Also, telling me that I am wrong for wearing my headphones at the gym to shut people off. Wtf dude, not everyone wants to fucking talk to others all the time, specially during gym time. I am there to work out and get sexy af, not to ask you how your fucking day went, I don't know u, i don't want to know you, you already showed me how fucking close minded and uninteresting you can be, why the fuck should I give that shit a chance?

Fuck outta here with that shit. He went on to tell me that software is made by people with 0 social skills. Booooooy I would have your granddaughter(she is my age) any day of the fucking week and you can tell me if we lack "social skills"

Foh

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

Social media censorship is such a fucked up shithole of bullshit.

Ig thot models post their asses and tits on there about twice a week and it's not a big problem at all. Just turn a blind eye to that.

But God forbid you post something that is vaguely mean or anything political that isn't center to left, and that bitch is getting deleted for bullying or harassment.

I commented on this post and basically just said "your mom sounds like a bitch" but that got deleted for harassment. Is that really what harassment is? Well holy fuck I harass my friends like a few dozen times a day so I should probably get arrested.

Gotta love having speech censored under the umbrella of "pReVeNtiNg BuLlYiNg".

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

Got this email from my manager today... a bit of a downer to my three day weekend!

I actually don't talk about work (in an indentifiable way), and I think most of the other points in their guide are utter BS (and unenforceable).

I am pretty open (about myself) on social media though, so feel sorry for HR if they've been combing through it! 🤣

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

My wife saw me posting on Dev Rant raging about my boss, and suggested I ought to use a different user name instead of my usual one... considering he spends all day using social media I think she might be right... passed the advice on to some friends we are all now paranoid and have new accounts. <3

Overheating The Javascript Ecosystem

Paranoid thought: You know, in the course of every day, being the corrupt piece of shit that I am, whenever I see a scandal or what looks like shenanigans-in-the-making, I ask myself

"Wisecrack, is this a fucking scam or con of some sort?"

I was recently asking myself this about javascript.

Not the language per se, but the ecosystem.

I noticed how there are a thousand CLIs for simple shit. Another four thousand for page long libraries, for simpleton level shit (because prototypes are designed after satans own aborted love-child of object models). I noticed another eight thousand guys imitating steve jobs, talking at conferences and 'change the world' high-on-huffing-my-own-shit TEDX talks like rubyists that don't realize the world has moved on, all to hawk books and inflate CVs for cushy positions at major tech firms and the herd of dicksuckers following the next fad off a cliff like lemmings. And another eight thousand 'tech journalists' pushing them off the cliff while begging for outrage and hype dollars and slowly circling like vultures above the drain that is the ad-based economy.

And I thought to myself.

"Wisecrack, who benefits from all this noisy self-indulgent horseshit? Where is all the money coming from for all these books, conferences, meetings, publications, media, bread, and circuses?"

"I don't know wisecrack. But if I were the CEO of a big company, threatened by the prospect of a universal language, or universal platform, like flash, but one I couldn't kill like flash, I would try to do the most corrupt thing I could think of."

"Whats that wisecrack?"

"I would try to 'overheat' the ecosystem by selectively hiring people from that ecosystem, pumping money into a boatload of similar products, all in the hopes of provoking the equivalent of an immune overreaction, imitators all flooding the ecosystem with the same shit in different packages, self promoting sycophants, aggrenadizing social media idiots, tools sold as tools, hyped as 'the next coming of steve jobs', overcooked shit that focuses on ceremony over functionality, ritual over productivity, documentation over innovation like some sort of amazonion infinite nesting doll hellscape of documents linking to documents linking to documents, each one a new circle of dantes inferno, where the definition of anything links to another document that says "see also xyz", and I would convince them that they had done it to themselves."

And then I would push typescript as their lord, savior, and master. "

"How do you know all this wisecrack?"

"Because I am a piece of shit, and, this is what I would do in any executive's shoes."

A mate from highschool contacted me the other day, offering me a job on this grand new idea he had.

So I said: "Allright, lets hear it, whats the idea?"

Him: "Trust me, its the next billion dollar app! It is a whole new social network for..."

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

Tooday
Movie sucks
Games sucks
Most programmers sucks
Buying a house sucks
Try to get a grocery under 200$ for nothing sucks
Have child with no future other then capitalisme sucks
Friends that don't take any news in 8 years sucks
Have a girlfriend that don't sucks sucks
Buying pricey shit and thinking i will survive at least 10 years and broke after 3 years with warranty sucks
All social platforms sucks ( other then devrant)
Working for a shit salairy and doing everyone jobs sucks
Lossing mind about idiots in our world sucks
My english sucks
You sucks
My water heater sucks
My landlord sucks
My budget sucks
My old 16 years old bike i use to go work sucks
Government sucks
House builder sucks at 80%
Bank fuck you everytime sucks
Taxes for any service sucks
Medical system in canada sucks
Educational system in canada sucks

Goes on each day i realize something sucks...

!dev

So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.

But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)

I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.

Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.

Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.

I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.

And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.

Freelancing sucks. "A good developer told me this should take a couple hours." Or "I need an Uber like app with built in payment and social integration. We have a $50 budget and it shouldn't take more than a day or two to build." Or "I need a simple game built. Should work on Apple and Android. No budget but we could work out a share of profits." Really wish I had a real job...

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Well I just had a breakdown a few hours ago.. For a too calm guy like me it's really rare, but also not surprising. I have my third deadline in a row, haven't really seen people over the last month. Thanks guys for helping me survive socially during this month, I'm a very social guy usually, so I really needed that.
Apart from that, last time I was hopeful about my schedule and sent it to my advisor she called me the day after shouting that it's not realistic and I'll never be done on time. I could have worked harder on February, that's true, but for fuck sake she ruined all of my motivation in a 10 minute call.
I wish I liked what I'm doing. I wish people I work with would have appreciated what I'm doing and encourage me. I wish I was 2 weeks to the future when I have not even a slight thing to worry about.
Get me outta here 😩

This rant has been boiling for a long time now so please bear with me. Here it goes.

A slight introduction of the lady working in my office. She's a soft spoken person who works for like 2 hours a day at max (rest of her time goes on surfing facebook etc).

NOW WHAT FUCKING GRINDS MY GEARS IS THAT SHE FUCKING THINKS SHE KNOWS HOW TO "CODE" ONLY BY KNOWING HTML!! FML

She claims of being a Social Media Expert, Digital Guru. But, SHE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO FUCKING USE GOOGLE TAG MANAGER!!

MY WHOLE FUCKING DAY GETS RUINED BY EVEN INTERACTING WITH HER!!!!!!

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

Is success luck or hard work?

“Success is luck.”
— the guy who spent 13 hours a day learning for four years straight before the success came

“Success is definitely luck.”
— the guy who sold his soul, become obsessed and traded his social life for skills

“Success is hard work”
— the trust fund baby who barely learned anything through his “career”

This is kinda the silliest thing ever but...

In a class with a computer lab, one of the other people who uses the same desktop as me started taking screenshots at exactly 1:11. I followed suit and started taking screenshots at 11:11. I still have no idea who they are...

Now is almost the end of the year, and I really want to know who they are if only for the satisfaction, so I was thinking and came up with a solution that would take minimal social interaction. I wrote a Python script to take a screenshot every eight seconds and hid it on the computer, running. It saves the screenshots to a folder that is nested in another one, so the likelihood of someone finding out about this is pretty low. So anyways next class day I'm going to sift through the screenshots and find out who this is and probably some stuff about them given that I get to see over an hour of their computer activity. Fun stuff!

TL;DR I'm using Python to stalk kids at my school...

I was talking to someone at the grocery store and as they walked away, I said "Have a nice!" And instantly regret. Fucking speech problems. Have a nice... Day? Night? What? Stupid brain/mouth slurring my speech.

Oh, and the social awkwardness helps I guess...

Waking up from a dream with a girl in it.
TL;DR: We fell in love and I can finally somehow remember her. Not completely though...

(To the perverts: We did not have sex nor did we kiss.)
The worlds I am becoming a part of are very complex. I won't get into the details of how they look like. I will tell as far as I can remember.

<vaguely remember the beginning>
My sister, my mom and I went into a house which turned out to have weird things inside.
Suddenly I became something like an agent and I had a special mission. I went to the basement of this building. Saw a few guys chilling there. Grabed a walkie talkie which was taped on the right wall. I have listened to it while moving back to the entrance, when I have arrived there, it began to do disortion type of sounds.

<I have been to a lot of different places here. Telling each of them would make me to not come to an end lol>

Then I have decided to go outside. The outside-of-the-house world changed. I was at floor 8 or something like that. It was very high when I looked down. All of the sudden I got into a waterfall type of thing which was about to suck me in to a circle. The waterfall was limited to the area of where this house was. It was basically hovering above the streets, but never reaching the streets.

I somehow met the lovely girl in a cube type of thing that helped us not to fall down through the spiral. We enjoyed the action the waterfall created. It made us move in a circle and we had to hold ourselves at the wall of the cube which luckily had knobs to hold on.

After that whole action I have been in my bed and sleeping. She somehow found me on a social media platform and contacted me with "Meet me on <some strange date>".

<some unlogical world shit happens here. I will just skip them until the date>

The day to meet her comes. She is up on a hill with a "purple?<idk it was purple-ish>" sky.

<can not remember the dialogue>

We had a great time and I felt that she had feelings for me.
She then went away. What about me? And me, too. ;)

The next day I went to see her again. She was gone. I found out that she has a brother. I talked to him about where she might be. Turns out her brother was a demon or satan <idk they all became agressive and god-like powerful lol>.
He told me that she must be there where <random name of enemy> is to fight the enemy to rescue her mom.

Her brother went to help her. I followed him since I did not know where the enemy was. Let alone where I was. The world has changed for the 99999th fucking time lol.

I followed him up another hill with trees and a lot of people. It was autumn.

Then we found her sitting on a hill looking down to the sea beneath us with cherry blossom trees around her.

The dream was about to end. I felt it. So I have asked her a few questions after the happy greeting, but I can not remember them and her answer anymore. But I do remember that she did not say anything after one question. She just stared at me looking through my eyes which immediately did end the dream.
I was able to get into the dream shortly after it a few times, but I was not able to interact with them.

Besides of that: I have had "Battle Symphony-Linkin Park" playing as a background music for the whole dream a long.

The good thing is that I somehow would be able to recreate her. I know how she looks like to about 60%.

I do not even know why the fuck I am telling y'all this.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

Blabbering co-worker rant.

So this bonker who speaks non-stop for 15 minutes without even a breather break is more annoying than I thought.

1. She used to work for a project A and then they moved her to my project. She kept cribbing she wants to continue working on A because that's where her expertise are. So management hired a new team member so she can continue on A and new member can work with me.

Now next week, the new member is joining us. As we prepare the onboarding plan, bonker comes crying that she wants to work on my project and NOT on Project A. She is forcing us to give Project A to new team member.

Manager upfront rejected her proposal and told her that she'd be working on A.

2. She literally gives orders. Her tone is rude and blunt. The other day ordered me to review her presentation and kept following up even when I said I was busy. Same tone and attitude with manager.

Then she complained about my behaviour saying I was a bossy person even when I used the most polite tone (because I have actively worked on and built my social skills).

3. Knows shit about the product, has no skill set, asks the same question 10 times, and isn't able to deliver bare minimum.

And then evidently everyone follows up with me because I am on top of everything (because I have to as bonker can't function).

4. She lied to me that company gives good hikes and easy promotions.

She was kicked out of her previous project because of her incompetency.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my manager saved her ass. But she literally is the most stupid person I have worked with me in my entire career.

5. She has no communication skills, something that is highest valued skill in my profession. And when I do my normal, it pisses her off. She keeps complaining that I am overstepping.

If I don't then product will just fall apart and everyone might get fired because of no work.

And that is causing her insecurities and she starts fear mongering about both of us being fired.

I told our manager upfront that I want to lead the product and she was more than happy about the proposal. What sucks is that my manager is leaving this month end and I'll have to build trust with my new line manager.

Ugh!! She is annoying..

I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

Looks like despite 20-30 years on the market all popular text / spreadsheet editors are still loading whole file to memory.

What the fucking wankers. WTF are they doing whole day besides changing menu layout and icon colors ?

Clearly development today is lead by bunch of idiots from marketing department accompanied with HR hiring social network self made models.
What a fucked up world.
Let’s add AI to our software but fails to open 150MB csv file.

Great job everyone. Great job.

There was this senior designer many years ago that used to come in late everyday, do fuckall except piss everyone off and then spend the majority of her day on the phone organising her social life. We all hated her, and she knew it. This one day she came in and resigned. As we were all Mac, we quickly invented a nickname for her which was "Type 11" in the old Mac days this error was "Unexpectedly Quit". The sad thing was she was best mates with the owners wife. Everyone in the office was questioned about their meanness and nasty vibes. She didn't quit it was just to get back at us for hating her. 12 years on, I'm self employed and she does marketing in a manufacturing co. We get on really well and she gives me good work. Moral: I have no fucking idea what life is about.

Apparently I am a mental patient to my mom, who sits in front of the computer every day, doesn't have a social life and doesn't have a future.

That's all because I don't want to attend her friend's wedding :(

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Today is the day when I declare that I once and for all cancel all SJW-attracting topics.

Social relations is a hard topic and it seems like people just can't live together. There is always some group that oppress some other group.

Today I declare that I don't care about all this shit. It bothers me, it weakens me, it makes my health worse. Can I live like 60 more years (I'm keeping things real about my remaining time here) without touching SJW topics? I think I can.

My life would be different. I'm quitting acknowledging SJW topics existence, I'm quitting talking about them. They don't exist for me.

For now I'm planning to focus on art.

Fuck everyone who discriminate, also fuck everyone who fight discrimination with another kind of discrimination.

Have to work from home for at least a few weeks..

i hate working from home..
my team Is all the social life i have. Already miss them after 1 day.

Not at all dev related but I don’t have a social life so I share with you guys:)

I’ve been fat for all my life. You might say it’s my own fault blah blah but I quit sugar over 10 years ago, I don’t snack and eat 1-2 meals a day, not much more than others do.

The first time I was in good shape was when I was 16. I was growing, I started boxing and I was happy-ish with my body for the first time. I got down from 110kgs to ~87kgs, which is a good weight for me, I have heavy bones and wide shoulders I guess.
I insured my shoulder and couldn’t do boxing anymore but my weight was still pretty much stable. After working in the office for a few months I started gaining weight again, I think mainly due to the stress and lack of sleep.
In 2017 for the first time I hit a new high with 120kgs. I quit my terrible, stressful 24/7 job and relocated and got down to ~115 which I maintained for quite a while (still going to the gym and stuff).

And then the lockdown started..
I went up to >120 in no time.
(Sounds really bad but as mentioned, I’m heavy anyway so I’m not THAT obese, just fat.

Seeing my weight was really scary to me so I started a keto diet again, which I did before but with limited success.

Warning: Controversial topic coming up..

I took it a bit further and tried 0-carb (carnivore diet) instead of low carb and I lost 6kg within a month. Then the next plateau at 114, then at 112 etc.
Went more strict and removed seasoning and stuff and started eating more nutritious meat, liver, heart, tongue etc and my weight started dripping again.

Yesterday for the first time in ~a decade I got down to 105kg.
My end goal is 90, so I made it half way through.

Just really happy to have achieved this. The 1 good thing about lockdown I guess, I had so much time to be on my own.

Before you say eating no greens is bad, keep in mind that most not old people die because of obesity, not because of a lack of fiber.

It’s a big achievement for me and I hope that I can get to 90kg in another 3 months..

Story over

Idea: social media, hard mode

- Likes are a currency
- You get one like per day to spend on whatever post you feel is worthy
- After 30 seconds, you are unable to unlike the post
- The poster gets the like, which they can spend
- You can only post once per day
- Each additional post costs a like
- You can only comment once per day
- Each additional comment costs a like
- Sure, why not, sell likes for money. Fuck. Dev's gotta eat.

PROS:

- Less time-consuming by design. Interact without losing yourself in social media.
- Learn financial management
- Encourages only good content
- More difficult to get an inflated ego from

CONS:

- You'll probably get 0 likes on most of your posts, loser
- Limits discussion, as comments are limited

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

So I titan Lannister, first of my name, a 21 yr old only child of super extra over protective middle class parents; with 0 social interaction and level 1000 introvert geeky nature, has made up my mind and gathered courage to go on a 3 day event in another state , with no known persons there or by my side, completely on my own.

I am excited as well as hell of scared. I always wanted to teavel places and meet people, but don't had courage to talk to even my coworker girl on the opposite table, leave alone meeting ppl or going out.

Please share your first time alone journey stories , or anything else that i should be aware of

I am a senior Android dev, and I have an old colleague (iOS senior dev). We work on the same project, but in every estimation session he pushes a lot on the lower side: he estimates 4h a task that normally takes 6h or 8h, and the reason is that he has no social life. Right after work he starts working again from home (I can see all his commits), he also works almost entire weekends. I would say he works as average 12/13 h per day.
I don t want to work extra time (unpayed).
About him, it is his life, so I don t care...but at the same time this makes me pressure. I care a lot about quality of code, and I don t want to sacrifice it just for catching up. Most of the people in the team know that he works a lot extra time.

How would you handle this?

!rant ✓devrant-meetup

Met @condor irl today. He's the same weird guy as I feel at moments. Interests that don't interest people around us in any way..

Drank some beers, evidently called Belgium.
He came all the way to the town I work at.. kudos!

Talked about breadboards taking 230V via cables that aren't meant to take the voltage in any way.. Security implications in networks and online services, like Fb. Faraday's cage & how it works; and some other shit I swear I won't tell anyone about as you should be comfortable discussing it.

Quite interesting, I swear! (:

Now on the bus home, as I had to cut it short to get to some parental business... But I'm looking back on some positive social interaction, which I'll gladly re-do another time.

Condor, it was sure nice to meet ya. I'll come your way next time. That ~10eu for your transport will be equalled some day in the near future.

@FunkDelegate sorry it was badly timed and plaved, you'll join us soon enough! At least you saw decent ass! xD

I work as a .Net consultant. Currently I am at a company that blocks all sociale media sites and sites that look like 'em. I don't mind the social media, but YouTube is also blocked and I need my dose of daily epic music world while developing. So, I set up a proxy on my server to easily bypass these blockades. Note: company policy says nothing about not being allowed certain websites, I always read this before using this trick.

Last week, a new guy joined the company and gets a desk just next to me. After a lot of looking at my screens and trying stuff he asks me for the entire office: "Hey how are you going on YouTube? It doesn't see to work for me.". 😫

The rest of the day, I had to explain to co-workers what a proxy is (they don't care about any tech they don't need...). And I had to explain to the pm that I was not hacking their network...

I'm not sure if I will be getting along with this new guy.... 😧

I'm so fucking frustrated with my ex company CEO, this motherfucker made everyone move to Bangalore costing is employees a good chunk of their salary and this delusional ASSHOLE knew that only half of the expected funding was coming in January 2023 itself and they'd be out of funds by July/August, they let go few folks from the team, fired the entire marketing team and expected to make the product profitable. The only reason I had stayed at that time was because the product was interesting to build and the scale I was working with was crazy like 100k request per minute peaks and avg of 10k rpm. I left the company in August...

This MOTHERFUCKER hasn't paid out final settlement after leaving for most employees and he openly says to the folks who are still working there that paying us is not his priority.

I hope your Atlas cluster gets fucking deleted, accesses revoked and entire AWS setup goes down forever, bitch.

We can't goto courts because the company law tribunal needs atleast 1 crore (1.2 million usd) of unpaid dues to declare it insolvent in a years time..

This asshole deducted taxes from our salaried but didn't pay them to the income tax department for an entire fucking financial year.

What a cheating, delusional, sick bastard. And he's still not willing to sell off the company to pay off the debts and call it a day.

Aarrghhhh on top of losing 2-3k USD I might have to pay my taxes approx 5-6k USD to the govt to keep my records well maintained.

What a grade A delusional asshole 😡
If he won't clear the dues till December, I'm gonna launch a mass of social media posts and destroy his reputation so that he doesn't get one penny of VC funds in the future I'm gonna make sure of that...

- Think YOU'VE got a personality complex? I'm a software engineer who majored in marketing.
- Think YOU'VE got a phobia about failing? I wrote a book on developing for Google Glass. And tech edited another on Hailstorm.
- Think YOU'VE got self-confidence issues? I had a run of 7 straight rejections by companies in the Fortune 500.
- Think YOU'VE got reservations about flexing your certifications? I held a MCP in FrontPage.
- Think YOU'VE got paranoia about your degree? My MBA's from the University of Phoenix.
- Think YOU'RE a glutton for punishment? I - Think Android Content Providers are a good idea.
- Think YOU'VE got a confusing skill set? A hiring manager told me I was "too passionate about technology to work here at Microsoft".
- Think YOU'VE got issues with intellectual property? I was given a cease-&-desist order for the first domain I registered.
- Think YOU'VE got false bravado? I had over 400,000 followers on Google+.

While all of these are hilarious quips and great social ice breakers, they're all 100% true. Enjoy your day. ;)

Asking seriously: don't all those social justice warriors on Twitter have something to do with their lives other than tweeting/complaining/attacking someone/... all the time?

I wake up for 16 hours everyday and it's not enough to finish my tasks that I want to extend the day past 24 hours. That's excluding two hours or so wasted reading technical posts on Reddit or Twitter but they have to ruin this time with their whining.

#justdevthings
That moment when you're so engrossed in your project that you lose track of time. You begin to SEE code irl, not just on screens. Things like hunger, environment and a sense of time fade away. That feeling when the code just works, but better when it doesn't and you figure out a smart fix. Oh gosh ill pay to feel like that all day.

I wrote a shitty layout for an android side project. It haunted me. I could still SEE the shitty xml long after the pc was shut down. I had a nightmare about it and woke up sweating, and all I could see was xml. Fkin xml man. I redid the layout at 3am and boy was i so satisfied.
I think that was just the tetrix effect taking its toll on me.

I always got screwed by parents for being on that machine all day, back in school. But none of that matters now. I can now feel the code running in my veins and flowing into the machine. I can now feel my heart throbbing at the sight of such beauty. They ask how i manage my social life. I say everything goes well until i start a side project, that's when social life gets fucked hard. I think I'm gonna die one day after performing the final commit.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

I once got something weird during interview. I had to do an assignment on site taking the whole work day of time. In the end, I got bashed on how much I delivered and had to defend it. Defending was easy: the project was decent while not being much. A Mercedes without electric windows. I just told them it's what I prefer.

Later got a phone call and got hired.

The social test was the hardest

Firts social hacking ever 😁😁😁

In the bus at the end of the day
Me:(fake phonecall to Bell)ho you offert me a 10go of data per months for 30$ ! Wow

Guy in bus: he call is phone company and give all is Private information in the bus to have a better deal.

Me: poke him and say "you know now i can create accounts on your billing address for free"

Guy: Holy shit man you are right i need to take care.

Me: now change all you password contains what you publicly said.

Me: have a good day 😋

Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.

Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!

Because Yes we can!

Beep boop.

If you ever thought hell didn't exist...
I just spent the day explaining cryptocurrencies to a room of social sciences and law students.
I really need to get drunk, but it's only Thursday 😫

So I am only 15 and I am trying to find local businesses that will allow me to either build them a website or let me redo their current website.

Doesnt sound thay complicated right? I have gotten to do it once, for a laid back coffee shop owner whos business went out of business a day after i emailed him about it being done. I mean how the hell does that even happen!

I have tried different types of emails and shown all of my work, which it is all good sites that look professional. Issue is alot of people dont trust email offers or dont trust me cause im 15. I am not much of a person who can walk into a store and talk to the owner about it, i am not social in that aspect.

So anyone have any ideas?

Detox for a couple of weeks.
Have been avoiding social media apps like Instagram and Facebook.

It’s day 3, already feeling positive and less stressed

Only downside is what to do in free time

There should be one day a year when random spam emails become true when you click on them.

It should be random for everyone so you never know what day it is and also happen instantly when you click on message.

World would be full of millionaires, guys with enormous penises. Everyone will eat food all the time cause you can lose all of your unnecessary weight with single click and whole internet will flood with spam emails.

Instead of scrolling trough news and social networks people would click on spam emails waiting for the day their spam will be fulfilled.

Economy would eventually collapse and most of us would be no different than monkey in some crazy experiment waiting for it’s banana.

It can be called fulfilled spam message paradox.

It would be funny alternative reality.

We had a lab in middle school, 5th grade, I think, where they had a few Apple IIe computers.

I remember one day looking over at a smart friend's screen and he was playing a flight simulator. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me a computer magazine where all the code was published for it. He had typed the whole thing in and saved it to a floppy.

It was part of a turning point for me when I was deciding between social groups: wanting to be a dumb jock or wanting to be smart. Thanks to that kid's example, I chose being smart. It cost me dates with the hot girls later in high school when I should have been carrying a pager for all the teachers who needed me to fix their computers for them, but I made sure to cry all the way to the bank when I was eventually making six figures.

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

So i’m making my first Angular app here. I commited the first code setup and shot in the PR. I got 40+ comments so i’ve been fixing them all day yesterday.

A part of the comments i don’t understand yet so i ask if the colleage can watch with me and explain ehat how and why.

What does this nitpicker motherfucker do? Add more fucking comments to the PR and totally ignores my requests for explanation. Fucking anti social dick.

Hi there fellow Devranters,
I am new here but my problem is pretty old. You see i stumbled into coding totally by accident. That was about 5 years ago. I have been learning ever since.
But the problem is that each day I just feel less and less of a programmer, more of a failure. I started with python, from sololearn to various ebooks.Then C++ and finally Ruby. But I still feeal weak.Despite the projects that I have worked on I still don't feel good enough. Most especially in Ruby.
I have a friend who is also into coding and coincidentally started about the same time as I did.The difference is that he learnt at university and I am self-taught.We used to talk a lot but we don't anymore,I feel too ashamed, an impostor even. I am scared he'll ask me something and I won't know anything about it.And I once taigjt him OOP. Right now I can't even code a hello world program without reading a whole ebook on python just to be confident.
We had dreams with my friend on a dozen or so projects that would have put us on the software dev map, but I keep avoiding him so much we have barely started any. I am afraid he'll find me too amateurish to work with.
I learn everyday to expand my knowledge,I have subscribed to a gazillion software related stuff on all social media platforms I happen to be in.But deep down I feel insufficient. I have been going through rants since the few hours I joined and it doesn't sound gibberish to me.Neither does other people's code when I go through it.But I am ashamed of mine I end up deleted after it runs successfully.
I just don't feel like a software developer, I don't even know what it takes to be one even. I learned 10 languages focused on 3, laughed at memes only devs get, used linux and loved it too but still I feel like an impostor. I used to be happy about all the things I taught myself, I onced dreamed of working at Google and later having my own startup back home.Now my friend and a couple of his friends have a small start-up and I feel ashamed of myself.
I don't feel like what I know is enough and learning only makes me feel worse, so bad I am scared of coding again now.Yet I just can't stop learning, I feel incomplete when I don't do anything dev related,but I don't even feel my speed is fast enough when I type on my keyboard.
😥😥

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Ive been thinking for a few now that if like to begin a social program to get old people to play computer games.

They are often bored as fuck， cant move much and have no mental challenges.

I mean what else than video games could save the day?

Old homes with puzzles and missing pieces. Dementia neighbours. Ots a no brainer!

!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/

So I work full time at a retail store, but only one person is on shift at a time here so I'm allowed to bring my laptop and code while I'm running the store. This is where I get most of my schoolwork done and make most of my project deadlines for web dev job.

My only social life really consists of me hanging out with my boyfriend. Often when I need to be working on some code or project he will sit next to me and play guitar/sing or will quietly read while I'm on my laptop.

Other than that I chat with some game friends through Discord throughout the day, and often visit/help family members in spare time off of work.

Not much of a social life when you're super busy

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

!dev

Last night I had a meeting at 7:30 and a social event at 6. I was just gonna skip the social event but my friends convince me to go. And it was alright.

I go to the meeting and one of the people that we absolutely need canceled but didn't tell us.

mfw I left a social event 30mins away to go to a meeting that was canceled.

Oh and the person that didn't show was my friend and they wanted to reschedule for this morning. Guess what I'm mad and hurt and just gonna be sad in my bed all day. Fuck your meeting.

I usually avoid procrastination by turning off my phone, not going on social networks or YouTube and by setting some goals to achieve in a day.

Its 5:32 am been working on a new social media website opened up devrant to check whatsup and found out people really have amazing pc setups ♥️ I couldn’t post mine because my laptop has a broken keyboard and i use a usb keyboard also my laptop overheats so i stuck skateboard wheels to two of the back supports its an i5 processor with 3gb of ram but I love it,its what you do with your resources that really matters right ? with that broken keyboard i created a website for my college department which now 720 students and teachers use and we have around 8k entries in 3 days. Running the website on a local server at my college so no money spent on hosting. Taking small steps towards my goals and hopefully one day i’ll publish my setup

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

I work for an big company that owns a social media website. One day I worked on the CSS of that side an changed...
[read more]

Future01

Click, click, click, click.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

I’m tired of living on popularity driven planet among animals, where number of clicks on likes, subscriptions and links are worth more than iq, education and experience.

Let’s face it - AI is showing us traffic driven recommendations that sucks. If you’re hooked up to social network and can’t disconnect from it you’re half way to matrix. You probably also disagree with me cause you’re serotonin junkie. You can’t stop like you can’t stop eating for a day. Bubble have you in your hands and whatever you do you probably won’t wake up. To be honest most of us won’t. It’s already to late.

I’m waiting for meta so they can put you in virtual world where you can have what you want and at the same time own nothing. They will put you in some small empty space and give you something to eat how many times you want so you can feel safe and click, tap, swipe, scroll more so they can own this planet.

You will be living only to deliver corporate metadata and you will be happy, cause they will make you happy with giving you emotions that you want to feel at exact moment.
If you get out, you won’t be able to interact cause you won’t know how to behave, you will become wild animal.

By going out you will break the law, cause outside world will be long gone. To move to bar or visit family you will travel with autonomous vehicle that have screens instead of windows.

Eventually you stop going to bar cause it’s unhealthy, you stop going outside cause there’s deadly virus and you can die.

They will take you last thing later with birth control so you can have baby whenever you want and with who you want as long as both parties agree by signing baby nft contract, you don’t have to take care of your baby and be pregnant cause it will be robotized, you will see your baby in meta. You will think you feel it using robot hands.
You will never meet your baby in person.
That’s how matrix will start. We’re half way.

If you’re struggling with productivity:
[1] Wake up early & Exercise
Waking up early means getting most of the work done as soon as you start your day. This sets a routine for you.
Doing a high-intensity workout early in the morning can kill laziness and make you feel productive.
[2] Divide the day into three parts
Do the most work in the morning hours i.e 6 am to 11 am.
Keep the 12 pm - 3 pm for work that requires less energy. Evenings can be utilised to finish minor tasks.
[3] Make a timetable
A proper timetable or To-Do is a good way to keep a track of your daily routine.
Tick off the work you've completed and you'll feel you've been productive.
[4] Follow people who motivate you to work
If you waste time scrolling on social media, make sure to follow people who instantly motivate you to work and take action.
[5] Update or shift workspace
Your workspace is where you spend most of your time, so make sure it makes you feel motivated to work.
In case you are bored of your workspace, shift it to a new room, preferably that has windows for fresh air.

Is there any other programmer that started as an architect (building architect, not IT)?

I'm divided between two different careers and working around 15hours a day because I can't focus on one. Is this a normal thing?

I work as an architect for the past 6 years and were always interested in the technology part of it.

Soon I got to be a BIM coordinator and started using Dynamo for Revit.

After that, I got involved in learning Python and now start studying web dev (front-end)

Programming is very addictive! I get it now why IT people stay in their dorm like it's a cave

In architecture there's always a client you need to make happy, while in programming I create things the away I want them to be, without all the boring formalities that I am used to.

I can learn it for free and there's a huge community to help on it. All careers should be like this.

I'm happy, but really tired 😪 my social life is resumed to hanging out with my dogs

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

Happy to be here 1st day and I'm enjoying it ,best social network ever for programmers ...been looking for such for so long and starting to get addicted.
Here I've learnt here that I need to start learning new stuff real fast.
Here I feel not alone,cos here I feel at home.
I'm Sam from Nigeria ( any Nigerian here?)

Marketing Person: [email] The feature you worked on is setting our customers’s statuses to “transactional.” We can’t send them marketing emails.

😒🙄

Me: [email] My code is not doing that. It checks to see if a contact exists in our mailing list. If it does, it adds the contact to the new list that you requested. If it doesn’t, it creates a contact and adds it to the list. Newly created contacts default to “onboarding.” For already existing contacts, I’m just adding them to the list and I’m not changing anything else. Here’s a blog post from the marketing software company that explains how a contact could get marked as “transactional.”

Later in the day, Marketing comes over to my desk and brings over the Product Manager. He asks the same question. 😡 Oh hell no. You do not create a gang up on me and hope the social pressure changes my answer.

Me: Like I wrote in my email, my code isn’t wrong and it’s not malfunctioning. It’s doing what you requested: add users who submit their email on x form to the new x list. In the marketing software, you can even check each contact and see when their status got changed to “transactional.” It wasn’t from my code.

I really hate marketing sometimes. Especially when they think they know how my code works. Excuse me, do you have access to our git repo? Can you read the code and point out the supposed problem? I didn’t think so. So don’t go accusing me of making a mistake or doing my job wrong.

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

When it's early into the night
When the temperature is just right
When I'm surrounded by silence
And no distraction makes me defiance

When I'm feeling cozy and ready to read papers and program for my thesis
But I ruined the perfect night work genesis
BECAUSE I PROMISED TO GO TO MADAFUCKIN DINNER WITH FRIENDS

DAMNIT!

I find it hard to be retrospective of the last year, work has been at times good but stressful, others tedious and frustrating. This year was an improvement over the last but everything good that I try to write about has some elements of frustration. My social life has also been somewhat stifled as I'm working at a company in a small town with very few people my age. I don't know how long I'll continue to be here.

The best experience of the year I guess is having my idea be viewed as a significant improvement over an existing piece of intellectual property, even if someone else is trying their damndest to take credit for it.

The worst is other people's ego's getting in the way. I've had people be rude, dismissive and belittling. Then when I argue my case if I am shown to be right I get a "well you learn something new every day" if I'm lucky.

Here’s Today’s book, a little late in the day but we had a storm here and lost power. Powers back

Anyway Programming Pearls, this books isn’t so much a tutorial book, or like “how to program book” it’s more an influential book and thought book. Similar to the mythical man month book.

It’s short book little over 200 pages, of short essays on problems that have irritated programmers over the years. Hence the amage to pearls as a pearl is developed from grains of sand that irritate oysters. This book is a collection of irritants of programmers. (No not the social or business side of things) but technical problems we all face.
These articles are compiled from the original postings that occurred in the Communications of ACM journal, back in the late 90s.

This books offers workable solutions to these “pearls”.

Think of this like one of the precursors to what we have now as stack overflow .. information was shared via journals since the internet wasn’t available but not so much question then respond like we do more of hey I had this problem here’s the solution sort of system.

It’s the type of book, when your bored and you don’t want to read some “how to book” you read this, just like mythical man month and others.

This book references items from knuths books. As well as references to others.

So here’s to the pearls the plague us all.

Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:

3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.

I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.

They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).

During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).

Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.

The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.

This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.

I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).

I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...

The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)

Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.

Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.

I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).

So... any thoughts?

Recruiter reached out on a certain other social network where people seem to be humbled a lot.

First interview (a day later) goes well

Second interview (a week later) also goes well. They tell me there's one more technical interview, but that shouldn't be a problem.

A week later, that interview is a breeze too. Interviewer said they'll prepare the paperwork.

Another week goes by without communication, so I ping them.

A week after that they send me an email saying that they need references they can talk to. A co-worker and a direct manager.
Uncommon in my part of the world in general. But coming up with that idea this late in the process? Really? But ok, I provide those in like an hour.

They take their time, but eventually call the co-worker. Another week after that, they still haven't called the manager, so I ping them again.

Silence for another couple of days, then a very sad email about how the general situation has changed and they've now stopped hiring indefinitely

I am honestly flattered by the fact that @scor really, unironically thinks that “by the frequency and varsity and depth you post and comment and self imaging”, I can't be a single person, and there is a whole TEAM behind me!

Honestly, I don't care about insults. Neither yours, nor of that schmuck that is salty because he posted some stupid misogynic shit a while ago, I reposted it as a screenshot, and he was obliterated by the community.

I'm only posting this because people out there legitimately think I'm a hive mind. It's not every day that you're told whatever you do cannot be done by one person. To me, this is more of a compliment.

Looking past devRant, I would like to meet @scor and other haters IRL. I have no hard feelings. I'm just an autistic person with bipolar disorder. I post whatever I want, as it's somewhat therapeutic.

You don't have to acknowledge it, but here's an honest, personal message: if you at any point compare yourself to me and lose, remember, my personality and creativity is a negligent, slight payoff for a literal hell that is a mental disorder. My thoughts are thinking themselves. I can't control them. My body is twitching constantly. I'm both actively anxious and always tired. My intellect suffers a massive penalty in a depressive phase, like now.

Finding at least some positive side to that hellscape is absolutely vital, and any person with a disorder can tell you that.

The fact that I'm social, I have friends and a job is a miracle. I'm privileged. I've seen a lot of people less lucky than me. They weren't able to monetize their troubled, sharp brain. I was.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

!rant Week 82

Eastern philosophy has made me better at programming. I'm not much of a metaphysics guy, but abstract space breeds creativity. I find that programming and zen are alike, wholeness enveloped by nothingness. A new programming language is being an infant to a foreign universe, without any means to make sense of things. Only through your own references can you make sense of this new stimuli. That nascent feeling, being a baby, is an amazing thing. Programming is probably the most humbling task I've ever endured. We all know the feelings of imposter syndrome, and yet they seem distant when a new solution is just burgeoning. Rehabilitation refers to social programs as programming. Criminals spend all day, "programming" in most institutions. Programming as a word becomes a meditation for change. So life and programming then, are forever in twined. And my experience of being humbled as a programmer has helped me in life. And my experiences being humbled by life, have made me a better programmer.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

Just started a simulation of the effects of social distancing, havent done behaviour modelin in a looong time so my skills are pretty rusty. Other than that im mostly drawing, i cant just code all day if i dont want to burn out.

I'm going to ask Chat GPT to first take over the role of our current leaders in the company cause they are not leading, and then I'm going to take our "relationship" to the next step and go through all my education and experience gained on the job with it being my best friend, teacher and mentor.

Guaranteed I will progress 3 x as fast since it's explanations make more sense to me, I don't have to worry about social queues, I grasp complex topics in a fraction of the time and it genuinely improves me as a human as well as my communication abilities also teaching me to be more precise, patient and happy to help instead of seeing it as another slosh of information to ingest after a 13 hour day. I understand the concerns with Ai but honestly I think this is an amazing opportunity to have the mentor, teacher and guide I always wanted! I hope to rise with the machine

Lately I've been coming to the realization of how much time social media and YT takes from me and Ive been trying to cut back a lot. YT is definitely the platform that takes the most time from me, so I decided to give it up for the time being. To me RN the landscape of YT is boring and repetitive anyways so I don't mind.

Yesterday was the first day and I was definitely feeling better. My head was not hurting as much, my thoughts were clearer, and I was able to focus on other things.

First rant! I'm currently on my first actual dev job and I've been learning a ton, doing extra studying/side projects in my free time and office environment is decent with good colleagues!

BUT

1) I'm getting paid about half as much as someone on my level (education and experience considered) - partly my fault, but thought experience would outweight the shit pay, now I'm really starting to question this bullshit

2) I'm away from all my friends, and by the end of my contract, 90% of them would have graduated... Have no friends outside of work where I live, and any social life I had, died when I moved

3) My work project is fucking tedious and could be flipped upside down to be of actual use, but no, company can't change how they've done things for the past 1000 years. But who gives a flying fuck about junior's suggestions, I haven't got decades of experience to back my ideas, plain logic and industry feedback isn't enough

4) Programming 24/7 for months is doing no favours to my hobbies, as I'm either too tired to do anything, or I don't have the time

5) The piece of shit library that I HAVE to use (because alternative has no support, lacks basic documention, the usual...) is built so that any automation that my project is meant to provide, is next to impossible to achieve, so day-to-day I'm just spitting in the wind as I'm slowly falling behind schedule

Quitting isn't really an option, as I'd have to find a job with significantly higher pay, really quickly to benefit from leaving... which is next to impossible

So here I am, stuck between frustration with aspects of my life and being contempt with other half (the learning and programming as a career)...

Is this something that will stay with me throughout my career/life? Or is it simply a shitty-entry-level situation out of which I'll grow out of?

I like many Apple products but if there's a thing I hate about that company its their aspirational marketing: they doesn't sell computers, phones, tablets, earbuds and stuff anymore, they want to sell you a "perfect lifestyle" (perfect from the perspective of Californian tech-bros) where you'll be super fit, super organized, devour self help content like no tomorrow while taking pixel perfect notes, do mindfulness and breathing exercises, juggle 5 social events a day... and all it takes to achieve that is buying "just one more device".

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Bundling all non coding stuff (slack, checking bug tracker, task management, meetings, checking phone, etc) to the "edges" of the day, start/lunch/end.

Have a single channel through which you are available for emergencies — ignore the rest.

And never bookmark social media, entertainment or news on your work machine browser.

Feature creep aside I do think after a few weeks of use that notifications on devrant could use a bit of work. There is a lot of interaction and it can get confusing.

Some use cases currently not supported:
- On long threads I want to know which comment of mine that got a new ++. Perhaps scrolling to it + different colour?
- Seeing the new interaction per thread rather than per timeline.
- Getting a hint on which thread people interacted with. First sentence would be useful.
- Muting threads.
- Marking individual notifications as read without opening them.
- Moving notifications out of the menu and giving them separate button to save a click (many times a day)

If something on the list is already possible I suggest it be made more obvious ;)

Apart from being full of awesome people I really like being able to sort the flow of posts. I know this isn't staffed anywhere near the big social media and it's fine the way it is. But this is my two cents even if no one asked for them.

@dfox ?

It's pussy-assed mass hysteria at its best. Social media and the overall deprecation of quality life for the human race is what's caused this. Fear takes its toll in many ways, and this is an incredibly forceful way of engineering a "Big Brother" effect on the World to increase the sale of products and pharmaceuticals based on predictive statistics that nailed down our habits and decision making process as a whole.

Sad shit, since history proves that this will eventually lead to a World War and we're way too far lost in opinion to comprehend the true consequences that will follow.

Having said that, it ain't gonna happen for a while, but this is the igintion that will cause Stephen Hawking's theory where we went from having 1000 years left on Earth ecologically to what is now approximately 100 years left socialogically.

But, at least you get to "work remotely" while jacking off to Facebook all day.

Go team.

Team of 2 developers expected to build a new company website with a dashboard to manage it without having to know development, an internal social media management dashboard, and a phone number provisioning/call reporting dashboard for both clients and internal. All while managing the normal day to day workflow of working for a digital marketing agency. Expected in 7 weeks.

How is everyone handling their day job lately? I'm feeling pretty safe about my position, but my day-to-day is definitely suffering as my mind wanders off.
Cost of living crisis, trying to have a social life, impending fatherhood, all while trying to do good work and improve my knowledge. Not easy.

Facebook and Buzzfeed :(
I kept checking every notification which pulled me in to a black hole of surfing and I ended up using 2 or so hours on Facebook and Internet stuff a day (this was only at work so my days got so long because I had to stay longer and actually do my job). Found out I was addicted, read some articles about work productivity and how to be more effective at work, deleted social apps from my phone and only check notifications once a day, and now my days are much shorter and I actually feel relieved and free :)

TLDR: Read the post.

Part of me watches the day fly by as I work through the various stories and issues my company has as we walk through the various phases and clean up of their own stupidity of outsourcing. I guess it would be unfair to say “stupidity” It was really a money thing. Excuses aside, the alcohol today tastes amazing as I work through the issues, nothing is ever the same, nothing is ever redundant or boring. There are times where you want to pull your hair out, jump off a building and question why the hell any one would write code, specifically Laravel this way.

I watch the internet from now and then and see the cry babies whine and complain about GitHub and Microsoft jumping into bed and their favourite, and mine too, editor falling into Microsoft’s hands.

It’s disgusting and completely childish, but I digress. The last time I was here the alcoholism and the loneliness had begun pushing me towards the Nicotine and suicide. I have managed to obviously push through and watch the money come in only for adult life to take it away, I guess that’s life. Complaining about it will do nothing other then show others how much control you lack in your own life. You quiet your complaints and bury them deep inside your mind where they fester and stir and become drowned in alcohol.

Dating is even harder, especially when you work from home, so much so that I have completely given up there, any semblance of social life is buried in Final Fantasy 14 online, where pixels and text other people write have become my friend, at least for a moment or two before the work takes over and I sit in a room blaring music and watching the code I write, appear on screen like some savant who has high functioning autism but can create amazing works of art. I don’t think I am autistic though.

The truth is I don’t mind my job, I love the money and the freedom as I stated before.

Code for me is like a seed of anger that starts deep in my core, festering, eating away at me, killing me slowly and branding me a fool. The problem is the best feeling, when there is a problem I can solve it with code, when there is a problem that cannot be solved by code I take solace in the problems that can be. I don’t like people, I hate offices and I despise dealing with my own personal issues, I would rather drink and vape until the nicotine and the alcohol has made me sufficiently numb.

Code is a place I can escape, a place I have control, a place where I don’t feel like blowing my brains out at the stupidity of other people. Have I mentioned that I hate people?

The internet is full of idiots, people ranting and raving about this and that and how it affects them oh so much, when they don’t even let their own code, there own programming problems, and in most cases shitty solutions, affect them. Look at this GitHub thing, the idiots are running around with their heads cut off, waiting for the world to end or in most cases acting like it has. Companies get bought, bill get paid, people leave each other – Shut the fuck up and deal with it.
I guess if you look back at what I have written you could say the same thing to me, boo-fucking-hoo working from home sucks sometimes, grow up and deal with it like an adult. Fair enough, I’ll take my lumps. Excuse me as I continue to drink this post away and watch the downvotes come in. I guess honesty comes with a double edge sword.

And yes I would rather use alcohol as a solution then deal with the issues.

Fellow social skeptics, I need to vent. Flew back into RI for the family, not the various holidays. Fuck christmas. Fuck the societal norm that's been programmed into me and all of us. "Merry Christmas", "Happy holidays".

Yeah that doesn't play so well for my family after your brother dies the night of the 24th.

Even my best friends slip up with it, and even I'm regurgitating the phrases when I'm in public and need to be socially fucking acceptable. It's fascinating to me just how muscle-memory it is. Does that make it hollow in the first place? Is the well wishing the point and the sounds and message secondary?

Whatever it is, I've never felt comfortable in these social situations anyway. If I didn't have to travel to see my family, this would just be another day. So here's a big fuck-that to social obligations and gatherings. I just need a good intellectual conversation or a project to dive into.

Every ten years, a new social nexus, from Usenet to Reddit. Every day, a flame war. Every year, a great leader that wins flame wars, convinces people to follow them. The question is, what happens next? What do you preach to the gullible masses you won over?

Every single time it gets to politics, and then, to philosophy. Yet, there are no large strides in sight to world peace.

You've seen that meme where everything is just applied math. Well, math is applied philosophy, and philosophy is a product of misunderstanding the language.

In the end, the flame war you won never mattered. Archived threads, Wayback Machine, inactive Usenet mirrors. Acres upon acres of human thought, passionately expressed in computer text, roamed by no one but web crawlers. Give them three days, and they'll forget what you taught them.

WWI had shown us that we couldn't improve the masses with art and education. There is no vaccine against stupidity.

Life on Earth is hell. People are hell. Living among people is hell. If your life isn't hell, you're fortunate enough to be paying criminals that are stronger than other criminals around them, for protection.

Only the habit of systematically denying yourself pleasures your inner animal wants, plus a healthy dose of doubt, can make you human. Without restraint, a man is merely a greedy beast.

How my day goes....

- 8:00 am: get to office

- 8-8:30: check all social apps(devrant,telegram,discord,whatsapp,linkedin)

8:30-10am: watch tutorial videos, reading some books

10-11am: break

11-1pm: tutorials

1pm-1:30pm: lunch

1:30-2pm: social apps again

3pm: lockdown rules kick in i head home
👨‍💻 👨‍💻 👨‍💻

When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.

After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.

My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.

Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.

I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it.

a lion in captivity forgets to hunt. a man loosing everyday forget about winning.

I am feeling so sad and worthless right now. Like, so worthless that if I am walking down the street tomorrow and if some car hits me and i die, i wouldn't mind.

I find it questionable about what I am living for? why am i selling myself in front of keyboard till 12 am every day to earn some bucks when all this money is being / will be used to give happiness to a bunch of people that don't give 2 shits about me.

why can't i get some love? why can't i get some respect? i feel like a disabled 5 year old boy trapped in an abled 25 year old body. I can feel my legs, but I don't have the permission to use them. its like i am tied by ropes. and this rope has been on me for so long, that i can feel my legs, but i can also feel that those are having cuts so deep that i won't be able to use them even once the rope is taken out.

being a single child, loneliness has always been my shadow at home. and The middle class poor income, fighting parents, sickness and lack of culture ensured that loneliness remained my friend in school, college and other areas too.

the only goal of becoming an ideal son has shadowed every other thing in life. I can't drink, i can't go outside after 10pm, I can't take a jobbin different city. I can't fucking have female friends or think about relatiion-shits with people. i can't drive the car that was bought by my salary money. the list goes on and on.. i think every Indian (girls more than boys ig) have gone through at least 1 such restrictions at some point of their life. but me? a GUY in his fucking 25 , is going through ALL OF THEM, from day 1.

Plus i haven't started to discuss the weird eccentricities that i have to deal with, which are not so common. we follow a special religion where they have lots of philosophy and additional rules ( like no onion garlic mushroom in foods, mediation + pray for 1 hour twice a day ,... etc)

But i didn't complain, until now. I got sadder and sadder with time, but I cooperated. Whome else to live for , if not for the folks who made you in their womb amd sack? yeah I will fucking stay celibate until you find some willing "cultured" girl from your "religion" and arrange a lifelong existence. yes, i will fucking keep paying the car emis and see it in the parking lot everyday , while traveling via a metro. yes i will stay in your house in front of you all the times and never learn to exist independently coz fuck maturity. yes i will be a static atm machine waiting to die as you please.

but i am still not your ideal son? I say one little thing, and you start shouting at me for being selfish? why is religious superstition and those crime storemies so much deep into your head that you folks are micro managing and criticising every single thing in my life?

why is there a need for repetitive arguments, fights and shouting before evry action? why can't we just be happy for once!

I am shattered looking for happiness. I can't live like this anymore. There are no more than 2 people in my life that i care about and if those 2 are always having an upside down , angered face the what is the point of waking up every day?

wish i could just leave them. But can they live without me? or even can i live without them? and no , not talking about emotionally. I am very strong at the emotional side and i can throw word daggers to even 10+ years of companionships and ruin them. this will be just another long term relationship that i will sour.

BUT I CAN'T LITERALLY LIVE WITHOUT THEM. i am a useless guy who don't have any social intelligence outside his computer screen. i don't know how to live alone, and exist, or what my goals will be. I never saw a future without thinking about securing their future first, and them being in my future at all times.

aagh fuck. another painful night to survive and exist until i rise again to live like a corpse coz i can't do anything about it

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

------

2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

----

3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

By not having a social life 😅
EDIT: except for that one time a month when I go to a club and get totally wasted and actually have friends for a day.

To ship a package of two USB cables from one US city to another. What could be easier for a large company? Well, hold on a little.

I ordered two fucking cables from fucking Nomad at 15TH OF FUCKING JULY, and they are still not shipped. Here's how their customer support works: you send them an email, they reply in like a day or two, and that's it, that email thread is abandoned. They won't visit it again. You should write a whole new message where you say "hey, the previous time you said me X, so I want you to do Y then", and the message title should be different, otherwise they'll ignore it.

My roof is under construction now. When it was raining and there was a rain both inside and outside my apartment, I filmed it and an article about the situation was in my local newspaper in like 20 minutes. Russian government organizations are notorious for ignoring people's requests, shutting down their telephones and doing other shit like that, but in one day I managed to collect the foundation of overhaul, my utilities provider, the foreman of the organization responsible for roof repair, his supervisor and the actual guy that did that job. That same day, they all was at my doorstep, collecting the evidence, signing papers, apologizing, threatening to sue each other and collectively signing a document that states that they owe me either a full financial compensation or an overhaul. I managed to do it in the country where you throw an empty plastic cup at a cop and go to jail for it for five years.

Nomad, tell me, what exactly is stopping me from going full Jackson Pollock with a .45 on your company all over the social media (props to @SortOfTested)? You think I can't handle a mediocre iPhone case manufacturer?

Think again.

So I observed that my screen time was slowly increasing in past few weeks. This was mainly because there wasn't much to do staying at home and I was simply switching between phone and laptop continuously which was increasing my eye strain. Fed up of this never ending cycle I decided yesterday to log out of all social networks and only see all the social updates only once a day.
Let's hope this gradually decreases my screen time and eye strain too...

Odd question to a dev community who are naturally socially awkward that talks to their ducks.

Even then, for those of us who do have a social life, we just chill when we need to. Anyone who "tries" to balance their life would find it very stressful. Just go with it. Do what you need to do at that scheduled time and when time is up, do the other thing that you promised yourself.

Others: "Easier said than done! You don't have to push releases and squash bugs in critical moments!"

Then that's a trigger to the question, "Do you even live, bro? There's more to life than just dev all day err'day."

Don't think too much.

First dev project? In Holland we had a social media site back in the day called CU2. You could put in your own html/css and style your profile the way you wanted.

For professional work it was a landingpage for a healthcare related page.

I was ten years old. At this point, despite being in my early 20's, I've officially been programming more than half of my life. From the first moment I knew that this was possible, that we, as software engineers, can do what we do... I've been quite literally obsessed with the idea.

I don't like to give other people credit for the events in my own life, but there is one thing that, more than anything else at the time that lead me down the path of computer science, directly lead me to where I'm at today. If you're at all interested in film and cinema (not to mention programming) then you've undoubtedly heard of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Amazing film, I'd recommend it to anyone based off of the film alone, but for me that movie holds a special place in my heart.

My mom took me to see it that movie in theaters when it came out, I would not stop bugging her to take me, there was just something about the founding of Facebook that... Sparked my young imagination. I swear to you that I didn't blink for the entire time I was in the theater watching it. It blew my mind, not only that you could do that kind of stuff with computers, but that you could actually make a lot of money working with computers as well... Ten year old me had different priorities in regards to programming 😂 Starting the moment I got home from the theater, I dedicated my life to learning everything I could about computers. Originally my goal was to, shock of all shocks, create a social networking site for me and my friends to use. I still like to brag about it to this day, but that project eventually became my groups final project in our computer class in Middle School. It was funny, middle school computer class, I had already been programming a few years by that point and was rather proficient in PHP. There were kids submitting literal spreadsheets in Excel as their final project, a few static HTML pages, that sorta jazz. My group and I submitted a full fledged twitter clone, with complete functionality. We got 100% on the project 😂😂

My reasons and interests have changed over the years. For example, I'm not particularly interested in creating a social media application these days, and I don't program because I think it'll make me rich one day (though the hopes always there) but the one thing that hasn't changed since that night I sat enraptured in the beautiful cinematography of David Fincher and facepaced dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, is the complete and total fascination with computers and technology. For that reason The Social Network will forever be my favorite movie.

I work for a media company with different business units such as radio, print, newspaper etc and radio is the largest (most money) of them all. The online unit (dev & social media) was relatively small until recently. So IT and budget is mostly focussed on radio.

Last budget meeting we asked to upgrade our internet and hardware (we have shitty laptops and very shitty screens). CTO of the group says to me: "I don't really belive in the internet because I don't really understand it so I can't see why you need these upgrades...nobody else complains about these issues."

Me internally: "how the fuck did you become CTO....??"
Me to him: nobody complains because they are sales consultants who reads emails and make phone calls all day...
CTO: I'll look into it but i'm not really convinced...

How do you win this fight???

!rant
You know I used to be fucked up in almost every aspect of life: academically, socially, financially etc. But I am happy I am able to fight back. After my college semester exams finished, I am so happy to enjoy such a great social life. Like I can go and hangout each and every day and night, whereas earlier I would be in my room all day and night, infact even my neighbors would question my existence. But now its so much fun to hangout, feels really great. :')

I'm anti-social, but sitting alone in my home office day after day is starting to get to me.

Thinking of renting a desk at a co-working space.

Not a Rant,

I'm just searching freelancers! I used this site when I was just starting my career. I still have the stickers on my (now old) Notebook I got 2016-ish for having... I don't know how many likes on here (user:chrome).

If one of you knows something about: Laravel, PHP, Bitcoin Core, BTC LN, Ads, Marketing, Social Media, CSS, HTML or JS - hit me up!

Maybe just send a mail to: admin@lahuge.com
I would love to find a team on this site. I hope the Community is still well. Back in the day it was really fun to watch this site grow.

Greetings,
Chrome aka. LaHUGE

PS.: If you're from Germany that's a Plus, but not needed ;P
(copy pasta because this Account is bigger, maybe it helps?)

Weirdest dream i had about code, i was just coding all my social interactions; i'd have some kind of overlay over my vision and i'd have to type in my every move and sentence while going on about my day in a very gray and sluggish world as if i was just a programmer stuck inside my body, working with myself the way i work with a server.

Another time i actually found a bugfix in my sleep. I had wasted 8 hours on a dumb bug that day without managing to find a solution and when i woke up, all the code was in my head and it worked on the first try!

Once upon a time in the bustling city of Techville, there lived a talented web developer named Alex. Known for their exceptional coding skills and innovative designs, Alex had a reputation as a brilliant but often solitary worker. Despite their immense talent, they often struggled with social interactions and found it challenging to connect with their colleagues.

One sunny morning, as Alex arrived at the sleek offices of WebWizards Inc., they noticed a new face amidst the sea of familiar coworkers. Her name was Lily, a warm and friendly individual with an infectious smile. Alex couldn't help but be drawn to her positive energy and kind nature.

Over time, as they worked on various projects together, Alex and Lily formed an unexpected bond. Lily's patience and willingness to collaborate made their partnership seamless. She recognized Alex's expertise and valued their creative input, which helped foster a deep sense of mutual respect.

As their professional relationship grew, Alex began to see beyond the surface of the company they worked for. They realized that WebWizards Inc. was more than just a business; it was a family of talented individuals who genuinely cared about one another. The company fostered an inclusive and supportive environment, encouraging personal growth and celebrating achievements.

One day, overwhelmed by gratitude for both Lily and the company they worked for, Alex decided to express their feelings. They sat down and poured their heart out, typing a heartfelt message of appreciation and admiration. Alex couldn't contain their excitement as they hit the "Send" button, eagerly awaiting a response.

To their delight, Lily responded promptly with overwhelming joy and gratitude. She confessed that she had also felt a strong connection with Alex and considered them an invaluable asset to the team. Furthermore, she shared that the supportive culture and caring nature of WebWizards Inc. had made her job more fulfilling and enjoyable.

The two coworkers became closer friends, their collaboration flourishing both in and out of the office. Alex's once-rare smiles became more frequent, and their confidence grew. They no longer felt like an outsider but an integral part of a wonderful community.

Together, Alex and Lily continued to create outstanding web projects, surpassing expectations and leaving their clients amazed. Their passion and dedication were fueled by the genuine camaraderie they shared with their colleagues at WebWizards Inc.

As time passed, Alex realized that their journey as a web developer had been transformed not only by their skills but also by the amazing people they had the privilege to work with. They learned that a kind coworker and a supportive company could make a world of difference, turning an ordinary job into an extraordinary experience.

And so, the tale of Alex, Lily, and the remarkable WebWizards Inc. serves as a reminder that in the vast realm of work, the bonds we form and the culture we foster can be as impactful as the tasks we accomplish.

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

People who do remote work, what's your stance on making calls to get together to do things?

In my case, I have this tech lead boss now who's always available to start calls so I can share my screen and point at what problems I'm having, and I really appreciate that.

Other people at my job are really hard to get into contact with, they're never available when you need them, so if there's some conversation by the nature of which there needs to be a lot of back and forth exchange to get both parties on the same page, more than a day or more can be spent before work based on that conversation can be done.

I'm not talking about distribution of tasks, but rather "person with access to X, I need you to do Y". I invite them to have a call so we can explore how to do Y together, because neither of us know it too well, but they just do whatever, ask how it went, and it turns out wrong. In this particular case, I've got a marketing guy who has access to the company's business account in a social media platform. I need them to add me there as a developer, and make sure I and another developer have all privileges necessary to create and configure an application which will use the social media platform's APIs. Marketing guy just takes hours to respond and generally acts like we're not worth his time, but can't do the things we asked and dedicate the time to see with us if things are working before he sets out to do other work.

This isn't an isolated case, we've got other people who don't look at their messages and are just generally unavailable. Not sure if I have incorrect expectations. Everyone in the company works remote, but we're all in the same time zone.

So in the next term we're going to learn web dev(bootstrap and some javascript, no backend :( for now), the previous term was about c#. We'll have to build a website as a team (4-5 people) and everyone has a specific task and have to do the research on their own,but at the same time we can help each other out. OMG if the whole school was just like this I would be happy to come here every day lol! I also hope to improve on my social anxiety, but this could easily backfire depending on my future teammates, coz you know, in every highschool there have to be some badass kid whose intelligent equals with two rats...

So yeah, right now I feel 50-50% about this whole thing.