Staying up past 2am makes me make weird things

TL;DR: I “hacked” my thermostat.

I’m stuck with an annoying roommate in college dorms who apparently always keeps the FUCKING thermostat at 80F. LIKE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH HIM. Every time I change it to like 73F, he changes it back to 80F Heat.
Getting tired of his shit for over a semester, I decided to do something about it. I looked up the thermostat made by HoneyWell and downloaded the product manual of it. Turns out, they have a system override ability to remove the heating mode and change the maximum and minimum values of temperature.
BOOM! I removed the heating mode and changed the minimum value to 70 and max to 74.
It’s 2AM here and I can finally go to sleep without sweating my balls off. I’ll keep you guys updated on his reaction hahahaha.

Needs to be 2am.. else nothing gets done!

Like many others my favourote shameless hack is a cronjob to restart our app server at 2am, thus preventing out of memory exceptions

FUCK HIM! FUCK HIM!

JUST CAME TO REALISE THAT AN OLD CLASSMATE DURING UNIVERSITY STOLE 2 OF MY PROJECTS AND PUBLISHED 2 PAPERS UNDER HIS NAME.

HE EVEN ADDED THEM IN HIS CV.

SUCH PEOPLE SHOULD DIE.

Recently, at 2am, he even called me and asked for some doubts on other topic, I helped him too. Turns out such he was such a cheap person.
Let him call me next time...

Fuxk yeah! My code works! It's 2AM, I'm happy and there's no one around, so I wrote a poem :-P

What was once impossible,
Is now close to completion,
Thanks to my debug statements,
Which now await their deletion.

Not only in my work, but in my life.

My biggest inspiration is the popcorn seller that patiently stays outside the subway exit, standing, every fucking day, from 4-5pm until 0-2am.

He stays until after the subway closes, and only leaves after everyone waiting for their Uber or their ride do.

In the rainiest day of the year, he was there.
In the coldest day of the year, he was there.
In the worst crisis of our country in the last decades, the region became temporarily infested by bandits and beggars. Sometimes I had to work overtime until 11:30pm and I had to be very cautious with all the robbers in the empty dark street. But guess who was there, sometimes calmly saying "get out, go work" to the bad elements bothering him?

I find it reallybfunny and refreshing when everyone is inside waiting for the rain to settle down, while he is standing in the middle of it. Or when I'm coming home really late, and he is still out there freezing cold.
There is no excuse for not doing your best. Life sucks sometimes, but there are no excuses. Just work hard, and laugh at the bad times.
Every time I saw him there, I thought "my day was hard, but I could've worked even harder". At the same time he made me feel better for having a better job, he inspired me not to bitch about any little things.

Then you might ask: "isn't he dumb to stay until 2am even though he is probably not getting any costumers after 11pm?" or "how can someone so unsuccessful be so inspiring?"

Well, I don't know. He just is.
Do almighty, genious people like Steve Jobs inspire me at work? Of course. More than this man? Certainly not.

People are fucking idiots. Had agreed to a meeting on Monday morning at 9 with some generic startup. Agreed to listen to their pitch after they had bugged me with hundred phonecalls and emails. It happened that my kid got sick during the previous night and this being the only meeting I decided to work from home and stay with the kid. I sent an email at 2am as apologizing, canceling the meeting and proposing a new time for another day this week.

Well at 9am I get a call from reception that my guests have arrived. I call the contact and she's angry at me that I didn't show. When I asked about the email she snaps at me: I don't have time to read emails on Monday mornings.

Well I don't give a flying fuck about your shitty pitch. Go fucking peddle your shit somewhere else if you can't handle your affairs and start snapping at me. FUCK.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

The main reason I'll stick to development as a career for the rest of my life is the freedom.

I can have a 3 hour long lunch with my girlfriend, I can write code at 2am, and usually I can leave for short holidays with just a few days notice.

That freedom is saving the little bits of social life I have.

So my girlfriend was complaining about the lights late night. As a regular dev I code until about 2am in the morning.
So here I present the ultimate dark theme. Darkroom red. No additional light source required, just your monitor(s).

Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.

Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"

Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.

Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"

2AM and a birthday party of my BELOVED mother that I have to attend tomorrow in the middle of bumfuck. And I'm not sleeping, oh no.. because "family obligations" require me to get her a present on 2 days notice. I'm making her something very simple, some LED's displaying her new age, powered by a lithium cell and some charge-boost-protection controller. So I need to make a mesh to place the LED's to make those characters.

Measuring the size of the project box, cut it out.. started drawing the numbers on it. Not satisfied and ain't nobody got time for that. Guess I'll just print something out. Drew a little image with some text on my tablet, sent it to the printer. Black apparently doesn't want to print anymore even though it's still fucking full.

HP YOU CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!! How fucking difficult can it be to make a printer and make it into something that doesn't shit on me every fucking time I want to use it?! Why do I have to deal with your shit, on top of my mother's?! WHY?!!!!

Fuck me. Happy birthday to my mother, and silently I wish that it's her last one. The bitch wouldn't - no she didn't - piss on me even when I was on fire!! Where were you "dear family member" when I was homeless, huh?! WHERE WERE YOU, WHEN I STOOD ON TOP OF A BRIDGE, READY TO END MY LIFE AND BEGGED TO YOU TO ALLOW ME TO STAY IN YOUR HOME FOR THE NIGHT?! Mother my fucking ass. A blood bond that I wish I never had! And that I have to work for now, because you fucking bitch can't even possibly think as far into the future as to invite your peers for a birthday party.. I dunno, maybe a week in advance, like a sensible human being would? At least she's improving, my little sister's and brother's birthdays she just invited me for the day before. And I also had to get a present ready for, in the middle of the fucking night. Fucking hell!!!

I'm so grateful DevOps is now a thing. I remember getting a phone call from a client at 2am on a Friday because their site was down and having to ssh in from a Nokia with the world's tiniest keyboard to reboot the server.

Of course that particular server only exposed port 22 on it's local network, so I had to first ssh into another server which did have its ssh port open to external connections.

Trying to remember two sets of credentials and type them in on a tiny keyboard, while so drunk you were seeing double, standing outside in the rain as it was the only place you got signal. Yeah…I'm so grateful DevOps is now a thing

I was at the airport, 2AM, waiting for the plane I was supposed to board to come from another airport... Got bored, scanned the WiFi networks, found an open network with the ID of the airline I had booked with, joined, and tried port 22 on the gateway... It was a Cisco router with the default password... Needless to say, I thought I needed to teach those guys a lesson... Messed the routing table, changed its IP, disabled DHCP, and restarted the router. Needless to say, we couldn't board because they couldn't check us in...

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

Alright, feature is starting to work, let's go to bed before 2am!

Finally in bed.

"So this stuff is awesome but lets go to sleep now and work on it tomorrow...
....
....
....
Waaaaait, I could add this other feature but I'd be harder......."

My brain is running at full speed at 10 to 2am now 😅

Have to get up at 4am.
I go to bed at 22pm.
Body doesn't want to sleep until 2am....

I love my body! <3

I need to take a break..
I've been wotking on my game non-stop for the past 8 days from 7-10am to 11pm-2am..

But there are alot of problems in my current repo, and i have ALOT of code to re-rwite..

(also i'm the only dev x.x)

I was stuck with an architectural problem for a few days. Tried to solve it in many different ways. I could always do a quick hack and call it a day, but.. That's not pretty and it would be a trip wire for future developments.

Went to bed at ~2am. Took a few hours before I finally fell asleep. In my dream I was solving the same problem as in real life, except there I found an obvious and simple solution. Woke up at 8am, repeated that solution to myself a few times to not to forget it. Implemented it in the evening and it worked perfectly!

Moral of the story: do not work late. Better go to sleep, rest your mind. You might solve the problem while resting, and you will need a clear mind in the morning to remember and implement the solution :)

p.S. This happened to me more than once.

Ordered a new high storage dedicated server (rented online) today.

The fucker wasn't delivered as soon as I hoped so decided to finally go to bed at 2am.

Aaaaaand then, of fucking-course, I got the email with the deployment notification literally the second before I went to sleep.

No sleep yet anyways, I guess 😅

!dev

Tired, went to bed early. Took two melatonin because I haven’t been sleeping well. Layed down at 9:30pm, tried to sleep for hours, couldn’t, and ended up feeling wide awake at like 11:30. Memories of my parents and their endless shit resurfaced and flooded into my mind, and made me various combinations of livid and sad and distraught. Got up and sat in the closet at 2am to try and clear my head, and eventually gave up and started my work day at 2:45. Got quite a bit done, and it cleared my head. Yay!

But it’s now 6:25am and I have standup at 10:30, and a day full of meetings. :<

… and plenty of memories I would very much rather not remember.

No, actually, there was this other hackathon I attended. The hackathon itself went pretty damn good. But as for the "experience", it was full of regrets.
You see, I was working on it for ~36 hours straight with the team. It was held in a warehouse sorta building. Weird place. But I lived nearby. So I finally thought (around 2AM) fuck it I'm going home for a quick nap, and went home. When I returned around 3-4 hours later, no one was there (even other teams). They all started to come back at around 7am all drunk, sweaty, and happy. Then I found out what happened. Apparently, there was a bondage themed party going on downstairs. And around the time I left, the girls and guys came up, saw a bunch of devs, and invited them all to the party. AND I MISSED IT!!! 😭

Bout to loose my shit. Fucking hate it when clients push and push to launch the system as urgently as possible. Say they have run through the test version and understand what they are getting and sign it all off. Then come back 2am the day after launch and bitch and moan cause its missing features they thought where there when they weren't part of the original planning and always use the excuse "i have just bought a bunch of marketing, your loosing me money" or "I have an important even with important people that need this tomorrow" and try make it your fucking problem.
Firstly, fuck you
Secondaly, fuck you.
I cant even comprehend your lack of logic.

Not really hacking, but my roommate says otherwise. So we share a router in the apartment and I’m the only one that really knows how to access it, so of course I change the password and tell no one (not like they’ll try to get in anyway).
Occasionally set roommate likes to get blackout and play music very loud at 2am. To be petty, on those occasions I set up an RPi Zero to connect to the WiFi, restart it, and sleep for a minute, and repeat. He’s still convinced we are getting DDOSd, and suspects nothing.

Reason I don’t just set parental controls - he gets more frustrated when the WiFi appears for 10secs, the music is just about to start and shuts off again. So he gives up quicker. Otherwise, he resets the router and I have to set up everything from the start.

how to be a shitty client:
- have a legacy database where column names are misspelled and everything is nullable
- hire external help which instead of helping break the ui (bonus points for breaking the api too)
- demand a very much custom auth logic but decide to use aws cognito for shits and giggles
- demand 1hr daily meetings
- demand biometric auth with 0 knowledge of how biometric auth works (the previous devs just had a face id prompt which does nothing and retrieved email and password saved on the device???)
- message me at 2am because you don't understand how timezones work + demand a build while you're at it
- call me a "heretical pagan" because i took a day off on a holiday you don't celebrate (???)

i could go on but i think this is enough

I worked for months staying up till 3am almost every night in order to collaborate with a team on another time zone. No one ever praised me or thanked me or gave me a pat.

Yesterday two members of that team stayed up till 2am once for the first time in their lives to make a release. They got immediately labelled as the most dedicated employees.

Okay, sounds fair.

I'm so glad I was recommended this app on the play store. I wouldn't have found it otherwise! Sincerely, a CS student that of course downloaded this app at 2AM.

Anybody's a father here? My 10 months kid is giving me hard times waking at 2am and not going to sleep till 4am (it is 4 now, here). That's a really repeating problem. I'm loosing my focus at work, tired after few hours of coding, couldnt mange to learn after hours. Makes me frustrated. My PM understands situation (actually he have 5 kids!), tries to help. But can't figure it out how to overcome this. Any ideas fellow dads in code? To make it clear - I really love my son, but if I'll fail to keep my level at job I could loose it one day, don't feel like beeing able to find new decent job with current exhaust level. Also I'm the only one who makes money in our lil family, loosing job for too long means loosing the roof under the head for all three of us. My wife is barely living after beeing there for son whole day, so please dont point at her. Our kid is really demanding on attention and love, and thats like a sweet poison. Love kills.

I need to stop doing this,
"Fk I have this, this, and this due tomorrow. Well time to implement this cool new thing I found yesterday in my personal project. *2am* okay if I sleep for 4.3 hours and then..."

Why don't I just do required stuff first so I don't have to stress?!

I've been fucking around with arch since 9pm and now it's 2am...I have class tomorrow...why did I do this to myself? oh that's right because it looks beautiful.

Doing a 2am deployment to production in my batman PJs like its normal. More coffee please!

I was supposed to be asleep four hours ago. But I have to say, screwing around with linux distros on antiquated machines I've acquired over the past two years is much more fun. The oldest computer I have with me today is actually the most recent addition to my collection: an HP Pavillion from 2002. It's got a Pentium 4 2.6, and is currently still running XP, though not for long. Thinking of turning it into a little cloud/web server for entertainment purposes.
I might just harvest the hard drives from it and put them into the other Pavillion I have (it's about 3 years younger) to have more storage in one device. Maybe I'll make them both separate servers, one for cloud, one for web hosting. We'll see.

Sorry for the ramble, I usually ramble to my girlfriend, but she's asleep, so I figured I'd dump it here.

Back to doing research.

What's a last day on the job suppose to be like?

I'm sure it's not working until 2am helping the company finalize a project. They are not happy that I decided to go to bed after a 12 hour day instead of pulling an all nighter helping.

Programmers nowadays have to...
… write 100%-covering unit tests;
… set up continuous integration, linters, hinters, style checkers, …;
… follow style guides for every language;
… meet impossible deadlines;
… meet impossible management/customer/end user expectations;
… read through terrible code others made;
… read through terrible documentation others made;
… make terrible documentation themselves;
… fight with the IDE;
… fight with the build tools;
… deal with unreproducible crash reports coming in from everywhere;
… debug code written at 2am (by themselves AND others);
…
…
…
… KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM.

Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.

I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.

=====

What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.

Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.

At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.

Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.

Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.

Why the hell did it take youtube so freaking long to get a dark skin?
My eyes get killed without it @ 2am looking at a tutorial without a dark skin.

I have had a dark skin installed via userscript for over 5 years.

Now they need to implement some of the features youtube+ has...

i should be paid for the time i spend thinking about code outside of work. i really dislike doing that, but then my brain just decides to dream about code anyway and i wake up at 2am with ideas and a headache

Tried getting enough sleep for the Monday and failed miserably.
First, I made my kids washed, like usual, around 6pm. Then tried to put them to sleep. The younger one went to sleep, the older refused. Wanted to play, run, jump, sing and scream. After an half an hour his screaming woke up younger. Now I had two kids to put to sleep back again.
The younger is one year old and requires more attention, otherwise cries.
After serious fight the older was forced to sleep. He tried to jump over me, bite me, kick, hit, eat chocolate, wanted to pee, then jump, run and fight again. I ended up lying him forcibly in the bed, holding his hand by kind of a block, so that he couldn't move to much. Took 15 minutes, but he felt asleep. It was 22. Joys of having 3yo kid.
After more 30 minutes and a bottle of milk the 1yo was sleeping.
At 2am the older woke and cried. I woke, tried to make him calm, he pushed me away and went back to sleep. Now it's 3:40, my sleeping pill wore off, and I won't take another one, because I need to get up at six.

This is how you get a good night's sleep before having a busy week.

Making your build site go live at 12am, stay up til 2am working on bugs, wake up at 5am to continue working on bugs.

The programmers life

I got more sleepy on a party than coding on my own in my house at 2am

I'm a web dev who decided to take a shot at mobile development (My first mobile app mind you). I'm writing a mobile app and one of it's features is communicating to my server via websockets.

So I write the code, click to send the data and my server doesn't receive it. Fuck. I check why. I log everything. Nothing.
I spend several of hours and I'm exhausted by this point so i call one of our mobile developers to help me. Turns out my emulator didn't have a WiFi module. FUCK.

Alright so I compile it to an apk and install it on my phone. I popped open a terminal and started my local node server.

I click on the mobile app...

NOTHING LOGS. FUUUUUUCK.

And this is the best part.
Apparently I deleted the console.dir call from my server that executed when it received some data from an emitter.

I only thought of this last night at 2am so I got up and checked. Yep. Kill me.

I've been more productive from 2am to 2:30 than I've been the whole day.

My coleague's story

- before leaving after long day at the office final look at support cases (after official support hours)
- sev1 ticket logged an hour ago, noone called us (although should have; after support hours)
- angry manager calls and demands to get in touch with the client immediately (we're already after support hours, FTS should pick the case, not us)
- we reach out. Customer has business-impacting case
- after initial info gathering: some cert got expired, they got a new one and placed it in the app's directory. The app still does not work
- the first question we ask: "are you sure you have placed it in the right directory?"
- "yes, we are sure. No problems there" - answers a voice with indian accent
- noone finds the root cause for hours.
- It's already 1am
- someone from client's specialists comes up with an idea: "are we sure the cert is in the right place? Let's try to move it to the same directory the old one was in the first place"
- .................................................
- production is working again
- "Why didn't anyone from support suggest this?!?!"
- .................................................
- 2am. Case solved, manager is informed everything's allright now.
- In the morning we get yelled at by the manager bcz we supposedly missed a sev1 ticket and were incompetent during the conf. call

This reminds me why I stay away from support. And why I started hating people. And why I do not work with indians (our ways are too different for me to stay sane and not to kill anyone).

After long hours of intensive coding and no caffeine, goto bed because u realise it's 2AM. Wake up next day, look back at the came code, "what the hell was I tryin to do!"

This motherfucker cocksucker E2E tester first pings me on slack that we are good. And then mails my manager that we are not. I don't mind him pinging me at 2am in night. But atleast he should tell that directly to me first not making me look like a fool. Such an asshole. I might just leave my company because of him. Motherfucking son of bitch.

Got a 1 day of alone time :) 8 hours WFH ant then the (almost) whole evening was MINE. Guess how it went :)

Coding until 2am and falling asleep on my keyboard, waking up on a cold lappy at 5am bcz its battery died and its aluminium frame was freaking freezing.

I know right? That was an awesome evening! I've managed to catch and fix some nasty bugs!

I have a neighbor with a really annoying car alarm.

It went off at 2am.

It’s not the first time it’s gone off in the middle of the night (though sometimes it goes off in the middle of my work meetings; variety really is the spice of life).

I can’t go back to sleep once I’ve woken up (doing so, like, always results in getting a migraine).

I am so tired.

18pm: *starting to work on own project. Listening to classical music for better concentration*
22pm: *no progress*
22:10pm: *putting on some good old death core on max volume coz fuck it.*
22:30pm: *realizing I did more in the past 20mins than in the 4h before*
22:45pm: *super motivated*
2am: *same song again? Quick look on the clock...* "fuuuuuu" *apparently listened to my whole playlist. OK. Let's search for more stuff on my 2TB HDD I dedicated to death core etc*
4am: "lul" *go to sleep*
6am: *wake up, go to school"
*goto 18pm*

It's 2am, can't fall asleep... Keep thinking about my code...

After 10h working and getting too tired... At 2am I just can't sleep. WHY BRAIN

It’s almost 2am, I cant sleep, I have an early morning class that I’ve already skipped twice this week, but I just can’t make myself fall asleep... I’ve been switching from devRant to Facebook to instagram for like 3 hours just to have something to do.

Thinking about just getting up, making tea, and working on some code to at least be more productive with my time

But I have sleepy-brain and idk if I am even capable of coding right now

I once had a nightmare because my boss suddenly appear in my dream. After that I woke up and can't sleep again, so I'm checking my mail and there is a new mail from him.. On 2am.

If you also programm in your free time you probably know this kind of situations.

Situation: I'm currently creating my own PHP framework (I know there are plenty... I do it for "fun").

The database Connector Class wasn't working so after an eternity (around 2h) I just went to bed.
11pm: My Eyes open. I'm sure I just solved the problem in my dreams. (Spoiler alert: I didn't)

2am: I go to bed again. It didn't work.

Next day: I open the file add a missing required file. It works. I'm now tired AF and feel like dying and above all: I now get all the suicide PHP memes. Good night guys. I'm getting some sleep.

Best shameless hack: installing a Windows Service to restart Apache Tomcat every night at 2am on a clients' server coz the jsp application kept leaking memory and crashing tomcat. So bad, yet such a timesaver.

TFW you hear noise from the kitchen at 2AM, you go to check it out and it is your brother opening a can of SPAM, getting the content out of the can, chopping an onion (crying while doing so) and then just holding back laughter all the way back to our room.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

When its 2am and your code still not working

Anyone else find they work better between the hours of say 10am - 2am rather than the "normal office hours" of 9am - 5pm?
The problem is if I start later then the people who I work with are so absorbed in their work that I don't receive a reply to my email.

As a developer, I WAS love with the concept of WFH. Thankfully, my office has no fixed hours (except for meetings!) and I can work at my pace peacefully. But lately, with WFH becoming mandatory, I can't seem to find time for myself!

Here's what my schedule looks like:
a. Start working at 10am
b. Standup at 11:30am
c. Lunch break at 2am
d. End work at 7pm.

A fairly simple routine but not sure why my team finds it completely normal to call me in off hours and moreover expect me to jump in a call too! I wish it was a 1-day affair. But no. It's a 24x7 day affair. Yes, let that sink in. 24x7.

How I wish there was no COVID and thus no lockdown. At least, people respected the work timings then !

"Deadline is Friday 6pm - update MUST be live then!"

Whenever I heard that I knew im going to be in the office till 2am

Our team (devs and QAs) have been doing a series of overtime work.

So, the company has provided us a place to sleep. Everyday, we would go to work at 10AM and then return to our place to rest at 12 midnight (sometimes at 2AM).

We've been doing this for a week now and we'll resume again tomorrow.

I already feel exhausted, and I was thinking of resigning after all of this mess was over.

However, I am having second thoughts. Since this is my first job, I have no point of comparison.

Perhaps a series of overtime like this one is normal? Is this type of work environment to be expected when being a developer? Or am I selling my self short and there are better options out there? What do you devs think?

2am. All the things around me are alive. THEYRE ALL FUCKING ALIVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS THEY ALL HAVE SOULS THEY PERFORM FUNCTIONS THEY ARE ALIVE

Deploying at 2am to "minimize impact" because that's our time of lowest traffic

my longest coding session was from 10am to 2am, so 16hrs
was in first semester of uni and we had to build the game "breakout" using a predefined guideline.
i had to program the collision detection of a ball against some blocks that had to be destroyed
took a long time for me to do the task, as i'm not the fastest coder (and often neither the smartest😅) and had to fight a bunch of bugs too.
in the end it kind of worked but the performance was horrible at best

Me and my mates rent a flat near the beach to work together on some code. We usually live in Saigon Vietnam which is a very nusy and polluted city. So beach is nice.

However，we went from office houra to full on， waking up and having breakfast at 5pm some days and others ant 2Am....

Right now i love on 12 hour day cycles.

Anyyyways. I also learnt to code this year.

So right now i was dreaming... And i did not dreami was coding， but my dream seemed to be organized like a code. For a split second，my mind was between the two worlds.... I actually thought to myself that i was surely a robot!!!

2am: I can just go to bed at 4am and get 4 hours of sleep and be fine

4am: Eh, I'll just sleep at 6am and take a nap before work.

6am: Who the fuck needs sleep? That's why I bought coffee

Week 1 Day 1

It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.

So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.

I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.

2AM is the best time to play some Sudoku... My brain must really want to goto sleep now...

9pm I REALLY needed to get some work done... Head was dropping like a nodding dog at my laptop... Gave up and went to bed.... Now its after 2am and I've been watching YouTube for 5 hours and still awake.... Just what even....

How do you deal with the feeling that you coded all those hours for nothing? You deep down know this solution will never work but you don't want the hours go to waste so you just continue. And then it's 2am, you have shit code, nothing works and your life is falling apart.

On support this week. Had to work until 7pm because of a bunch of pending tasks from last weeks support pair, had to wake up at 2am to restage our apps in our cloud env, and then wake up at 6am again to do deployments and validation only to have management breathe down my neck as to why my deliverables aren’t done yet.

It’s only been day 1.

My first exposure to computers was when i was 7 in 98. Hp Palvillion with windows 98. Got it from walmart and it cost around $1100. Brought it home and i hooked it up on my own on the living room floor. First program installed was "who wants to be a millionare", fitting that a game be the first thing installed since it was for homework. I lived 16 miles from town at the time so i really had no friends and the isolation made it hard for me to adjust in school to the point that i was a loud kid seeking attention. Then we got dialup and i found invisionfree forums which my first programing experiance with javascript started. And no I'm not talking about jquery I'm talking about the real thing.

Fast foward a year. I find an opensource arcade and learn php while writting an arcade from scratch that uses curl to mitm login to verify the user. Later that month i create a small project that dynamicly creates a signature image for the top 1000 posters on a coding forum i liked.

Then all hell broke loose when i found osdev.org, thought i was going to be a badass and make the ultimate operating system that would combine linux, windows, and mac where it could run anything. Reality Check hit me like a semi and train hitting at full force trying that and made me look into hacking. Spent alittle while breaking windows in so many ways and talking to others on irc until i was about to turn 18. Switched to ubuntu 12.04 my senior year while that was occuring.

make some projects that keep me going so I can quit job and really focus on them without weird pressure from outside. If its not my day, it happenes. If I have **that** idea at 2AM Im not bothered to wake to job and just write it, than refactor it so it's more of "proper" thing and release new feature/thingy

I have so much ideas piled up and so little time ;-;

E: forgotten to add wk176 tag :/

Stayed up until 2am launching a website for a client. Now I’m up too early in the morning and can’t sleep anymore. I feel like shit. I’m too old for late night work.

Well after 3 days of fighting with C I finally got my assignment done ✅ :D the assignment was simple and would have taken me like 5h max to do in Java( which is my first and most proficient language).

However I was away from class for a while and subsequently had to code the project while teaching myself about C and pointers .🤖

This is why we don’t skip school kids 😄

P.S It surprised me how many other people were in the schools lab at 2AM to push the assignment to the local git 😮

It's 2am and I uploaded to app store without updating the stupid plist.. I'm sure the build is going to get rejected.. F*******ck

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

Finally got that damn web app to send out mails (2am). Turned out mail server worked, rails was properly configured, delayed jobs were running and were getting proper rights and environment. The issue was wrong configuration in app itself (somebody skipped part of the wizard). But still, fixing somebody's else server with webapp I know just a little about in languages I know even less about (not a web developer) after few guys failed and just within five hours, makes me feel both dumb (should have noticed much sooner) and proud (figured it out in the end).

It's been a while since i stopped programming.....
It's been so busy with all the school work/assignments/ and the most important part is that school ends at 10pm, arrive home at 11pm, prepare for tomorrow school stuff, sleep at 2am, wake up at 7am next morning, and again ends at 10pm 5 days a week...
It is exhausting, but I am getting used to this routine.
Studying my own programming skills or working on a side project? Not sure when to do it... The only way to continue studying is at breaks at school, or sleep less and study....
But it is impossible....
I have some great projects that are waiting to go out to the world, to list a few:
- cloud gaming
- cloud storage with live streaming
- complete school schedule management
- home automation framework in dotnet
- deepfakes and ai image generation algorithm (~18 months of training till now)
- game cheat engine (20GB total omfg ^^)
- and more
and I don't have time to finish it. lol
I think it will see the bright world after 3 years of high school... By then, my projects will be ancient, probably....

TIme is really short.
24 hours equally, but feels like 8 hours a day....

Should I abandon the project rn and focus on studying? (probably should)
or should i sell the project or open source it?

Also, how do you manage your time between work(study) and side projects (especially big ones)?

I honestly do not understand the hate for Macs. I know I'm not the first to rant about it, but it's sad that I have to. Yes, you can build a crazy PC with 172828 cores over-clocked to 79Thz for like $7 and have a taco along with it, but that's not the point. Each of them are good for their own things. Maybe, I don't want to spend the first 13 hours figuring out which version of Linux I need to run after I get a computer. I mean give me a break. Each of them are personal preferences. What people often don't see in Macs are value you get with service and surprisingly useful default apps (I'm looking at you Open office) and a solid feature set. Why am I even writing this, it's fucking 2AM.

2am, saving to post later because limit

I want to see a cartoon about a rabbit 🐰 and a frog 🐸 hating each other and constantly fighting over who’s a better jumper and they enter a jumping competition that is very tough for both of them and they somehow begin respecting each other over time

I love froggos. I want a pet froggo 🐸

Fucking computer went on a fritz at 2am after a hard reset ...
Got it to restart, no sound.
Trying a restore point, hope it's software.

I bought rim world the other day. I think I'm addicted cause I stayed up until 2am. Fml I have self control issues and I'm at work feeling like shit.

It’s 2am. This is what I think about: a baby head but it’s a cheaply made plastic toy toilet that is somehow narrow like a pez dispenser, I put some green plastic stuff in its “mouth” and close it and I’m like oh no why I did this he’s gonna swallow it and there’s kanye in the background screaming grand theft auto grand theft auto we’re in a game we’re in a game

I’m scared. I can’t sleep. My heart goes like 180bpm for no reason

I feel inferior.... :(

Maybe I used too many ifs...

and it took me 1hr it seems...

maybe i should go back to sleep...

actually i woke up at 2am and realized i was supposed to be taking a nap... so i sorta overslept by 6hrs... tho i still need to work tomorrow... ehhh... today.

Working on a CS370 (Software Engineering) project with 5 people; 2 of which feel like their time is more important than everyone else's so when we all meet as a group to go over presentations, documentation and other things we need to do as a group, they silently sit alone working on bits of code they should have done previously. Then when we can't get docs done and handed in on time, one of the two decides to spam our group chat at 2am when 2 of us are sleeping because we work in the morning, one of us is sleeping because of morning classes and the last one is doing god knows what. Like, I'm sorry. But failure to do your shit on time does not constitute an emergency on my shit. All of our weekly peer reviews reflect on how no matter what we say to these two; they refuse to work as a team.
!rant, more like dev hint
In a team, your time is not more important than team time. You can do things on your time whenever you want; but unless your entire team shares your schedule, team time might be a rare commodity and should be used as such.

Two architectures to support, on one everything went smoothly, other one I spend since Monday till yesterday 2am to make it work. Now time for half-day meeting and if it compiles in the meantime, I can release today before leaving work. Sounds like a solid plan, Friday afternoon release. What could go wrong? And I hoped it will work nicelly on Monday, latest Tuesday.

I just went back to Old School Runescape and I played it 7pm - 2am last night so I guess that's my new distraction

I'm so tired when I got up. Didn't sleep much last night. Working on a Sunday night till 2AM because I did not work the week on the project I was given.
This is not happening for the first time, I sleep late around 3AM to do my work, as day is too noisy and distracting. Attend some meetings during the day and get lazy in the evenings. Work during nights and then the next day I'm all tired for daily stand up.
How do you people tackle this schedule? I need serious advices.

Shitting is getting out hand for me. Last night when i laid in bed to sleep i woke up at 2am because of the urge to take a big shit. Incredible. And so i did. Now today almost 12 hours later i was having lunch and in the middle of eating i had an urge to take another big shit. And so i had to pause the lunchbreak just to take a fat shit. Its getting quite annoying. Why cant i do something or be somewhere without having the urge to shit. Why am i so full of shit. Probably got all this bullshit inside me because of recruiters

Me, two days ago: Man, I should try to drink less caffeine, I felt pretty shit when I didn’t had coffee… :(

Me, at 2am: *adds 6 tubs of gfuel to cart*

*proceeds to checkout*

Yesterday I tried to change a part of my old code (wpf app) and guess what happened?
Whole app didn't worked then. :D
I had to stay away till 2am and work 5 hours to fix it.