Me: 1 is something, 0 is nothing, NULL is the absence of things
JuniorDev: wut
Me: You've got pizza in a box, that's 1. If there's no pizza in the box, that's 0. If there's no pizza and no box, that's NULL.
JuniorDev: OOH so there's no object to reference if I ask for a slice!
Me: *small tear*

Always explain things in terms of pizza. Always.

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

D: “Did the attackers exfiltrate any data?”

M: “I can’t say for sure, but most likely based on—”

D: “—but did you find any undeniable evidence of it?”

M: “Keep in mind that the absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence. There was very limited logging to begin with and the attacker erased artifacts and logs.”

D: “If there’s no evidence, then there was no exfiltration.”

M: “If a business doesn’t have cameras on its front door and then gets robbed, it can’t claim there was no robbery just because they didn’t video-record it.”

D: “That’s a poor analogy. Nothing’s missing here. I couldn’t care less if a robber made a *copy* of my money. That isn’t robbery.”

M: “... If the Titanic really hit an iceberg, then how come no pieces of an iceberg were ever found in the wreckage?”

My programming teacher is a freaking degenerate. He spend 7 months teaching us basic stuff like if-clauses, while-loops and stuff like that over and over again - everyone was annoyed but he didn't listen to us because "some people still don't get it". (The reason for this could be their total absence during lessons but who am I to tell.)
Beginning of 2018 he realised we hadn't much time left to prepare for our final exam so he tried self-taught learning. 8 sorting algorithms, recursion, how to write classes and objects in less than a week. And of course there was a classtest about this - needless to say that like nobody passed it. He still has no clue why we are "so lazy and dumb".
One of his favourite code examples is a calculator. I don't know how many i've programmed and they've gotten more and more ridiculous. (Who the hell would want interfaces like IComparer in a calculator?)
He even wanted to convince us that for-loops can't count down (and that things like "i--" doen't exist.)
I could go on and on about this guy and his craziness.

My PC when I use it: "..."

My PC when I look at something on my phone: *gentle fan hum*

My PC when I resume activity : "..."

My PC, 5 minutes after leaving it: **VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV**

** sits down, still big fan blowing, open up the task manager to see what's bugging the system **

** PC calms down **

I have an overly attached PC?

Job offer:

"There is no hierarchy within this company."

Bullshit.

Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.

Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.

You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.

Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.

Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.

How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?

That's what I would find much more interesting.

A developer's worth is only measurable in their absence. 😢

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

The biggest annoyance in Java for me is the absence of "real" properties. Writing getters and setters everywhere is ugly, you are generating them anyways.

When you're coming back from vacation and you are praying nothing has gone wrong in your absence

Fact:

"Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence.."

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

^^^ This sums up my last year as a systems engineer perfectly

Hey guys.
Sorry for the absence.
So... Lately I've been working in shifts, doing extra hours and stuff... And today, Saturday I went to work for nothing... My boss fucked me just to make me go to work, when there isn't much work to be done...
Btw, I have a burn out for more than two years because I had to work and study and sleep for 4 hours a night, for months.... (check my profile for more info).

Today I had enough
Almost got killed while driving... felt asleep.
I'm saturated.
Monday I'll talk to the owner of the company
and If I don't like what I ear I'm making several complaints:
- One for the organization that protects workers
- One for the work court (we have that In Portugal)
- And one criminal complaint... After all they fucked my health, my life and are putting my life in danger just because...

Lets see how it goes...
Better part... If I make any of the complaints above they can't fire me, make me work overtime or in unpaid shifts...
Oh, and someone else also made a complaint recently... Governement oficials spent two days this week checking the company accounts and calling workers for confidencial intervews...
So, I guess It's the perfect time to drop the bomb on them.

Our company is restructuring and our CTO offered me the lead architect role. I'm currently the dev manager for about 40 guys and girls. I was delighted.

So, because I believe people make shit up in the absence of information, I called my seniors in to explain the possible restructure. To my surprise (and shock), they dropped the following pearl on me...

If they had to report to anyone else, they're going to leave the company.

I tried to convince them that one of them can apply for my role, also no.

Don't get me wrong, I love my team and do feel flattered about their response. But I also feel a bit trapped/confused now. I've spent the last 6 years building and protecting the team from 5 guys. And frankly, I'm tired and just get back to focusing on coding.

Any sage advice?

The Return of Mr. Gitmaster:
So there is this colleague I already ranted about several times. After my previous team lead had confronted him about not doing much work, there was some irritation because he showed not up at work, but it turned out the external training he did was just a week earlier. Then he was ill a week, another week vacation so we didn't see him much. Not that his pre- or absence makes much difference to our repo: When his and my team lead looked at his commits of the past three months they found like the one copy-pasted HTML-form that wouldn't even show.
Fast forward to now, where we have a new team lead and we were going to lunch with Mr. gitmaster. So we got some more hero stories from the great work he was doing in the previous company. How he was graphically monitoring the heap fragmentation that stupid glibc was causing to their search engine, and how much better it became with tcmalloc.
I still don't understand how he bridges that cognitive dissonance from all the superior tech knowledge he displays to not actually writing any code at all. Not that I would not have experienced some states of feeling low, in paralysis unable to write a single line of code... but he seems so full of confidence, always commenting how trivial and easy all these tasks would be, as if it's all so lightyears below his abilities. Maybe he should just become a manager - but not mine.

Teacher : "0 is nothing, NULL is the absence of nothing."

Wait, what?

So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.

This sad Keanu was gifted to me by a coworker and friend. He sticked it to the monitor, when I was on vacation and he felt bored without me.

Keanu is sad, because I had to break one of his legs, so it does not occlude the monitor.

Also the sad post-it-Smiley came later. Another coworker messed around with my cube of magnetic spheres in my absence. He could not put it back to a cube together, so he left this post it on the magnetic spheres. I thought that day Keanu and the post-it fit together well. This sad Keanu now wears a sad mask.

Because this item reminds me of the kind coworkers and nice occasions, it is my favorite item on the desk.

IF ONLY DOCUMENTATION WAS IN ENGLISH

In the past I've seen documentation that is great, and documentation that is conspicuous by it's absence.
Over the last decade, I've noticed documentation is getting WORSE.
I believe the reason for this is that those tasked with creating documentation have become so accustomed to the jargon in their own heads that they have LOST THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE IN ENGLISH, and as a consequence simply don't bother.
New terms such as "ThingamyJig" are defined as "A Collection of ThingamyJigs" — so you end up going round in circles and get back to square one.
They make little or no effort to provide simple examples.
If only companies who create languages understood that those who wrote the language may not be the best people to write the documentation.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Warning: BBQ religion discussion

I love living in Seattle, but one thing that really, truly bugs me is the absence of legit bbq. I love all bbq, Carolina, Memphis, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgie, doesn't matter. Even Kansas City and California if i have to.

There's places people swear by here, but they're mostly just meataterias with meat that is just OK. At least half of BBQ are the sides. Here, very little vinegar in sight, everything dry AF and underseasoned/oversalted. Dry potato salad that is mostly kraft mayo, coleslaw that's also mostly kraft mayo and menu items like "queso mac and cheese." You said cheese twice, I like cheese, but I don't trust you enough to order it. And greens? Don't even try.

Biggest thing though: if you don't serve fried okra, don't you dare call your shit Texas bbq 😠

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

So I am doing a homework with the language my teacher made. He said we could opt for either Java or Lisaac, but he said the latter would be pretty hardcore. But I feel hardcore is just an understatement, and outside of an absence of documentation on the object methods which makes you look all the way through the library files when you look for one method/object, then another, then another and all, here's a single fact that will express my feelings:
In his language, there are three main types of errors:
* Execution errors: the program crashes when something that shouldn't be possible is attempted (looking for an item in an array that's out of its range) ; ok, I can take those
* Compilation errors: syntax errors, semantic errors, type incompatibility... the classic, ok, I can take those, I'm used to it
* Compiler errors: when the compiler compiles in C, but fails to do so! "Mister, am I allowed to ragequit?"

Friday wisdom:
Test's cannot prove absence of bugs. Tests can demonstrate the presence of features though.

P.S. I didn't came up with that

Went into a room that hasn’t been visited in a while.
I decided to clear up some space and see how dusty it was.
Naturally I use my hand to take the dust off the table.
My hand is covered in dust.
Because of the absence of a trash can, I have no choice but to open the window and throw the dust outside.

I open the window; a gust of wind rushes inside, blowing all the dust in the room.

Smh.

I can’t understand why every time I work for a multimillionaire company that sells their product to thousands of companies, when I start to debug this fucking product it crashes because of the absence of simple input checks... wtf

“Can’t divide by zero”
“Null everywhere”

This little underscore (actually the absence of whomst'd) was the source of a very frustrating bug.

I tried to debug the sources of a 3rd-party library to no avail, but all I had to do was to read the documentation for the 1001st time. 😤

This project is taking my soul out of me...

Every time I have to change something that has been changed countless times in the past 9 months and every time I see the clusterfuck it is becoming I literally feel my energy being sucked away.

Thank god I'm being interviewed by other companies already...

(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.

All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.

TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

Bad leaders are simple - they give someone a job - simply to return an eon later unhappy with the progress - without seeking to understand a single component of the events that transpired during their absence. Place this mentality at the top of the hierarchy, and it will cascade throughout an entire organisation.

"Elegance is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity." - Alex White

It's been long time that I use the JavaScript blocker add-on by default, and I pretty much get accustomed to see and perceive the web as broken styling trash for most of the times.

And this broken state(on non-SPA websites) isn't even justified because CSS has never been as powerful as nowadays. So... WTF?

On my side, I never let the absence of JavaScript ruin the template/style of a webpage u_u

I just saw an episode of gumball about the absence of the Internet and it was technically perfect

Not being able to look at people’s faces in person.
My autistic empathic mind-reading hyperperception works best when it has a lot of data, e.g. when visual contact isn’t obstructed by a video compression algorithm. Without that sense, my brain has to work extra hard to read minds. It becomes exhausting. When I don’t have this power for some reason, I feel very anxious. In absence of data, a naturally anxious and depressed brain assumes the worst.

Confession: a very important feature of the website I'm developping wasn't working for a certain time. The boss wasn't aware because he doesn't go on the site, and I only found out last week because I needed to implement a new feature that used the previous one. Problem: the bug was only on production, not on local (and of course we don't have test server).
I took advantage of the absence of my boss today to clear the situation by making all of my tests on prod. I hope no customer tried to pass a command today, but it's finally repaired. I am both proud and shameful.

For our product there is a common type of bug we get reported. It is not really a bug, also it is not a feature - instead it is a missing or incomplete feature.

For example to help users we add a search feature on one screen, but there is no search on some other screen. Now the absence of search on that screen is apparently a bug.

To make things worse to report the bug users try to trick us. They say something like:
"Hey can you help me? How can I find things in the abc screen?"

So I explain how to browse for the item or whatever.

Then they say:
"Ok now how do you do that on the xyz screen?"

Slightly suspiciously I now tell them how you can browse for the item like before or we have this new feature eg. search you can use if that is quicker.

Now they say:
"Don't you think it would be better to have that search on the first screen?"

OK now I realize this is just a trick and the person doesn't actually need help using the software. So I tell him how we only added the feature on one screen and if he thinks there is value adding it on other screens he can put enhancement request in and if wants he can talk to my boss about making it a priority.

Then they go on asking other rhetorical questions like:
"why was it designed like this?"
"Are you guys deliberately trying to make life harder for people by making them learn different ways to do things?"

I now want to delete the new search feature but luckily it is close to lunch time so I have a good excuse to escape the conversation.

I actively job hunted for close to a year without success. Now I have two offers in addition to my existing position, and that, without even having to apply for either. Knowing I can't combine all three, I've turned one down cuz it offers the least compensation for the most work but the guy is insisting he "wants my skin in the game". I know he's not stupid and obviously knows nobody else would be sympathetic to such peanuts

But it's not as though my life took a dramatic turnaround after months of turmoil. All three opportunities are still within the same meagre region, albeit with minor improvements. I do NOT feel grateful because the circumstance of one of the new offers is such that I'm still tied to my old buddies apron strings. Not only did I stagnate but I've got them paying my salary now. They rub it in by telling me I might get a car in two years time if I join them now, and how many properties they've acquired in our time apart

It sucks how little headway I've made in their absence, and how much harder I have to work to have any hope of earning close to their monthly wages

"Simplicity does not mean want or poverty. It does not mean the absence of any decor, or absolute nudity. It only means that the decor should belong intimately to the design proper, and that anything foreign to it should be taken away." - Paul Jacques Grillo

I just found out my headphones become noise cancelling if I gently push them a bit through my ears. I can finally focus with noise around me, yay!

This is not an euphemism for sticking something up my butt.
I'm compensating for @rutee_07 absence, is this good enough @oreru?

I spent most of the first half of the year writing an app that talks to an API that a vendor custom-made for us, to automate the opening of vendor hardware replacement tickets. It went live yesterday on the vendor's side, and I began 13 days of PTO today. Rather than go full-on with it, I handed it to three engineers to test it while I'm gone and document their experience. Preliminary results have been very good. I figured that would be the smartest way to handle my absence and still get some valuable work done with it.

But I'm going out of my mind! I want feedback now! I want to work more on it! All I can do is keep a list of fixes and improvements and stare blankly at it until after my vacation is over. My mind is still wedged firmly in the backend. Must relax!

So I started work as a software developer during college, and the people there were really nice to me and endured my constant absence from work because of college stuff.
Now that I graduated, I got an offer as a software engineer for 1.5 times the salary I currently have.
Should I take this job and forget what the people at my current work did for me?

I feel like we we not only 'advanced' various fields by pulling people off some lord of the flies island who only wanted to dance around with a severed pig head in reality and training them, but also depleted and destroyed many essential fields by removing all valid motivators from our environment by spreading so much cynicism and unguided lust for power over others in the absence of any of the unifying beliefs of former generations that the professions are going to implode in the years to come.

so I wasn't very experienced when i went to work some place years back. I'd worked on my own. and I was criticized by their 80k per year team lead as having 'only done some simple things'... when his project didn't work, and par for the course their criticisms were coming from people who took a standard backend on a very large project that actually had been designed to function and something else likely needed fixed, to 'HEY LETS USE LINQ TO SQL APPARENTLY WITHOUT TESTING RELATIVE PERFORMANCE !!!!! AND WE'LL THROW SOME AD HOC QUERIES GENERATED BY MICROSOFT AT OUR SERVER INSTALLATION AND WATCH THE PERFORMANCE 'GAINS' THEN WE'LL BACKTRACK AND PUT STORED PROCEDURES BACK AND GENERATE HOOKS TO THEM LIKE A CLASSICAL DAL. JUST USING LINQ TO SQL'S CONTEXT OBJECT ! HURRAY I HAVE A BACHELORS AND 15 YEARS EXPERIENCE !'

There are so many details to fill in teaching the mindset of how to do things right in the first place is kind of expensive to begin with and you don't necessarily learn that in school working on common comp sci projects in academia. But they should have known better. I'm actually embarassed to list linq to sql on my resume as I think back.

Hello guys.
I'm not a newcomer here, I actually had an account 2 days ago, that I deleted in order to create a new one. I had to start fresh.

Anyway, after a long time of absence (one of the reasons I deleted my previous account), I'm glad I'm back here, and I look forward to discuss interesting topics with this community again!

Come back home after 2 months of absence (during quarantine I was away) just to find that tomorrow I'll be WFH w/o internet.

Sounds like it's gonna be a productive day!

I look at my code after a month's break. My first thought: what the **** am I reading..?

Today I deeply understood/learned that if anything complex has to be built, tested and maintained by a single person the most important factor to don't go crazy is the concepts of "separation of concern".

Even though it makes the development slower (*) and quite some times boring it gives back in almost absence of uncertainty and because of repetitive patterns also ease on going back to work on a new/old part/feature.

(*) Because of planning and organisation of the code flows and layers flows, but also compartmentalization of actions (a bad example would be the mix of validation code with CRUD code)

How do you experience the separation of concern? (If you have ever had the chance)

Ps: still earning ~1400€/m, am I worth more? 🤔

The absence of backward compatibility in php updates should be illegal and the developers responsible for that should be trampled by an elephant with the PHP logo painted on its side.

My consuming cycle:
1. An urge to buy a new shiny thing. No peace of mind if I refuse to buy it. My brain starts to generate sentences like "Treat yourself", "Why are you even living if you can't buy what you want", etc.
2. Acquisition. Immense guilt about the money spent. My brain somehow classifies any non-electronic thing that costs more than $30 as "ridiculously expensive", no matter how much money I make, no matter my reserves.
3. A short period of... no, not peace of mind. It's just an absence of that urge. I can't quite call it "peace".
4. goto 1

Hyperconsumerism is hell. I don't want my life to be ridden by guilt. I want to break that cycle, but when I try, it's just me asking that blaming questions to myself.

Somehow I probably got an answer. I should make my everyday thought process and patterns independent of buying stuff. Money shouldn't define what I do and what I think about.

Everything I need with an exception of medicines is both factually cheap and perceived as cheap, and I don't feel guilty about buying medicines.

What should I aim my thought process to? I'm tired of programming, because it provokes an entirely different kind of guilt, the guilt of "you shouldn't be resting, go write that article, go study that new web shit, go build that another open source thing (that nobody cares about)".

Art makes me a bit happier though. I studied 20th century progressive art a bit, and appreciating the ideas behind certain pieces of design, architecture and fine arts make me feel superior than other people, and also superior than my past self. I don't know if it's healthy or not, I'm just being honest now.

I think I need more art in my life. For now, I'm fine with knowing that I'll probably never create a real piece of art (aside from programming), so at least I can consume art instead of buying worthless shit that doesn't make me happy anyway.

heading back to work after a month of absence (10 days sick leave, holidays and paid leave) wish me luck and grant me strength not to kill someone or myself, fellow ranters

fucking caffeine telling my brain that it doesn't work in its absence !

"this will require a rewrite you really don't want to do..."

first thought is coffee.

You get my best work with snarky, asshole broseph, or you get whatever I can shit out with medicated, socially-acceptable broseph. I could probably give them a better choice, but I have no interest in trying. My absence is their loss. I'm no Steve Jobs. I'm mediocre as fuck, but I'm willing to learn new things and I dive into that shit as hardcore as I can... I don't fucking know anymore.. 😔 It'll probably be better when I sober up I guess

I've been using boomplayer for years now, and I only recently observed that its notification panel has controls for toggling repeat/shuffle/single state. With bated breath, I clicked on it, half expecting it not to budge. But, impressively, it did

It got me thinking about the devs who worked on it and how much their manager would've insisted the app cannot be released without this *crucial* feature, when in reality, it's fringe and 1% of their (in most cases <5k) user base will ever notice it or be bothered by its absence

Now, I'm not advocating for incomplete releases. I'm just saying it's unnecessarily pedantic for management/product owners to double-down over flimsy stuff

So I was tooling through the same dumb crap again looking at the same posts and watching as people just for some reason do the same things as we no longer try to solve the problem of the country getting bankrupted which they cause and I feel an almost total lack of any or all motivation to do anything.

why should I ?
people are chomping at the bit to ruin our country and have succeeded for some time now.
our courts are corrupt
our government is bullshit
the young and old are all garbage
and noone seems interested in time progressing because there is always some other dumbshit
age group reaching maturity being told the most obscene explanations for things.

its like i'm mad max discovering the airplane cult !

and yeah I like what i'm looking at exactly this moment, but its not worth what it costs in the absence of a real economy.

I want to move forward with life and retain a life the only way these bastards coerce people to engage in their weird ordered tyranny is by removing their ability to have a normal life.

fuck you people.

additionally, fuck your arranging the most obsene aspect of your whore trade beside the one normal people would want !

Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?

I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?

Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out

Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from

I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off

Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!

The Business forgot to list a requirement and now want raise its absence as a defect...

"Elegance is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity." - Alex White

The "recycle bin" feature of Samsung "My Files" is amazing for data loss prevention when moving files out of the smartphone.

There used to be two ways to move files out of the smartphone to make space free. One is direct moving, the other is copy-deletion. The first is self-explanatory, the second means first copying the files and then deleting them on the phone.

Thanks to the the recycle bin, which keeps data for a month, files on the phone can be copied out and then put into the recycle bin instead of immediately deleted.

This means that if the copying was incomplete, there is a thirty-day grace period to get the files back from the phone.

The benefit of moving files instead of copy-deleting them is the lack of the deletion step. Moving files out directly does not have the emotional barrier of deleting the files from source like the deletion step of copy-deleting does.

Moving files feels like moving items to a new room, where as the deletion step after copying feels like destroying something.

So why not move files out? Because there is a risk of data loss if the device disconnects while files are moved to an USB OTG device. Due to write buffering, files that are moved out might be deleted on the phone shortly before they are completely written on the USB-OTG.

This is not an issue with MTP (Windows or Linux through USB cable) because the file systems are managed by the computer, so if the phone disconnects while files are moved out of the phone using MTP, the file system is kept intact by Windows or Linux.

Now, thanks to the recycle bin, there is no emotional barrier to deletion because the files on the phone are automatically deleted after 30 days in the absence of the user. The user can press the "delete" button without worries because of knowing "I can get it back until a month from now anyway".

I'm looking for a new side project.. I want to write in Python or React, haven't used those languages before but want to learn them by doing something more or less useful :D
Do you have any cool ideas? Thanks a lot!

Well to be honest with you concerning this coding practice. As a deliberated of obsession without coming from a divers angle of reasoning,by application of ardent and candid Wisdom,and more on a logical pattern of presentations,even in the absence of sentimental aggregations I will move with a conspicuous and convertible analysis,base on imperative understanding of this matter,having in mind not to be influenced by perceptional retroversion which can interfere with good judgmental alibis. Hmm therefore, I will advice or come to a conclusion that point going too deeper cause this is just untainted matters of circumvention and irrational amplitude.Do you comprehend or should I go deeper?

anyone made something that sits there and tells youtube to filter out content from other history lists and or certain subject material to allow something not inundated by their 'it' bullshit to shine through ?

also, this time, how about you all take pictures of seeming parents so their children's locations are accounted for at all times and the child traffickers working on camera here can get caught ?

they wouldn't be able to say kill their captives if they absence of the child was noted.

Oh look a beautiful woman behind the counter and an absence of dogs and stupid people

Hell, I always thought I was a team player, but is it a great week being the sole developer (all the other on vacation). So I didn't get interrupted all the time, read overblown PR. Still, even in their absence I spent about three days fixing their build issues and PR's, but I could sit down and read the code, some documentation to get a better understanding why it all sucks and what we should do with our pain in the ass build system.
It's really a blast, deleting some stupid code, removing superfluous dependencies and above all leaving snarky remarks in the commit messages and code comments. Just letting some steam off. Code is where my devrant is.