My secret joy. Logging into our "automated email do not reply" mailbox and reading folks futile attempts to argue with an automated system

Virtual Assistants these days xD

Instead of a rant I have a story for you.

I was browsing my emails and eminently pissed off, as I usually am. Came across an email from
michael@michaelnthiessen.com

and thought "fuck this guy and his adverspam!"

Because whats more rational than hating someone you don't know, over something they didn't do, because of something completely unrelated to them of which they have no control?

Totally human.

The email looked like this

"I have some fantastic news for you:
Clean Components will be released again on April 21!
"

With a "🎉" emoji. I'm in a more vile mood than usual today.

It goes on.

"Even better, I'm significantly dropping the price, so you'll definitely want to pick it up!"

How presumptuous.

I fire off a quick reply.

"What a bunch of bullshit.
I decide to change careers and a month later, just like in 2008, this fucking pandemic happens and the economy and hiring
Starts collapsing.

And here I am getting sent this bullshit.
"

I had to rewrite and shitcan the response a few times for civility. I guess this is me being polite, but I was suddenly compelled to vent to this total stranger over what in all likelihood was an *automated* email.

Six and a half hours later I got a reply.

"Hey James, I'm sorry this pandemic has been rough on you.

I hope things turn around for you soon.

If it would help, I'd give you the course for free, but if you've switched careers I'm not sure it's relevant any more?

Michael
"

My god. A lone voice of calm in a wasteland of 24/7 bad and worsening news. Sometimes simplicity is the soul of class.

Hes got it in spades.

And here I was thinking "today might be the day. Thank god for giant bottles of hydrocodone."

It's not true that all gingers are soulless demons.
Some of them are angels in problem glasses.

No but seriously, hes a cool guy in my book.

Check out his site if you're interested in Vue at

michaelnthiessen.com

Following my first rant, my boss had the brilliant idea of running the old and the new architecture in parallel. I had advised that it won’t be ideal since the same Scala code was ingesting into 2 different Kinesis streams and one was running an old KCL written in Java where as other was consumed by a Firehose delivery stream(eventually we will be ingesting it into Firehose directly). I had told few manual + automated tests on Code as well as from a functionality of the new architecture and a set of tests for checking the integration of the new Producer code with Consumer.

The statement I got from my boss was “This is the test, we test it on production in parallel”. My boss had a brilliant idea to fucking test the new code on the production directly but running them in parallel without accounting for undefined behaviour it might cause in the current production system. I mean my boss should get a Nobel peace prize for shattering our mental peace.

Anywho, we started the deployment today at 5AM in the morning. I had all the aws services deployed. Was just waiting to deploy the new Collector code which we did at 5AM. Immediately after 5 minutes the system went bonkers, there was fire, blood, demons and I was smoking a cigarette with the biggest “I told you so smile” on my face. I’ve just written an email to my boss and have told him calmly that “Listen motherfucker, 90 percent of the software companies aren’t idiots to focus on testing and quality. We need to start spending time on testing and quality else we’ll again be in the same soup after few weeks again”.waiting for his reply

Okay, where do I even fucking start.

Today, my account been hacked by some prick because i wouldn't send him fucking nudes. I quickly emailed discord and they keep sending me automated emails. I got so fucking pissed and then they emailed me "how did they get your info?" BITCH HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUCKING KNOW? THATS WHY ITS CALLED HACKING IDIOT!

I sent them 5 fucking emails, no response.

Discord Support- Actually, DISCORD IN GENERAL IS A FUCKING HORRIBLE APP!

Message from discord: I am isabe*******@Gmail.com. I'm fucking pissed how your damn support team won't fucking just give my goddamn Discord account back. KEEP IN MIND I HAD A YEAR OF NITRO, A YEAR AND DISCORD CLEARLY DON'T GIVE A SHIT! YOU GUYS ARE SO FUCKING UNFAIR! LITERALLY YOU GUYS DON'T SOLVE ANY DAMN SITUATIONS WITHOUT IT TAKING MONTHS, OR YOU JUST DONT FUCKING REPLY!

Wow WTF!

So for a new client, they have their domain on a registrar that has the most ugliest and confusing UI ever.

So I decided to transfer the domain to somewhere better.

Guess what, it takes 5 days for them to release the domain. The site would be down and I won't be able to proceed with my work until transfer is complete.

In hopes to speed up the process, I tried to create a ticket. There is no ticket system and their only available contact email listed is sales@shittiestdomainregistarever.com

I mailed them yesterday evening hoping for a reply.

Few hrs ago, I received a bunch of automated email on some ticket I never created.

The biggest WTF is that the To: on that email is some other customer's gmail address and I am CC'd along with a bunch of other customers gmail and hotmail addresses.

Seriously, WTF is this?! I'm glad I took the decision to move from them

This is not a developer-related rant, but honestly, I'm annoyed, and this felt like the best place to vent.

My Twitter account has been suspended/restricted. I can still log in, but I can't tweet, follow people, anything.
No reason was given to me at all for my restriction, other than an automated reply when I attempted to appeal it stating they suspected my account of being hacked - an account I hadn't used in about a month, has a randomly generated 12 character password and has 2FA.

Here's the thing - I didn't grow up with Twitter, I've never really taken an interest in it, I only have my account to post dev stuff now and then as I know some over devs do - It felt like a good place to easily log what I'm currently working on and show off my work that I was proud of.

There aren't any other platforms I know of where I can do that, other than here (but my work consists of things that are also not dev related, so...)

I have no idea if I will get my Twitter account back; it's been over a week now since I attempted to appeal it with absolutely no response.

If anyone knows decent platforms where I can share my work and progress (dev, art, level design, etc.) and can use it sort of like a dev blog, I would greatly appreciate it.

So I'm receiving messages from recruiters weekly (no flex intended), half of which are not even close to what my profile describes. And I got really sick of it so sometimes it takes at least a week for me to respond if I decide you're actually worth a reply (looking at you, automated half-assed messages that didn't even notice I know nothing about Javascript).
The thing is that some of the more useful messages are actually quite interesting and match my ambitions and desires quite well. But I like my current job and love the project I'm working on... Am I the only one who wants to stay "loyal" to their employer and their project, at least for as long as the contract is valid?? I really want to be there when delivering the final product and test it myself but it sometimes means declining very interesting job offers.

How do people decide its the right moment you have to leave for a new job if you're satisfied with what you have currently? I'm graciously rejecting interesting offers in the hope that they respect my "loyalty" towards my current project and stay reachable to me when I need them later on (I've already had some that would hit me up after a year asking me how it went and if everything was still okay). Is this something that happens often or am I just lucky with those specific recruiters??

Like yes, I can surely use the money I'd receive from a better job. But I am still learning a lot on my current job and I am positive this kind of job offers will keep coming over the years (and hopefully even more so because I keep getting more experienced). I'm also not the top candidate for some of these offers if I may say so myself, so is it important to take what you can get or is it better to stick to what you're comfortable with?

#Suphle Rant 2: Michael's obduration

For the uninitiated, Suphle is a PHP framework I built. This is the 2nd installment in my rants on here about it.

Some backstory: A friend and I go back ~5 years. Let's call him Michael. He was CTO of the company we worked at. After his emigration, they seem to have taught him some new stack and he needed somewhere to practise it on. That stack was Spring Boot and Angular. He and his pals convinced product owner at our workplace to rebuild the project (after 2+ years of active development) from scratch using these new techs. One thing led to the other, and I left the place after some months.

Fast forward a year later, dude hits me up to broach an incoming gig he wants us to collab on. Asks where I'm at now, and I reply I took the time off to build Suphle. Told him it's done already and it contains features from Spring, Rust, Nest and Rails; basically, I fixed everything they claimed makes PHP nonviable for enterprise software, added features from those frameworks that would attract a neutral party. Dude didn't even give me audience. I only asked him to look at the repo's readme to see what it does. That's faster than reading the tests (since the docs are still in progress). He stopped responding.

He's only the second person who has contacted me for a gig since I left. Both former colleagues. Both think lowly of PHP, ended up losing my best shot at earning a nickel while away from employed labour. It definitely feels like shooting myself in the foot.

I should take up his offer, get some extra money to stay afloat until Suphle's release. But he's adamant I use Spring. Even though Laravel is the ghetto, I would grudgingly return to it than spend another part of my life fighting to get the most basic functionality up and running without a migraine in Spring. This is a framework without an official documentation. You either have to rely on baeldung or mushroom blogs. Then I have to put up with mongodb (or nosql, in short).

I want to build a project I'm confident and proud about delivering, one certified by automated tests for it, something with an architecture I've studied extensively before arriving at. Somewhere to apply all the research that was brainstormed before this iteration of Suphle was built.
I want autonomy, not to argue over things I'm sure about. He denied me this when we worked together. I may not mind swallowing them for the money, but a return to amateur mode in Spring is something I hope I never get to experience soon

So, I'm wondering: if his reaction reflects the general impression PHP has among developers globally, it means I've built a castle on a sinking ship. If someone who can vouch for me as a professional would prefer not to have anything to do with PHP despite my reassurance it'll be difficult to convince others within and beyond that there could be a more equipped alternative to their staple tool. Reminds me of the time the orchestra played to their deaths while the titanic sank