Our designer (and frontender) just saved my ass big time. Had to do a tiny project involving design and frontend so I gave it a try and it looked like crap, deadline in a week. The designer made the most beautiful thing in like two days.

Kudos to all designers for doing what they're good at and ensuring that we, backenders (and cyber security people for that matter), can do our thing without having to worry about knowing how to design stuff and create interfaces because we might hate doing that and sometimes just really suck at it.

Kudos designer guys/girls!

This one guy REALLY WANTED to work on the hardware (aka arduino in this case) part.

After hours of trying (with 8 guys) of get it to work on windows which just didn't happen, he still refused to even live boot into a Ubuntu machine.

At the end of the day one of the members went to sit down with him to talk about it and the guy finally gave in.

Two seconds into Ubuntu and arduino was successfully up and running!

Then, every day whenever he didn't get something, he'd just do nothing for the entire day while claiming to be working. The team leader sat down with him and I did too, offering him to sit next to me for a day to see how backend stuff went (I was the backender).

Did it but it just went back to the same old bullshit.

I honestly don't mind it if you find it difficult to ask for help but if you, after numerous chances and conversations, still don't do shit, sorry but fuck off.

He was a nice guy and blamed his autism for it but that's just not how it works.

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

Working on the privacy site.

DAMN frontend can be a FUCKING pain in the ass!

I JUST WANT TO GET A SIMPLE BOOTSTRAP PAGE WORKING, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FROM A BACKENDER? 😭

I'm a backender. I fucking hate everything relating to designing, UI/UX designing and especially frontending.

I can't stand it when interfaces look bad/are off, have bugs and so on.

I just can't stand that stuff but the irony is real 😅

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

I'm a backender, Linuxer (servers + cli included) and security person.

For some projects I do need to write my own frontends and that, in general, IS my worst css experience.

HTML is quite manageable but CSS, except for the basics, is fucking Chinese to me.

So yeah, about every goddamn project that includes ME having to do frontend stuff is/has been the worst HTML/CSS experience.

Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).

I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).

Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!

I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!

Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅

So, 5/10 minutes of discussion about a class i need in the code. This was with the backender.

Ofcourse the designer hears this, joins the discussion and causes another 10minutes of explaining that a photo is different then a video...

Meanwhile i took a piss and got coffee because i’m fucking tired of these discusseion. You’re a designer, why care about code other people write. Go draw something

What the fuck is up with job ads for "software engineer" that don't list the tech stack or even the actual product you'd be working on. I get it that it's some shitty external HR companies but are they even trying?

Also half the fullstack positions that don't even list the front stack. "Looking for a backender that will also cobble together some mess for the front, we don't give a shit". And then half of professional software is virtually unusable.

Wellp lately so much shit happened with parents and school that id like to (atleast see my options for) get(ting) a job in order to be independent.

What could work, knowing im a backender, coding in cpp, but open for other langs ?

I have no degree, but my github repos lol

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

For the past days i’ve mentioned that i need a backender to create me an extra page in the solution. No attention was given. Backenders where too busy. Today we started a new sprint and i got asked what i’m gonna do.

I told them for the fourth time, i need backend work done to continue.
I got pissed.
Backender got pissed.

And in the end nothing will be done for this cause.

Fucking great.
Fuck my life.
Fuck these people.

Ima backender....

!rant
I'm a bender. A backender!!!!!

Ugh, I finally got a big project at work as the main backender but I still have a lot to learn. I fucked up the estimation for a big component and this is the fifth night im working late because I feel responsible.

Fuck this shit.

The only time I didn't envy git is when most of the team had to refetch after our lead front-end developer deleted trunk, committed the deletion, and then a backender had to re-base it off his repo. Until then, I thought only my dog could fetch for days.