Buzzword dictionary to deal with annoying clients:

AI—regression
Big data—data
Blockchain—database
Algorithm—automated decision-making
Cloud—Internet
Crypto—cryptocurrency
Dark web—Onion service
Data science—statistics done by nonstatisticians
Disruption—competition
Viral—popular
IoT—malware-ready device

So, there's this big company in Poland with its name starting with C and having CEO famous for saying that every software developer can be replaced with a finite number of college students.

They recently lost a HUGE government contract and so stories of people working there came to light. My two personal favourites:

1. A tester who has been fired for finding too many bugs and mistakes in their product. He was also told that bugs are to be found by clients on production, not in-house.

2. A programmer who was yelled at by his team leader for "wasting time" on code reviews instead of typing the code. He was also told he hadn't been hired to criticise other people code.

God, I'm so grateful I don't work there.

I suddenly remembered this after being gone from my previous company for nearly a year.

So, I worked there as a tech supporter and Linux engineer.
What would often happen was clients calling with an issue regarding software of some sorts and about half the time, instead of LOOKING AT THE GODDAMN ERROR MESSAGE they'd just click it away fast and complain shit wasn't working.

I specifically remember this one case:

*big client mails complained that one of their clients' email isn't working. Screenshots weren't possible apparently so after emailing back and forth for way too long, we decide to do a screen sharing session (which we never do).*
(for the record, already emailing for hours, client very frustrated, me as well because the behavior of the software sounds impossible)

Me: alright, close everything, then open it again so I can see what happens.
Client: *opens mail client, error appears, client clicks error away faster than an arch user being able to mention they use arch*
Me: uhm.... I assume you already know what that message said and that it has nothing to do with the issue?
Client: it has nothing to do with the issue.
Me: okay... But have you at least looked the message?
Client: no but it has nothing to do with the issue.
Me: but, how'd you know if you won't look at it?
Client: it has nothing to do with the issue, okay?
Me: okay.... so, what's happening here?
Client: the user isn't receiving email anymore at this point!
Me: alright, have you checked the settings and everything?
Client: of course, all good
Me: okay but can we at least restart the software again to at least check the error message?
Client: FINE. *restarts client (pun intended, of course)*
Error message: username or password incorrect, can't connect to the server.
Client:..........
Client:............
Client:...............
Client:..................
Client:.....................
Client:..................
Client:...............
Client:............
Client:.........
Client: 😐
Client: 😶
Client: 😅
Client: 😬
Client:..... Right, I changed the password...
Client: *sets correct password*
*poof, error message gone*
Client:..... Thanks 💀
Me: you're welcome 😄

💀

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

So today our CFO stepped into IT and angrily proclaimed someone using tech@ e-mail and fake name is defrauding company funds buying themselves... "used female lingerie with extra virgin juice" (sic!).

I work for an IPSP, we handle finance for commercial services (think PayPal but smaller). One of our clients is a big platform where girls can sell items like bath water, used socks and more. CFO demanded our admins found out who and when connected to that website, what URLs and so on.

As mentioned, said platform is pretty big, hence, from time to time we help them with their service when they ask us to, that's why we have a tech@ account. Last month there was a minor issue with one of the banks, someone fixed it and, as per usual, made a small payment of €1 topping up the account wallet to make sure everything works. It was an intern whose will to live is still strong and unencumbered with experience so she jokingly wrote "panties juice, extra virgin" in the payment note. What she *didn't know*, however, is that admins on that platform used the very same account to test new billing system they've implemented and our CFO received an invoice.

Got fired earlier today.... I had a feeling it was coming but was hoping it wouldn’t.

I really liked the job and the work. It was difficult for me at times because the job demanded medium to advanced linux skills and knowledge for just about every issue. And I’m still a complete newbie to Linux. But I was learning new things constantly because it was a challenge.

But they said that my skills weren’t up to snuff for them or their clients, so instead of investing in training they let me go. I’m sure there’s big company politics at play and someone (or multiple people) higher up would probably rather just hire someone that already had the skillset they were looking for than invest time and money into training.

I don’t wish them any ill will. Even though I’m thoroughly pissed at the situation I’m in now.

I believe that I was a really engaged employee and driven to learn and strived to be better than I was, but I guess that didn’t matter. Or maybe it just didn’t matter enough...

I... uhm... I... I can't... I ... I can't even.... THIS IS LIVE IN THE CLIENT'S SITE WHERE ANYONE CAN CREATE A LOGIN WITH NO VERIFICATION WHATSOEVER AND SEE THIS WHICH IS LINKED TO A BIG RED BUTTON THAT RESETS THE WHOLE DATABASE, YOU FUCKING DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// This event clears the entire solution in all active clients, truncates the database and also removes any stored PDFs in the server folder
$(document).on('click', '#resetDB', function () {
// This event only happens if the user correctly enters the password, this is to prevent other users than the admin from performing this action
var answer = prompt("Please enter the password required to perform this action.");
if(answer == "-REDACTEDBECAUSEHOLYSHIT-") {
socket.emit('resetDB');
} else {
alert("The password is incorrect, please try again!");
}
});

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!!11!1!!1!1one!one!!!11

(I'm not inventing this, even though the "site" is internal only and not accessible through the web. That does *not* make it any less stupid!)

I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!

You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.

Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.

Our working hours are from 9 to 6 which is the standard in Malaysia (I'm not malaysian )

Yesterday I came in around 10AM and my boss took me to his room as soon as I arrived.

Boss: If you were in school and you come late what do you expect to happen ?

Me: get punished, I'll compensate by working an extra hour today.

Boss: well our clients aren't available at your extra hour and I'm struggelling with a big client you're supposed to ship the rest of his site and golive today and he's freaking out

Me: yh well his site is done it just needs final QA before going live.

Boss: oh its done already?, cool cool. Anyway you shouldn't be late you're not Malaysian and being late doesn't run in your genes like them.

*ops manager (Malaysian) walks in*

*boss confused*

*ops manager looks him in the eye*

*boss looks at the ground*

* me giggling while walking to my desk*

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

WEB FUCKING THREE

Ok, some of this shit is interesting, let's get that out of the way:

Crypto - great for doing illegal things, great for financial speculation, interesting mathematically. But as likely to replace actual currency as I am to replace the fucking Queen.

NFT - should be written on the headstone of humanity. Entirely fucking useless, planet-roasting bro-wank dressed up as a revolution in...pretending to own shit. The only difference between a Bored Ape owner and my nephew pointing at a castle and insisting that it's his, is that he isn't thousands and thousands of pounds out of pocket by doing so.

Metaverse - AR and VR have been around before this dogshit rebrand, and they'll outlive it.

No, it's not that. It's that we now have a new species of parasite - the "Web3/Metaverse" LinkedIn guru insisting that this shit is even needed, let alone the next big thing.

Web 2.0 was a stupid fucking term alright, but it did represent a new generation of technologies that were badly needed, and adopted by the entire community. Web3 is a bunch of shit that some cunts think they can get rich off, so insist that we need. I wouldn't even give a fuck but I've already spent hours of my life explaining to clients and peers that this is UTTER FUCKING BOLLOCKS, there's no need for a blockchain in your app, there's no need for a blockchain in virtually anything. Yeah if you want some fucking 3d in your app or your page I'm your man, but if you keep saying 'metaverse' I'm going to fill it with easter eggs.

None of this shit was needed before and none of it is needed after. Have you looked at web3 games? It's Steve Buscemi asking 'how do you do, fellow computer games?', it's a fucking gambling app pretending to be something a human would do. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush already cornered the market for that type of fucking mug, right now you're making the Candy Crush business model look responsible and efficient. You CUNTS.

One time was in a meeting with clients from abroad (big company with some offices in the US). After the meeting we went to a restaurant with the clients. Then one hour later our CEO shows up and starts tanking beers like crazy and gets super wasted. Then starts asking the client if they have a job for him in the US. He doesnt want to run his company anymore because all his employees are fuckung idiots blahblah. Then he asks me you understand right you have seen my employees they are fucking stupid. Uhm yeah dude I work for you... *awkward sillence, continues chugging beers, changes topic*

True story.
Some clients (especially in India) don't want to pay, but they want everything to be implemented in the project.

Big data.... Check
Machine learning.... Check
Deep learning..... Check
Espresso maker.... Check.

They want all the buzz words that are buzzing to be put in your project and they want you to put it in the 'cloud', for which you have to pay.....

the worse type of clients are the ones who want a web site ready to deploy with all content present, but can't fucking provide their content
I'm talking about an eshop for a big company in the region who can't fucking provide us the products they intend to showcase and considered the work on their page incomplete because it lacks content

A friend offered me a new job in his company. Therefore I am going to quit my job. I like my current job, but the conditions are shit. Still I like my colleges and my clients. So I feel really bad for quiting.

The Job he offered me is pretty good, well paid and has many benefits for me. I like him and his company and are really excited to work with them. They are expecting big things of me and I'm scared to disappoint them.

Also I haven't told my boss about my plan to quit yet and because we become kind of friends in the time I work for her, it's an difficult talk for me.

😕

VScode shows that how good a big company can do to the world by honestly caring about its clients than focusing on its selfish needs.

Recently, one of our passwords was accidently published on a public page for a few minutes before it was noticed and removed. Unfortunately, this password opens nearly every locked account so it's a pretty big deal.

Management was informed of this mistake and told that we should change the passwords as well as implement a few other protocols to make sure this doesn't happen again including things like unique passwords, more secure passwords, using a password manager, etc.

Their response? It wasn't online long, probably no one saw it. There will be no changes in how we handle ours or our clients' secure passwords.

Just finished my internship.

I entered knowing nothing and spent the entire year on solo projects.

My company does not use any frameworks because "they don't want to run code on a server that they didn't write", they use waterfall, only use version control on half the projects, use notepad++, never once even glanced at my code to check I know what I'm doing - even when i asked.

Also have never heard of a code review, have absolutely no QA in place other than the devs making it and quickly testing it visually, no requirements gathering - just pictures and have never heard of tdd.

Recently was given a project with no designs, no specs other than a verbal half thought out explanation and was dumped with random deadlines like "this needs to be demoed tomorrow night" with no idea about the project progression or what it looks like. Apparently it's all my fault that it failed.

I am very grateful to them for teaching me so much and giving me opportunities to teach myself on nice projects but come on.

What boggles my mind is that the company is 6 years old and has big, big clients. I don't understand how. I once tested a project about to go out the next day that had been "tested" and found pages of bugs. They would have lost the contract for sure...

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

First junior software dev job, asked what I wanted for hourly pay, replied “I need at least $13/hour to survive.” (This is in US, 2007, I was almost done with Bachelor in CS, single mom with two little kids, was also in the army national guard at the time)

I grew up poor, and was very ignorant about salary negotiations. So of course they offered $13/hour. I accepted, thinking it must be fair, and was glad to be making more than minimum wage. Six months in, I’m doing the same work as their devs with 2-4 years experience, find out they are billing clients $100/hour for my work. Then, to top it off, the COO makes a joke in a meeting about how it’s not a big deal for their “technical assistant” to be doing lackey work because he’s only paid $13. Fuuuuuuuuck. That comment still makes my blood boil.

I had a nice manager at the time that explained how salary negotiations worked, but I still think it’s lame as hell. I ended up getting put on salary, $50k/year, after threatening to leave.

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

Just finished our BIG update including a big change in the backend (PHP => NODEJS). So I hope our users will enjoy this one because we are not yet public and our competitor get a lot of clients each day but if we compare our product to their product: Ours is responsive as fucked and have much more stability but less fonctionnalities so we have to add more fonctionnalities before releasing our product to the public. I hope we will be able in a few weeks! With only me and my back-end dev (My employee and friend at the same time) to work on it and they have 2 more devs to their team to use Bubble.. (They are now 6 or 8 devs (wannabes and using a drag and drop website) in total vs 2 (us) real programmers).

A well deserved night of sleep :P

Hahahahahahahahahha I'm not going to do anymore of your "quick" projects that result in shit pay and drain me out. I got actual fulfilling projects I enjoy working on hahahahah not again "friend". The audacity of this guy to ask me to handle a big project alone while he sits on his ass and gets a 50% cut. He should have paid attention in school if he wanted to be a programmer. All he does is lie to clients that he can code yet runs to me to do all the work. Hahahah let's see how he gets out of this one. Not gonna help you today "friend".

So I just got this email from a tech company, I registered to send my CV some years ago , about a dev Job openning.

The descripition included:
Java and Angular ( first red flag )

So I go to their site to check it out ...
No https, ping the domain returns an ip from another continent with 500+ ms latency.

Major flaws on the site usability...
Super dumb password recovery method...

I'm fucking outta here dude. I might send them a proposition to fix their servers and at least put it behind letsencrypt though...

And these morons have big clients, like my bank... wtf...

So, it has been 2 months and a half since I started working. So far I learned two important things.

1. Clients are fucking retards. Like really fucked up shit. I don't even understand how they got the job.

2. Working for a company is nothing like an internship. I now realize much they treated me like shit during my internship compared to my current job. I did my internship in a startup and I now work in a big multinational company, I feel way more welcome in this company than in the startup

So far I really enjoy my work and I've been learning more for the past 2 months than during my studies.

You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.

It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....

I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.

To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.

I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.

There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.

Trying to explain functions to my coworker and why they should be used even if powershell scrips don't 'need' functions
I've explained it 5 different ways across multiple meetings when they've gotten stuck on something.

At this point I've decided 1. I don't have the patience or brains to be a teacher..., 2. I'm going to have to review every script they ever fucking write, 3. I'm never letting them work on anything critical or time sensitive for big clients. (Small clients ehhh) I'll fight my boss to avoid that headache lol

Me, being a lowly junior dev, had the honor of being in a same group chat with a big corporation devOps team.
Finally ready to play with the big boys!!

*opens chat*
DevOps 1: "so we need to remove the CSS cache from our clients computers."
DevOps 2: "ok, well... just delete the server cache"

*watching in awe as they all try to figure out why it's not working*

This continued on for a while...
Until my boss had enough laughs and giggles and put an end to this stupidity :D

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

Can we rant about coworking spaces?

I like the coworking office concept and I love this desk I have for myself, I like this building, the supervisor is sweet and I made new clients here...

But I hate one of my "neighbours".

We have several office rules and he constantly breaks them.

No music allowed without headphones. Nope, gotta listen to shitty radio straight from the smartphone speaker.

No loud conferences or phone talks. Nah, let's set the volume to the max. And leave the phone behind and let it ring loudly forever.

You can only occupy one desk unless you rent more. In comes his coworker who keeps occupying an extra desk for free and who's as loud as he is. And bring the kids because hey, growing up bored inside a office is good for them.

And today's newest: no eating in the office. Coworker brought her kid who set up a -dinning table- on the extra desk and began eating her lunch leftovers. It wouldn't have been so bad and I wouldn't have noticed except the office was overflowed with the stench of overheated pasta.

This is a big office. I had to open the windows. I can still feel the smell. It's nauseating.

I didn't say anything because it's not the kid's fault they didn't take her to the building's canteen space. But at the risk of making enemies where I shouldn't, I need to have a "fun" talk with someone.

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

I really wish people valued health over profit.

So I joined a company last month and last week I got assigned to the biggest client we have. The project is quite big and there are no deadlines coming up. I was sick for a couple of days and hence could not turn up at the office. Apparently the client called up my manager and went on a rant about this situation. So now I have to work on the weekends to cover up for the missed work while on meds that make me sleepy.

Fuck such clients.

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

There are clients who always suggest an idea then after they suggest they will say "...again don't do this yet, its not a big deal blah blah blah"
Then the other day they will ask if their idea is already implemented.

🤦🏻‍♂️

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

It's annoying when clients are such big fucking assholes that they make you want to leave an awesome job

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

I'm still in denial that Dropbox did 1.1b$ in 2017, cash flow positive. Do they actually even get big clients? It has to be all enterprise, because I highly doubt any consumer actually purchases a Dropbox plan.

I'll just start off with how I really feel. Fuck big corporations with their career robots and retarded practices!
Now for a story. So I work remotely for most of the time nowadays, since my company has as clients big corporations. Used to be embedded with said clients, but it became kind of painful to work with them all so I asked to be reassigned to a remote position.
Now for the retarded part: The fucking Klingons I'm working with have two tiers to their VPN, but won't let me have the full version because it would be too fucking expensive. I checked and it's fucking 50 bucks per year difference.
So for that the Klingons are making me code through a remote connection that has a "best effort" priority.
Fuck.
Anyway after 3 weeks of writing code at a 400-600ms latency I finally snap.
I try to use a proxy and it. I write one myself, gets balcklisted in 2 days.
After about another week of writing code through a fuck straw I start working on node socket with 2 clients and a server that encrypts the send data, and syncs 2 folders between my workstation and the remote one.
It's been a month now and it is still working. It's not perfect, but I can at least write code without lag.

Question for you peeps: What shenanigans have you pulled to bypass shit like this?

So I've been doing work for a big ass real estate firm. Managing work of their 12 websites. A month ago they sent a prototype built with React.js which their design agency did. What we did was creating a backend API and an administration area and hooked the prototype to make it dynamic.
Everything was working quite great but around 2-3 days ago their guy who had been looking over the work of this React.js website came up and said that it isn't working in Internet Explorer 11. Bastard didn't mention this earlier throughout the whole month when we had provided him access to a staging server. I coldly replied that the prototype was provided by their design agency. But today the fucker put it all on us and said that it is something we implemented that caused this issue. I had to do some research but I finally managed to run the website in IE11. Bastard tried to steal my weekend.
Fuck IE11, fuck such pig clients, fuck Microsoft. IE, just DIE already you syphilis infected piece of whore's ass!

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

Ok, just built my first hello wold using react and after installing node babel react etc... The resulting folder is 51.7mb big. Makes me wonder what am I doing with my life why should I do this. what's the fucking point of it all.
Don't get me wrong I like react and I think it's really cool, but what is all this going to achieve at the end "build a website to sell rubber poop" like wtf... some company wants to sell shit and some monkey with an MBA is going to set the deadline and add Features. No one understands the shit we go through no one cares and we just build websites and Android apps... maybe there is no point here maybe there is nothing.
I remember when coding was fun now it's just building highly responsive web/Mobile based IT solutions to clients who wouldn't know a good website if it fucked them in the ass

Oh, well. Work on bad projects with bad clients/managers, for the sake of the money, it's a life sucker. At first I thought it was not a big deal. I was collaborating to someone's elses business and doing the best work I could.

I was tired, depressed, sleepless, having allergic rhitinis every two weeks, frustrated without any opportunity to grow intellectually, fearing clients calls and emails, and... in denial.

Since last year, I decided to stop working on some kind of project and for some kind of people. As the remaining contracts and projects were being wrapped up, I started to feel relieved, despite of all anxienty of let go long term clients and see income lowering.

Then I started to use my free time and savings to futher my education, send cvs and work on side projects. It's not an easy transition. I'll still need to keep working on not-so-good projects to pay the bills, however, I've been selecting more.

Slowly I'm recovering my life, health and enthusiasm for cs again.
I'm learning to not give a fuck and it really helps.

When clients calls me, and tells me that the website is broken.
client: It won't upload my pictures, says that file size is to big.

me: How big is your picture?

client: How do I check that?

30 min of explaining and a him forgetting to charge the laptop.

Client: It says 32 mb.

Me: Yep that's way to big, won't work for a website.

Client: How do you make them smaller?

Me: Crying.

Today is release day...big sprint (complete UI redesign) ... Already 1 and half month late ... fingers crossed (specially for in house clients)

Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something

Agency hires me to convert a 4 column + sidebar + pattern backgrounds email to responsive, for a big client, I make a redesign, simplifying it (less columns, flat...) to avoid issues, client insists, exactly the same design is needed.

I tell him its almost impossible but I will try, and try, and try, many times, but on their old Outlook, some email parts are not aligned (just that), try, and try, many hours, many days beyond budget... all the times since first explaining that perfection is not possible with all possible email clients, and like 7% is using outlook... At that point, and before, email was so well.

Finally I put an end to this, tell them to pay and leave me alone, as they didn't take my advises and warnings serious, not my fault.

This story is nothing until the discovery I made today: the agency had signed a contract with the client, a bank, in that contract there was the obligation to replicate exactly the same design and should be perfect in all email clients...

I've been a developer for 15+ years, all the time as a consultant with so many different clients, have been mobile developer(ios and android), front end, backend, and many other roles, I love programming, but lately, I don't know, don't feel excited about it anymore.

I lie on every interview when they ask what am I looking for in a project, to be honest, everything looks the same to me, just showing some parsed data, which is provided by a backend which is stored in a database, at the end everything resumes to this, I do not see any challenge, or any interesting thing about this anymore.

I don't know, I mean, you can get good money on this profession, be in big offices and stuff, but, there is something missing, at least for me, is like, nobody speaks each other, no friendship, no honesty, no connections, is like, come on, we spent most of our most useful hours day after day in here, there should be a connection or something, I see many people(including me) having lunch with their cellphones, is kinda sad, I wonder if it was like that in the past.

I don't know, it feels so gray lately.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

So I work in a web development company in my town and have been doing a while or heap of parallax sites for our clients. Now obviously when we do the designs we get them in and get them to play around with the site before we go ahead and push their new site out and make it live right.

Wellll who would of thought that a simple parallax site would be so hard to use for the general user??? Recently we have been getting the occasional call where the client is getting complaints about the site only being a big ole image or just one block of text. After investigating why their site was broken or why the users weren't able to see the whole site I came across no problems at all.

Today I got a call from the client who instructed me that after explaining to one of his own clients that he had to scroll down the page that everything was just fine!

I mean, what? How do you miss the big ole scroll bar on ya screen or even think to even attempt to scroll? Some people aye lmao

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

When your boss asks you to work from home, because you can concentrate more on the big project you're working on and ignore support requests and other clients... then he just Skypes and emails you anyway cause everything needs doing today 😢😭

I have had it with the new pm for my project. We've had to literally write down rules for him to follow on how we want to run our project.
- we always go over time on standup because he's asking everyone specific questions about each ticket we're working on instead of just letting us give our updates. Wrote a rule for not doing that.
- he gets overly excited to get things done to the point that he's approved a PR himself and merged a production release during off hours.
- we're a team of 3 devs but he has 7 big items he wants us to work on concurrently.
- we use jira to keep track of things but he insists on us updating a spread sheet that he made as well. We just straight up told him no but he'll bring it 3 times every week.
- he wants us to write a report of our daily progress in our jira ticket before we give the same updates on standup
- every time I give him an estimate, he tells the clients it's a promise we'll get it done by x date.
- he never pushes back and says yes to everything
- oh here's a funny one, he's "reviewed" my code several times

Idk what to do here anymore. We've literally talked to him about all of these issues. He'll change for a few days and go back to doing whatever he does.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So management calls me at 1 AM. I have insomnia so I'm still awake... but I know I have to set boundaries, steer away from unhealthy and unproductive habits. I knew that this spontaneous meeting would not be compensated, and even if they wanted me to fix a bug, I'd be too sleepy to do anything really. I needed some healthy sleep. So I muted my phone and ignored them...

But I kept thinking on the call. What did they want? Did they found a bug on production? (We do have clients on the other side of the world.) Would this create a big fight? And of course, if they brought it up, what would I respond? I did feel guilty. I was worried about the company, since my future also depended on it... and my insomnia kept me awake for an extra couple of hours...

One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.

But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.

I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.

Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.

Fucking piece of shit.

I did a communication and multimedia design study because I was convinced I already knew almost anything.

Ooh the beauty of youth.

But it did help me in the long run, communication with clients and being able to present work with some decent looking presentation and mockups gets the managers all horney as teenagers on springbreak.

Pretty sure thats why I beat some competitors on big projects while their technical skill and team where much better.

Everyone is hyped on Flutter so I got a new idea.

I'm so distasted of Discord's official mobile clients, and this popped off my head:

Why not we implement it on Flutter?

After all, Flutter has these all nice things, and its certainly better than React Native.

I've laid out some of the things that needs to be done and one thing I've noted and remembered was:

- AFAIR According to b1nzy, former Discord employee, you're gonna need to know the WebRTC packets for Screenshare.

- VC is gonna be easy, and its probably the thing I can support without being too hacky.

hmu if you're up, I'm gonna call it Fluttercord, it won't be big or anything - just a experiment I want to show to Discord since they seem to struggle with the mobile clients

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

TLDR, i am not performing as I used to in my job before i made my side hussle and idk if i should do anything about it.

every since covid started and companies started laying off people, I started realizing im in danger when no company was able to match my current salary, and the ones that do would, make me do a hunger games hackerrank competition with thousands of other people which I don't really wanna take part of..

My company even laid off a lot of people due to budget cuts a while back and i didn't feel secure at all, and knowing that i might end up with less salary should i get fired and settle for the next company that accepts me, kinda made me lose any trust i had for the whole being an employee thing... I have financial goals i want to meet and depending on this one company to not fire me is scary...

I registered a tech company and hoped I could take on some high budget projects, got nothing the first year but slowly i started getting some projects and now im hiring contractors to help with projects and its going great and im really happy and excited about it.

But i often need to manage said contractors, have calls with clients and even do some coding myself. Some of that i end up having to do in secret in my company time... we work in a big co-working space so i get to sneak into a meeting booth and do all that.

my manager lives in another country and basically im in a situation where i can get away with it without anyone noticing.

However, I used to be one of the top contributors in the company. I used to finish a butt load of tasks every day and i ended up being promoted to manager, but i still get some coding tasks. But generally, if it weren't for my side hussle i would still be a top contributor and shine like i used to, but now i mostly do what is expected on me, and im afraid someone would ask me at some point why im not as productive as I used to be.

nobody asked me anything but i just feel kinda guilty and miss having the one job to focus on and taking credit for a lot of things and helping everyone, but at the same time i dont trust that the company cares about me enough to give me any guarantees or stocks or bonuses so i feel i need to keep growing my side hussle to have a safety net..

thank you for reading my rant

TIFU by showing login data during presentation

I was presenting my school project when my teacher asked if I could show him the source code. I said ofc, just let me login to the FTP server. I completely forgot that it was also shown on the big screen, and a random funny student logged in and tried to replace the index file with a joke file. Of course, he didn't want to make damage, so he made a backup. But this backup caused the problem, because he connected to the FTP through Windows Explorer (wtf?), and when he made a copy of the original file, it was renamed to "Copy of xy", but in a localized version, which contains special characters. Because of these characters, some FTP clients couldn't even connect, others just couldn't interact with the file. No download, no rename, no delete, nothing. After trying out like 8-9 FTP clients, I just remembered that I could rename it in PHP. Well, it got deleted instead of being renamed, but at least it wasn't there anymore. I have spent like half more hour with searching for a backup version on my computer until I found it.

TL;DR: showed FTP credentials during presentation on big screen, random student accessed and renamed a file, special characters in name fucked up the server, luckily I found a backup.

So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)

I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.

But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).

But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).

My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.

How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.

I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.

Fucking Visual Studio is such a piece of shit. 2 years ago we created a solution for our 7 webclients with 30 projects (clients, common stuff, tests, ...).
Things were ok, we could change something, save the file and everything was built and we just had to reload the client. Only F12 between the projects does not work.

But now the studio doesnt get shit done. Opening the clients solution after a clean checkout takes 5 minutes, saving doesnt build anymore, building breaks the project because it cant find references, rebuilding works but takes 3 minutes. When you have a syntactic error in a file the fucking thing almost crashes and becomes unresponse for a few seconds. It randomly shows errors in some files that disappear once you rebuilt it, sometimes it builds but still shows an error in that file.

But at least we will soon rewrite the clients in angular5 and dont need this piece of crap software anymore for the front end.

If I only could get my team to use another technology for the server so that I dont have to see this big pile of shit anymore. Fuck Visual Studio.

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

Just received a client who needed me to add content to his website. I do provide content adding services where clients have to provide all the content I will add to their website.

The only problem is that this client gave me the content for his about page, which only consists of three sentences. Seems simple? Well the three sentences are big enough to be considered three paragraphs!

Computer society in High school

So while I was in high school, I got excited over the computer society because I thought I could learn a lot of programming stuff from them. I joined and quickly realized that that was a big mistake. They were teaching stuff that you learn from the computer classes in grammar school, eg MS Office, email clients.

I started to learn programming myself through learning online, eventually being the best student in the society. The teacher in charge chose me to teach the class next year, but it cannot be too advance as people would get bored and confused.

Why does classes have to be like this, cannot be too hard. Has to be something that clearly everyone knows. This kind of bullshit has to stop.

I’m working 2 jobs at the moment, putting 12+ hours/day, been doing for about 2 months and I’m already burned out;
I’m working for a big e-commerce agency which is about to get bigger, doing mostly outdated Frontend work (Magento) with no sign of raises/promotions/ real growth, since all clients are basically enterprise and only want “ol’ reliable” over innovative.
A lot of smart people, lot of knowledge, pay is fair.

The second job I’m doing (part-time) is for a smaller agency in the same sector, pay is a bit higher, closer time zone and an opportunity to work with newer technologies.

I need to make a decision on one of these two companies since I can’t possibly keep working all these hours.
Is there anything else I need to consider before making a decision?

As a Frontend developer I’m getting a bit tired of working with Magento and its outdated tools, but at the same time seems difficult to switch to something different since I haven’t really worked with anything else, I feel a little bit lost

Real, seriously honest feedback wanted.
What do you do when you are stuck at a place that has potential but it is being run by someone with the wrong idea?
For example: not to toot my own horn, but I shine at front end Development. Not just slicing up designs, but seriously creating amazing user experiences. And honestly, there is no shortage of work for that ... every client we have has an expectation that their site or application will look awesome. And we have some very big clients.
That said, the manager truly believes that we are all inter-changeable and should have no preference. As a result, John Doe over there who has zero ability in front end gets tasked with building the front end of what should be an amazing app... while I eventually get tasked with some sitecore bullshit that I have no interest in.
And it goes on and on and on.
It is no coincidence that anytime the dice land on me for front end, it wins an award and always ends with an awesome thank you from the customer.

I am not sure what to do, because it just makes no sense to me. And this is just one example of the mismanagement.

Any help?

3 out of 4 projects on hold because hosting companies nowadays can't do shit.

Changing a website on another hosting to a new one. Another hosting failing us, some big clients already waiting for the release.

I hate clients with shared hosting

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

I dont know how to timeline projects. I tell clients that it will be ready in one month. But the project will be so big that it takes lot of time to actually code it and do all the procedures around it. I m just giving them timeline based on the speed of my mind.

Broadly there are two things which concerns me:

1: Clients' businesses fail miserably or change their direction.

2: Instead of focusing and improving the quality of their work/product, they prioritise remaining things instead.

BONUS: Don't forget those individuals who dream really big but fails to take any action towards it, just talking. I stay away from these people personally.

Because of these reasons design gets vanished or no longer valid for their new business venture, and don't forget the time and dedication it took to create, as a freelancer it hurts a bit.

I like working for non-profit organisations, most of them look for volunteers. Your work and efforts are alive, and you have to be jack of all trades IMO when dealing with them. Additionally in the process you will meet some extraordinary individuals.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Meeting scheduled with a client to train them how to edit things in their new WordPress site for 11 am today. At 9 the account manager walks into my office and tells me the meeting will be starting at 10, and in addition to that we will be starting with the web stuff because the analytics team didn't do any of their reports.

The time is now 1130 and I still haven't heard from the client. I'm afraid to start anything big because as soon as I do the client will show up, but I don't want to just sit here and wait. I have been knocking out the little things on my to-do list for an hour now while I sit here with the team and "discuss the meeting points."

Why can't clients respect my time? If I say I'm going to call you at 3 your phone is ringing at 3, if I say I'm going to show up to fix your workstation at 1215, then I will be there at 1215.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

I recently refactored the horrible main.js of one of our clients. I didn't even know you could fit so much shit in "just" 700 lines of code (yes, it's really that big...). After 3 hours full of swearing and grinding teeth about this piece of shit, I was finally done and tested it.
It was so incredibly satisfying to see the page loading twice as fast!

I hate websites like upwork and freelancer, its impossible to outbid the other applicants while maintaining a price that makes the work worth the trouble. Yet without them its impossible to find clients who are willing to pay $1k for anything no matter how big of a project it is, they keep looking for $200 solutions. Hows a developer supposed to raise some cash for a house and shit like that.

Extremely frustrated with the release process and versioning system at my current company. Don't know if this is same everywhere or the half ass release managers can't think of a better way here.

Basically for any client raised issue that can't wait for next release are built as a hotfix. However hotfixes are never bundled togather or shiped to other clients. This is causing a vicious chain, two clients raise two separate issues on same version. Instead of fixing them as single hotfix (however minor the issues) we create two hotfix versions for each with only their issue. A week later same clients come back with the issue the other raised. Once again instead of bundling what is now effectively same code we build hotfixes on top of the clients respective branches. We now have two branches to maintain with same codebase. No matter how serious issue, the hotfix is never made generally available and always created on client's specific hotfix version.

Now that was an example for only two clients, in reality we have released five patch versions of a product in last 2 years. Each product version contains about a dozen artifacts (webapps, thick clients, etc) with its own version. Each product version being shipped to various clients. Clients being big banks never take a patch of product even if it fixes their issues and continues requesting hotfix. We continue building hotfixes on client branch and creat ever increasing tech debt. There is never a chance to clean up or new development. Just keep doing hotfix after hotfix of same things.

To top if all off, old branches are still in svn while new in git. Old branches still compile with ant new with maven. Old still build with java 5,6,7 while current with 8. Old still build from old jenkins serve pipelines while new has different build server. Old branches had hardcoded integration db details which no longer exists so if tou forget to change before releasing it doesn't work.

Please tell me this is not normal and that there are better ways to do this? Apologies I think I rambled on for too long 😅

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

Dealing with clients is probably the biggest personal challenge. I'm not much of a people person, and I find it hard to converse with friends and people I've known for years, let alone clients who are looking for answers for why things aren't working, and wanting you to explain exactly (but in simple terms) why a thing that seems simple is so complicated.

Another challenge, which is somewhat related is expressing myself. This again, stems from not being super great or comfortable in conversations, but as a dev, even among other devs, your opinion on things gets asked a lot. For someone who was used to sticking with the status quo and mostly agreeing with things, stuff like peer code reviews, or giving pointers on how to implement something is a big challenge (but I'm improving)

Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.

Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.

I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.

Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.

The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..

with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire

tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either

P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount

1. Give me more knowledge
2. Give me some nice colleagues that have a clue on what tbey are doing
3. STOP MAKING MY CLIENTS SUCH BIG MORONS

I'm a student at uni and also one of the two web devs at a website agency.
Today, I got in office and my boss told be, that he just signed off (confirmed) two mobile apps ( we're switching to React Native) and is in the talks with a few other clients, also we're like a week from starting our first big project.
Furthermore, internship deadlines are ending at the start of next month.
Goodbye Life 😂 🔫 💻

I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.

So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.

Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.

So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.

And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.

Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?

Working in a big tech company but re-image clients using an usb-stick.

Ticket: implement compression algorithm to crypto object x

Details: object to big, we must devise a way to compress it. A deflate algorithm should be added here, yada yada yada we did not have the time Yara yada...

Go see crypto provider's documentation... It has compression options... -_-

You lazy fucking stack overflow copy question dimwits!!! Jesus fucking Christ! This reached production like this shit, I've got clients complaining of the size of the payload because you are a bunch of lazy fucks who can't even read simple documentation!!!

I want to kill someone for wasting my time and patience... Don't call me for this kind of crap... I have better things to do!

I mean, the time it took you to write the ticket should suffice...

How do you guys learn? As we all know, we have a lot of stuff to learn in our field and it's growing and growing and growing. Other than the programming itself, we also have to learn the other stuff like algorithm designs, programming paradigms, big o notations, git, etc. And if you are working, you also need to learn the business rules your clients might have. And if you're unlucky with your job, your boss might even assign you to tasks with a programming language you have zero knowledge about.

So I was wondering, how do you guys balance your life, your family, your studying and your job? And how do you keep your head from exploding with information?

Turned up on customer site yesterday to do a says SME work for them like I have done every week for last 3 months..

As I walk in they took a decision 15 mins earlier to power off the platform I'm working on to do a backup ( on a big data platform?) and its down till 13. 30...

Irony? The minute they finally let me turn it on New data arrives in the platform so their backup is out of date and they wouldn't need backups if they'd followed my original design and distributed it over two data centres....

Oh and they 'forgot' I was coming so there was little / nothing to do for the rest of the day either

Clients can be a PITA but I can't really complain.... Easy day though!

I just finished posting this but think it deserves its own post.
If you're creating a business or "startup" (as people like to call it these days) don't assume the idea is novel or investors will just jump on board. Focus on the business fundementals, money and cash flow, even before launch, unless you can afford not to. But really you can't afford not to. Selling before launch means that you're effectively doing two things 1 you're collecting new customers and income for the business and 2 you're. raising awareness at the same time. Obscurity is death and failure.

Get you a good sales team and marketer when the time is right.

Have a year of runway.

Identify the sites and groups your target audience and investors frequent. Start conversations now, buzz is the hardest thing to generate.

Start building relations with customers and potential clients now. Discuss launch, ask them if they'd be willing to pay up front before launch, in order to secure a "lifetime membership", offer it as an early opportunity and charge extra. Giving a discount out of the gate is a mistake B/c it says to potential investors that you don't think it's ready or worth it yet. Of course if it's between making 1. Some money or 2. No money, don't let it be a deal breaker, offer a discount. Going from no clients to any clients is a BIG deal. If you can do 1 you can make it to 10, if 10, you can reach 100, we etc.

No one likes asking for money and yet it is as important if not more important than development.

I don't think ranters here from first world countries (US/UK/Canada etc) realize what a big deal it is when companies from these countries hire South Asian companies (like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) for their out-sourcing work.

I have seen some career building centers with people giving testimonials like "My mother tongue is Hindi and I was always afraid to talk to US/UK clients. But now that I took a course here, I can talk to them with confidence.".

People here throw themselves at these companies' feet begging for a contract. Gotta get that currency converted bag am I right?

I worked at a company and one day someone from London hired us for work and the boss threw a small party cuz "Someone from LONDON is hiring us omg".

Makes me wonder, this is why third world countries like us have such a good IT infrastructure.

Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.

Damn you software and hardware corporations.

You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.

Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.

If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.

Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.

If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.

Get me out of here you asshole.

It's somewhat nice here. The thing is we have a lot of infrastructure problems and it's hard to implement business here which made it hard to find a job. But if you're working with US clients, it's fine. Internet access and electricity is not reliable, but you can find a workaround.
As a consumer of digital services, it's weird as we're pretty close to the US (2 hours flight) and there's not an embargo against us, but payment processing services won't touch us (legalization is awful for them), so good luck paying with any local issued card. And if anything is country restricted, we're right next to Cuba (Again, legalization). Paypal, Spotify, iTunes, most of Netflix, a few cloud providers.

Yeah, that's it. Right next to the US and no embargo and willingness to learn other languages (Easy to find French, English and Spanish speaker), but with big infrastructure problems (Internet and Electricity) so you can be really qualified and not get a job.
I'm in Haiti.

Need to hold a 3-day training at a clients. It's my first time I'll be doing such thing because I'm still am pretty new in the company and don't know a lot about the system (product) yet. It's a group of 8 I need to train. Haven't got input for 3 days to talk about. I really have no clue how to fill those days. I'm panicking big time right now. Were you ever in a similar situation? Anything you got to share?

!rant

Question to the devs that hire.
Would you hire a developer with the qualifications:
- knows multiple programming languages (can be any but knows them well)
- has worked the past 6 years in the field however worked during his school life.
- started of career in web development and worked with high end clients, (big corps, businesses, celebs)
- does not have a CS or Engineering Degree (has a different degree that is remotely related)
- has failed his A Level exams (pre-college, high school board exams by Cambridge) (not that this matters)

Disclaimer: This is not about me. I was in an argument with my extended family about the importance of grade school education in work. My family consists of Teachers and School Administrators entirely. The above point all define me and I was successful enough to earn more than what my family does early on when joining college. I did however fail my alevels only to get a scholarship in a great University for my field.

Originally I'm coming from Java , about 2 years ago, I switched Node with TypeScript and had a hard time getting accustomed to Promises. It was a big relief when I learned about async/await. Much cleaner code, no brainfuck anymore when thinking about how to handle stuff that requires multiple async values and so on.

Now I'm working on a clients project as a Java dev again. SOA, Spring Framework, Kafka and MongoDB, nothing too complicated... if they wouldn't use reactor to bring reactive functionalities to Java.

It feels like I'm back in Promise Hell...

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.

Is it just me who feels the application they are currently working on is dumb, filled with issues, basically a pile of shit no matter how big/small easy/complex it actually is.
Just today for fun I opened up a clients webApp I worked on long ago, which I considered as shit but it I actually kinda got impressed by myself lol.

Thought I was going to get through the year without making a big mistake on a project. Today I found out that I launched something that didn’t have the clients analytics in the page. No ones fault but my own. ☹️

Some background:

About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.

So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).

Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.

Everyone is happy.

Fast forward to last Thursday night.

“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.

I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?

So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...

The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.

What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...

His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.

Now we have

POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback

The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...

But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!

Arghhhhhh

Any tips for getting into the freelance game?

I’m a FE dev (React / TS / Next) with a11y certs and 7+ yrs of experience, but am wondering how I can get my first clients freelancing?

I’ve got drafts for contracts and all the legal protection stuff sorted to prevent me getting fucked over in most cases, but am struggling when it comes to getting myself out there and actually grabbing clients.

What tips do you guys, gals and non-binary pals have for someone wanting to break from big-corpa and to go into this new direction?