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

Oh, you mean psychological.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Today is good, so far.

Husband graduates and promotes and my younger brother made it to Texas safely this morning.

Oh, and I'm out of the office 😄

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

Gave a recommendation to the boss to do a thing. He said “Go and do the thing.” I wanted to do a proof of concept but there was no time. We got the contract. I tried to do the thing. It didn’t work. It WON’T work because the vendor’s marketing far overpromises what the product can do. No way to back down because the client is already fully invested in the solution. I want to quit my job AND my career now because I apparently suck at all of it.

Sometimes i wonder how many people from here work in the same company, talk every day, and don't have a clue about it...
I mean... last person here you told to suck di** here can be your boss actually...

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

How to find out your boss really thinks you suck and that he was planning on letting you go at the first opportunity and hadn't yet figured out how to do it:

1. Realize that you're overworked and overwhelmed.
2. Proactively ask for a reorganization of duties and provide two alternatives with several helpful suggestions about how to organize the work so things still get done, but it's not all on you.
3. Mention quietly that you recognize a third option exists of no longer working there but that you...
4. The boss interrupts you at #3 and basically asks, "How soon can you write your letter of resignation?"

Damn, bro. You could have paused for a second or two before hitting me with that.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

Context: ive been porting a single threaded D.A.G scheduler into a lockless multithreaded one. Point is its an objectively complicated project where theres lots of overlap in the code and architectural boundaries are very fuzzy.

My boss: "Can you just make new branches for every 'large' change youve done. Its too hard to merge this one giant branch youve got"

Me: "Fuck bro, but this is 2 months worth of significant refactoring where the commits are not atomic and you told me way back then that it was cool to work in my own repo. Now ive got to go redo half my work"

Boss: "Well yea but isnt it so much better to work with clearly seperated histories"

Me: "yea its great if you tell me thats the workflow you want upfront. This is gonna suck but ill but my balls and dive into this pit of lava if u say."

How do you deal with a manager like this?

My manager is close with 2 colleagues who constantly suck up to them and who they're pretty much friends with.

I don't particularly like to do stuff like that and don't really like the manager either (in my opinion they're incompetent) but now, often when I write code, the manager will have those colleagues "check" it. Not peer review, as I never get feedback. Just occasionally I'll find out they "checked" my code to see if I work/do my job right.

This is despite me being more senior than the both of them, having contributed far more actual code to the project than both combined and one of them can not even write proper code!!!

I'm honestly tired of sitting here and working on boring long tasks, and then being treated (behind my back) as if I am not working.

It's building up this paranoia in my head that this problem is also making other colleages/my boss think that I am slacking.

I used to be so close with everyone at the company, but now I feel completely alone and alienated...

So, I'm about to be up shit's Creek. I need a new source of income, ideally either a new job or becoming a freelancer. I have been making intranet sites with ASP.NET for a while now, and I can tell two things:
1. It's too corporate minded, so I'll need a fucking degree
2. It's too corporate minded, so I'll be stuck with people like my boss, who still use tables to align content despite the project having bootstrap.

I need to do something more fulfilling, but I probably will have to leave my job by December anyway due to some major fuck ups in my life, do I need to get something lined up. I have been brushing up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but when it comes down to it, I suck at design so my "portfolio" is blatant clones to learn CSS and shitty Spartan things.

Basically, I'm anxious, terrified, and unable to figure out what comes next. Do I keep sending job applications and praying to whatever deity will listen, it do I start figuring out this freelance thing? If freelance, then how do I get into it? I'm terrified and desperate.

Can there be a happy rant?

This is going to be a bit of a rambling semi coherent story here:

So this customer who just doesn't know what their data schema is or how they use it (they're a conglomeration of companies so maybe you get how that works out in a database). For every record there's like a ton of reference number type things mapped all over the DB to fit each companies needs needs.

To each company the data means something different, they use the data differently, and despite their claims otherwise, I think there are some logical conflicts in there regarding things like "This widget is owned by company A, division B, user C.". I'm also pretty sure different companies actually don't agree on who owns what... but when I show them they just sort of dance around what they've said in the past...

So I write a report (just an SQL query that outputs ... somewhere ... I mean what isn't that?) that tells them about all the things that happened given X, Y, Z.

Then every damn morning they'd get all up in arms about how some things are 'missing' but sometimes they don't know what or why because they've no clue what the underlying data actually is / their own people don't enter the data in a consistent way. (garbage in garbage out man...)

So I've struggled with this for a few weeks and been really frustrated. Every morning when I'm trying to do something else ... emails about how something isn't working / missing.

In the meantime I'm also frustrated by inquiries about "hey this is just a simple report right?" (to be clear folks asking that aren't being jerks, and they're not wrong ... it really should be simple)

Anyway my boss being the good guy he is offers to take it over, so I can do some things. Also sometimes it helps just to have someone else own something / not just look it over.

So a few days into this.... yup, emails coming in about things 'missing' or 'wrong' every day.

Like it sucks, but it's nice to see it suck for someone else too as validation.

!dev

Sorry about another non-dev rant, but I can't help it :p

I have seen a post here on devRant a few minutes ago talking about being a millionaire, so I thought I'd write a lil something for people thinking of chasing that.

As I said in a comment on that rant: as Jordan Peterson (aka Lord of the Lobsters) said, in order to be successful you need to be an industrious person, i.e. you gotta work hard, very hard. Most success stories are from people that worked very very hard (Elon Musk is one I can remember off the top of my head) and had to put their life, friends, family in second place. To this day I remember watching a video on a 30 year old millionaire, he said he didn't have friends for about 6-10 years, he just worked, worked and worked. If that's what you wanna do with your life do your thing, I'm just saying that's not it for me.

A few years back I wanted huge success (being famous, being rich), but I've come to realize that's not what I want. Being famous must suck, people recognizing you everywhere you go and shit, and being rich comes with a price (pun intended?), which is working every minute of your time for 10 years. That's not gonna make me happy, I have realized that I want to get married in my early 30's at max, have kids, buy a comfortable house somewhere in europe, have enough money to be able to give my family a good life and be able to buy and tune a few cars (that's a dream of mine btw), and maybe even try to start a company of my own (I don't like the idea of having a boss). And I think that to achieve these goals, all I need to do is be a bit smart right now: invest in fixed income, don't buy expensive shit, live with my parents at least until I get out of college and get a relatively decent job.

Anyway I might've steered off-course for a bit there, the point is: before you decide you want to be a millionaire, think what you actually want in life. If you want to be rich and are sure you have the willpower to work a 100 hours per week, do your thing, whatever makes you happy. But if you are going to work 60 hours a week and you're looking to be rich you're just going to be disappointed. You'll be chasing money all your life, sacrifice the (IMO) important things in life (friends, family, health, fun) and you won't get anywhere.

It's all or nothing, make up your mind before you waste your time.

We use Sequelize. This is how we do database structure changes:

- I create/change a model in Sequelize, and let it change my local database, then I do work on that
- I push the new code to a remote branch
- my boss/CTO/lead dev then manually creates/changes the relevant table(s) in our staging database
- I finally merge the branch I originally developed into the remote branch
- boss checks that everything is working
- at last, boss does the same process of modifying/creating tables in production database
- finally, staging code is merged into main

So right now:
- I'm changing a feature, forgot I was editing in the main branch
- go ahead and create a remote branch for it, pull locally, checkout local version of newly created branch
- try to run code
- oops, there's a missing column in one of my local database tables
- ask for boss for SQL script that will create the missing column and potentially add more data or whatever
- waiting for boss to respond

H-how can we improve this process? Boss has talked about us moving to use migrations but we never ended up doing it. I don't know much about migrations either. This is gonna suck so hard.