As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

I have a colleague who has a fear of closing any window. He'll let his Mac run for months on end without closing any of the windows he's opened. He also has all kinds of browsers with tons of tabs open. He's a designer so I get his urge to not do all the technical bits and bobs every day, but for the love of zalgo restart your computer once in a while. Or at least close windows you don't use. It's come to a point where non of us want to help him, because helping him out takes forever with his slow as shit computer. We've asked/told/joked about it too him several times, but he just doesn't want to listen. At one point when I was helping him everything took so long that I decided to reboot for him. And of course Mac had to go and reopen every window that was open during shutdown, which took another good fifteen minutes. Shite OS. And naturally he spent the next hour fixing everything the way he liked it. He hasn't turned off his computer since (couple of months ago), except for when we moved to a new building a month ago.

Just had to get that annoyance of my chest.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

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.

Biggest thing that pisses me off about windows 10 is the fact that they do not give two shits about wasting your internet, and they try to hide everything in obscure split settings, set updates to happen at a specific time sure but did your dumb ass remember to disable downloading app updates in the store? Probably not.

Heck how about we preload apps for you because you are on mobile aren't you, we know it is a desktop but we would really love to be the next android so here you go have apps all the apps.

Instead of being the foundation for things you actually intend to install we want to also give you a sample fucking 200 level tower that will take forever to demolish so you can start building the cozy cottage you do want.

I am digressing , but final thought is just that Windows can be a 1gb install since the rest of the shit is what fucktards that use a Samsung S8 just to facebook want.

Plebs.

#justathought

There are 6 stages of an man's live that he wish for

1. Child phase and school phase : don't know what it was, can't remember mine

2. Teenage phase : study, exploring new areas, competition, body building, getting into relationships , breakups, dreaming, etc

3. Ambitious phase : getting graduate, changing jobs , lust for money, tensions, parties, ambitions, cars ,new houses , marriage, honeymoons and kids

4. Family settled phase : permanent job, nice salary, long family trips , fun time with kids, paid holidays, hardworking phase

5. No tensions settled phase : children getting graduate, marrying, trying to settle themselves, you and your wife having enough money or pension to live peacefully, you are playing golf with friends, doing excersize nd charity regularly, etc

6. Permanently settled phase : lie peacefully in your death bed and wait for eyes to close in sleep forever

..
..
..
..
..
What life gives : "fuck that shit... let's mix some of these stages, replace some of them with opposite/ negative stages and skip some of them"

LPT: Avoid building any complex report/tool with Excel, because you will forever be fixing the damn thing!

No need to think small when you have eternity to work with. Right now I am building a network operating system, something I've started around 2 years ago. I expect to have an installable and more or less usable system in maybe a few more years.

When I would have an eternity to work with, I'd first look to make our planet redundant. It's insane to imagine that we only have this blue marble to work with, while we have a fireball of hell as a neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood. What even happened there? I'd like to find out. Granted Musk is already figuring out Mars, and he has the money for it while I don't. I don't like the man all that much (too much marketing wank) but hey, at least he's got us covered there.

Maybe one day we could live forever. Maybe we could map and upload our minds. Maybe we could replace our entire body with synthetic components when the frail meat-based components inevitably fail. Perhaps it could even happen in our lifetime, at the pace technology is progressing at. If and when that happens, sign me up!

So we do not have an amazing internet speed. Can you imagine the dread we feel in the office when a new xcode version needs to be used to have apps be accepted by apple again. For those uninitiated: update all ios devices. Update unity to work eith newest xcode. Update to newest xcode, update mac to newest osx to actually be able to update xcode. It takes FOREVER. If this meets you at 8am, you are not building today. You are done.

What the fuck this fucking shit of an app supposedly went through five rounds of QA and I broke it in 5 minutes? Holy fucking shit How this is the main point of your job. You shitty shits take forever getting this PR to me and now it’s buggier than a haunted house on Halloween?

After this is after wanting to cuss Apple for making me update the os then then xcode then iTunes just to recognize the goddamn development phone. It’s an app built off Cordova it works for like 14 versions of iOS just run the bugger you over priced aluminum chassis dildo riding fruit Fuckers.

Now back to the goddamn cluster fuck I just got delivered. What the goddamn fuck. This level of bullshittery I have not seen before. And apparently Cordova is only partly de-sandboxed? I don’t know for sure because I don’t have time to test it because I’m running the entire technological stack of this company on a junior dev salary!

When you tell me it goes though all this QA and you spend 2 weeks on just QA tickets for fucks sake the first operation I do, the most common fucking operation on the app, the shit we have been building around all this fucking time, should not fucking error out. For fucks sake at least try to get the main fucking thing working. I recognize you did a lot of work and implemented a number of features but what the fuck good are they if I can’t even run them for one fucking time.

My company spent millions of dollars on new services in the building and software to utilize the software. Software takes forever to load and I am getting NullException errors when I click on anything. 🙄

I am going to rant about this here because there is nowhere else where I can "SCREAM".

My work process....

Working on a project that does not have mockups nor a plan. I am building as I go. Design, infrastructure, EVERYTHING. Because my boss is a "genius".

And the project goes like this....

1. Boss tells me to build something.
2. I tell him the functionalities and design.
3. Boss, "Figure out yourself and we will see how it goes".
4. Me, Builds something.
5. Boss does not like it and demands changes.
6. I make the changes.
7. Repeat.

1 year and a half for one project that is a simple e-commerce. Show the products, a search functionality, users sign in and can order and show their orders.

A simple page in which does not take time, but without a plan, without A FUCKING PLAN this project will go on forever.

I am losing my mind. I put on test and tell my boss to test it for bugs. He demands a meeting and tells me, "we need to add this".

OH FOR FUCKS SAKE. TEST THE SITE FOR BUGS YOU FUCKING USELESS THING. I WILL FIX THE BUGS AND THEN WE WILL TALK FOR NEW MODULES.

I am doing documentation, database infrastructure, front-end, back-end, testing (because my boss cannot do it. It took him 2 week to start testing for some things after asking him every fucking day "Did you test it", "Did you test it").

Maintaining out CRM for bugs and new modules and maintaining our company's website.

Not sure if it is because my computer is older, but my demo app is taking forever for gradle to build! Now I can procrastinate without feeling bad! 😁😁

Use Rust they said. It will be much less hassle they said.

And now rustc just stops working in the middle of compiling. No error or anything it just doesn't want to continue compiling so I'm stuck forever on "Building ...". I thought I would never have to experience this again after deciding to pretend C++ doesn't exist but alas systems programming appears to forever be a right pain in the ass

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

You know it's all good and well but compiling and building opensource software is like falling down a stairway and getting fucked by dependencies and quirky configurations on each step.

Forever...Down one step and down again.