Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.

"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"

"Uh... look at my beard"

"What"

"Just look at this beard!"

"Uh.... OK"

"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"

"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"

"You don't have to lie"

She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.

"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"

"Yeah"

"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."

She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"

Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."

Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.

Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"

"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"

Joanna: "No I already took care of it"

"How?"

"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"

Me: "I do miss shaving though"

I used to work with a guy who had 2 PH.Ds, in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and over 600 patents but I kid you not the guy could not use the coffee machine. Now it's not like this coffee machine was as easy as a Keurig, it was some $20,000 espresso machine that took a while to figure out but I tried teaching him how to use it a few dozen times and still he couldn't get it right. It got to the point where I thought he was faking it so that others would make it for him so I offered him $500 if he could figure it out. Still nope. So for the remaining 2 years we worked together I made him coffee whenever he wanted, 2-4 times a day, and he bought me lunch everyday. Before I left the company I bought him a Keurig so that when I left he'd still have coffee.

Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

First world problems...

I've been working at this startup as a tech lead for a little over a year, and we've grown from 3 to over 150 employees, and a bit over a million end users.

I've spent tens of thousands on high end displays and chairs for your lazy butts, on external consultants to help and train you, even those fucking dirty recruiters have leeched their shares of the pie. I built an amazing luxury kitchen with a fridge, beer cooler, induction plates and a blender for all your crossfitting bodybuilder meals, but forgot to think of my own needs.

NOW I JUST WANT TO BUY A GOOD COFFEEMAKER AND ALL THESE FUCKING TEASLURPING FAKE DEV-BROS SUDDENLY START SCREAMING ABOUT BUDGETS AND HOW COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARY IF YOU MEDITATE. FUCK YOU, WE'RE LIKE THE ONLY STARTUP IN THE COUNTRY RUNNING A FAT PROFIT. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID MINDFULNESS IOS APP. GIVE ME MY FUCKING ESPRESSO OR I'LL BLEND YOUR BALLS INTO A PROTEIN SHAKE.

** Non Dev Rant **

I just need to rant about this because I'm furious.

Last night I had a house warming party. It was mostly, if not all, of my girlfriend's friends. I'm a cranky old developer so I don't have friends.

Everyone was nice and dressed nice and brought us gifts.. all of the gifts were pretty much specifically for my girlfriend.

So this one girl came... she's younger.. around 25. She came with no gift (I wasn't expecting gifts I just need to mention it for the plot), and was dressed in sweat pants. Alright, no problem.. I really don't care at least she's here.

So as more guests arrive I finally get a gift. Someone brought me a case of beer and a couple of yummy cookies. I had to put it down on the kitchen counter for a bit because I needed to grab more chairs.

The basement door where the chairs are is 10 feet away from where I left my present..

I come back from upstairs.. not even 5 minutes later and I see sweat pant girl stuffing one cookie in her fucking mouth and the other in her pants...

Are you fucking kidding me!? I bought desserts and snacks and all the alcohol you can think of and you steal MY fucking present. Not just one of them... but BOTH.

She saw the other guests give me it.. say "here buddy this is for you"... followed me in the kitchen and STOLE my fucking cookies.

I was going to eat them this morning with my coffee and I realized I couldn't because this fucking ass hole took my fucking cookies!!!!

I hosted this party for my girlfriend's SJW ass hole fucked up friends... put a smile on my face... pretended to like people... and for once didn't yell at someone... and the fucking thanks I get is 2 stolen fucking cookies.

Fuck her.

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...

Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why

Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.

She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.

Asked her anyways:

Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.

Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!

There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.

Navy story time again. Grab that coffee and fire up Kali, the theme is security.
So, when I got promoted to Lieutenant Jr. I had to attend a 1-year school inside my nostalgic Naval Academy... BUT! I was wiser, I was older... and I was bored. Like, really bored. What could go wrong? Well, all my fellow officers were bored too, so they started downloading/streaming/torrenting like crazy, and I had to wait for hours for the Kali updates to download, so...
mdk3 wlan0mon -d
I had this external wifi atheros card with two antennae and kicked all of them off the wifi. Some slightly smarter ones plugged cables on the net, and kept going, enjoying much faster speeds. I had to go to the bathroom, and once I returned they had unplugged the card. That kind of pissed me off, since they also thought it would be funny to hide it, along with the mouse.
But, oh boy, they had no idea what supreme asshole I can be when I am irked.
So, arpspoof it is. Turns out, there were no subnetworks, and the broadcast domain was ALL of the academy. That means I shut EVERYONE off, except me. Hardware was returned in 1 minute with the requested apologies, but fuck it, I kept the whole academy off the net for 6 hours. The sysadmin ran around like crazy, because nothing was working. Not even the servers.
I finally took pity on the guy (he had gotten the duties of sysadmin when the previous sysad died, so think about that) and he almost assaulted me when I told him. As it turned out, the guy never had any training or knowledge on security, so I had to show him a few things, and point him to where he could study about the rest. But still, some selective arp poison on select douchebags was in order...
Needless to say, people were VERY polite to me after that. And the net speed was up again, so I got bored. Again. So I started scanning the net.
To be continued...

Worst meeting I’ve been in?

Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”

Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.

I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.

June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”

Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.

That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.

Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.

I can’t count money as quick. I don’t know how to operate a cash register. I’m bad at following small tasks in the kitchen. Ex: girlfriend yells at me for putting unstrained yolk in recipe (after straining it).

I can’t lift heavy stuff. Out of breathe helping my mom move. My uncle told me, “if you can’t do that, how can you work?” Then he touts his son around proudly for being in the army. I felt like shit for years.

My cousins told me to get a job at McDonald’s to learn the value of a dollar. I spent all this time studying and hadn’t found a single job at the time (not that I was looking). I was living off financial aid and some income from an app that sold for a dollar on the App Store.

I would mess up if I worked there. It was depressing guys. These people who worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. It was like a cool club that I couldn’t be a part of! I wanted to be that smooth barista at Starbucks with a smug look on my face. Making coffee for all the ladies and writing hearts next to their name on the cup.

The responsibilities of going to work day after day and blowing your paycheck at a meal at Denny’s with your friends. Complaining about not getting enough hours and talking about adult stuff! Sigh sigh sigh. Oh and taxes! Let’s complain about taxes on a single W-2 just for the hell of it (not sure why they do this when you can file a simple 1040EZ) even though we get a refund.

Then..

After many paid internships (roughly 3), now I may be receiving an offer that is 100k+ with a 401k and all benefits I can imagine. Free food up the wazoo. Gym on site. Happy hour Friday’s.

I brag about taking a shit for an hour at work and coworkers don’t give a shit. Or taking a day off to do personal errands anytime.

Having my own place in a nice area (though the cost of living is enough to take care of 3 families in another state). Supporting my girlfriend through school and helping her with her dreams of art.

Going to fancy dinners and not worrying about the bill afterwards.
Accidentally damaging my 2017 Honda Accord and not giving a fuck because I can pay $900 for repair with less than a week of work.

But I can’t help but think that all this time..

I could’ve just quit and worked at McDonalds. I could’ve been one of the cool kids..

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

I'm sick of how much abuse PHP gets from other programming communities. PHP written well, using PHP 7 is comparatively quick. yes it has its quirks, just like JavaScript, but just because you can do stuff in multiple ways, and the language has a few inconsistencies doesn't make it a bad language. The recursive flag in bash applications changes case inconsistently (I.e. zip and cp) but that doesn't get bashed (lol) half as much....

I think I need to finish my coffee this morning

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Waking up, feeling like I have a cold I sit down at my computer and see that my biggest client has asked for a minor change. I haven't had my coffee yet, but I can do what they're asking for in a minute. The site is *gone*. Just a permissions error. Have they been hacked?! Why hasn't the client called me?! The files are there and no changes have been made. It doesn't come up on any browser. 10 panicked minutes later I check it on my phone. It comes up. Wait a minute ... While editing /etc/hosts yesterday I'd accidentally uncommented a line for this site that I'd foolishly left in there. One character later my false alarm is solved. I'm getting my damned coffee now.

(tl:dr at the bottom)
context:
my partner programming skills are pretty basic and he does not work in software development. instead he is in the largest (and only) electricity company here.
history:
one day his boss ask him "hey, do you know how to use google maps?"
Partner: "yeah, what do u need?"
His boss: "great! please make 10,000 routes with these coordinates, i need them for tomorrow"
Partner: "WTF!" ,grab his phone and call me, "(explains me te situation) dude, can you make like a script or something?"
Me: "Sure, but we'll need a loooot of coffee"
We spent 18 hours developing a routes generator with java-fx, mysql and JS.
Next day we went to deliver those routes and to "show" the system. They told us that after searching for 6-7 months, they wasnt able to find such a solution as ours.
Next day, I took a plane to this company HQ (My partner was food-sick, so i had to be there by my own), had a meeting with the TOP Bosses (on of them arrived in a Helicopter, lots of body-guards) and after a 3-4 hours, just like that, we had our first Big Contract with a huge ass company.

tl;dr:
we ended making an 8 months national project with the biggest and only electricity company with an 18hrs-developed system.

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

My PM: I don't like when you get up and help out other colleagues with their problems on their computer. You're not at their service.
Me: okay, I'll refrain from doing so.

The next day, I arrive 5 minutes before 8, I get myself a coffee, talk with a few colleagues, and:
PM: Hey, can you please come and help me review this email?
Me: ** fuck it, I still have 2 minutes ** Yeah I'm coming
PM: Now please.
Me: ...

Also my PM, 5 minutes later: Hey I don't manage to print my document, can you help me?
Me: ...

10 minutes later, I get a call:
PM: did you call XY about ZX?
Me: Yep, sent you a mail about it 2 minutes ago
PM: Really? I don't see it
Me: I sent it.
PM: Can you send it again?
Me: ...

Later that day:
PM: Hey, what are you up to?
Me: Well, I'm working on our improved websi-
PM: Can you please create a new campaign on Mailchimp? We're all under water here and a bit of cooperation from you would be great
Me: ** huh? ** erm, ok?
PM: Do it now
Me: Yeah yeah, don't worry. ** click ** here, done. Now, where was I...

----- PM on holidays

Other colleague from another department: Hey Phlisg! I have a small problem on our platform, can you help me?
Me: ** writes a script to help her out **
Her: awesome, thank you!!
Her own PM, 5 minutes later: Hey! Thank you very much for your help, it helps us out a real lot, very much appreciated :)

I lost my smile at work since the beginning of the year, but that little help I gave my colleague just gave my smile back to me :D

20+ years of experience and I hate where this industry is headed. Sure, we have second year grads telling us that they're "Full Stack" developers - but, imo... that's a "Full Stack of Bullshit".

I started developing online properties in 1989, at the ripe age of 17. Bulletin Board Systems. I knew the user experience before it was tagged onto some fuckwad's wonder-filled LinkedIn profile.

When I say, "Don't use that" - it's not the result of a control freak mechanism that seems to be built into every Facebitch/Twatter/SnatchChat fool in existence.

I do so, because I care enough to guide team members in the proper direction so they aren't driving themselves and others off a goddamn cliff, drooling onto mobile device like it's God's penis.

So, of course they do the complete opposite. Fail miserably. Finger point like the typical douche bags. And, slowly destroy the income of everyone around them.

At this point, I'd rather be homeless than to deal with anymore toxic bullshit. So, I'm done. Set up an exit strategy, and walked away from the highest paying position I ever had.

Fuck them and the full stack of bullshit they rode in on. Onward and upwards, fucktards. Enjoy finger-pointing into the mirror.

Back to Earth, in... 3 - 2 - 1.

(Takes a sip of coffee.)

So, how's everyone doing this fine morning?

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

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*

Last week, someone contacted me, he said he needed me to fix the existing code on a new WordPress website because the developer did a messy job, so I thought to myself, it can't be that bad, requested for the SSH access and got into the server.

Guys.

Guys..

Guys...

I was wrong, some people really know how to fuck shit up.

I don't want to go into details but there were legit more than 50 plugins installed and activated on the website for no good reason and all the pages took about 45 minutes each to render if not more, so you can literally request a new page, start making coffee and use the washing machine and if you are lucky to have spent 45 minutes, return to a fully loaded page.

For a new WordPress website, it seemed really old.

It was almost as if this developer had a line of code that looked like this:

@Import 'all the bad programming practices ever and the ones yet to be invented';

There are things that i wish i didn't see.

Yesterday, i went to a coffee shop to relax and reviewing my works. And suddenly a college friend of mine approach me and we started talking about work.

Me: So, What do you do at work? What's your stack?
Him: Not much of a new. Still working with wordpress, html,css and jquery.

So he started talking about how cool wordpress is and how he generates money doing sites.

Me: Can i see your sample works?
Him: Sure, *opens his shitty windows laptop with Web Tech stickers*. and handover his laptop to me.
Me: Woah. the design is so neat (I'm lying). But it's freaking slow man(REALLY FVCKING SLOW).

* I decided to open the devTools and inspected the source code. And I can't believe what i saw.

- 20+ images with 2~4mb file size
- 13 unminified javascript files with variable declarations that looks like minified.
- CDN's of bootstrap, foundation and semantic UI
- LOTS OF FVCKING PLUGINS

* I didn't told him what i saw. I just turn over the laptop to him and finish my coffee.

Him: My sites are cool right? I have a lot of pending projects right now. Easy money Bruh!
Me: Wow. *sips* coffee. and say goodbye to him and walkout.

I FEEL BAD FOR HIS CLIENTS!

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

Running an Alpaca farm in rural Finland, next to some mountain creek with an oldschool water mill so I can grind flour and coffee beans.

I hated people so I tried to find solace as a nerd in technology, but tech is also fucking awful so I feel like retiring in a tranquil forest with some equally grumpy wooly animals.

If I get eaten by a bear because I'm a skimpy city boy that's OK, more epic than being found decomposing slumped over on a keyboard in the boring grey suburbs.

All of this is probably pandemic-me talking though. So sick of this concrete city with the farting cars and fat obnoxious shoppers.

I need some trees around me, and some mammals with a higher IQ than my current neighbors.

Boy, this Monday mornig was crazy...
At 7 am, as I just left my flat, I received an ultra urgent email from the CEO of a company we exchanged the fileserver for, that the network shares are not available.

I instantly turned around, went back to my flat, fired up my HAL9000 supercomputer and connected remotely.
4 levels deep (PC => VPN => Remotedesktop => vSphere Client => VM) I felt like I was in the movie Inception and tried to figure out what happened.

I don't know why, but in the logs it said that the fileserver VM was down since 4am. Holy sithlord... why?

After restarting and the usual problems with Windows Network Names, everything was back online.

My special thanks go to Mr. Coffee, who is always a great companion during monday mornings, Mr. VPN, the great fellow who invented the VPN and last but not least "The Internet" for connecting me to a world of binary, where every idea finds a listener and where Ajit Pai can be memed without concequences.

FUCK YOU Ajit. Harlem Shake is so 2013.

Im way to fucking dense... Today a girl tried to show me she wanted to get to know me.

I was at McDonalds to get a coffee at McCafe. Since Im a regular there I know one of the guys enough to make jokes with him. So I was talking to him while he was making my coffee. Just before he finished it a girl interrupted him with the question if she could finish it. All she had to do was draw something with caramel on top of the cream.

I thought it was kinda rude because I was talking with her colleague. She gave me the cup and I walked out after thanking her, only to realize what she had drawn after I sat on my bicycle.

She had drawn a big heart with a question mark in it. I didnt really pay attention to the girl because I was annoyed she broke of the conversation and just took my coffee and walked out.

Now Im trying to remember what she looks like so I can talk to her tomorrow, but I dont even remember her hair color..

import LongRantKit
import NonRantKit
import TldrKit

I don't like stickers on my laptop because it clutters it up. But today I realized the importance of them.

A few months ago I was sitting at a coffee shop working on a paper and I noticed a guy with this cool sticker on a MacBook Pro: it had the integral symbol to the left of the Apple logo, and to the right of it a lowercase d and another Apple logo. It took me a few hours to realize what it meant, but I finally did and at that point I also guessed that not many people know what it is.

So I, as antisocial as I am, I finish up my work and before I leave I walk up to him and say hi. At this point I'm a senior in high school and I learn he's a junior in the same college I plan to attend. We talked a little before I had to leave and got to know each other somewhat.

After I leave I find him on Instagram and Facebook and friend him and such.

Recently I posted a picture saying I had recently joined the Apple Developer Team, and also recently reposted a memory on Facebook from 5 years ago that was a screen capture of an iPhone 4 simulator running iOS 5 showing off one of my first apps.

Then yesterday I get a message from the guy I met at the coffee shop asking for some help with an iOS project he's working on. We decide to meet today and I spend the entire morning showing him the basics of Swift, Xcode, Interface Builder, etc. I feel like I really helped him jumpstart his app and helped him understand the basics of different concepts.

If he didn't have that integral sticker on his laptop I would have never had this opportunity to finally share some iOS development experience.

For this I would like to thank my high school calculus teacher, with whom I spent many classes at Starbucks because I was an only student. I'd like to thank laptop stickers, and finally I would like to thank the coffee shop.

TL;DR: Said hi to a guy with an integral sticker on his laptop, a few months later he approaches me for help understanding iOS development.

A Monday morning poem

I enter the bureau, feeling all relaxed and well,
my colleague looks up:
"Abandon all hope, welcome to hell."

This indeed, he doesn't say,
his face only twists a little in dismay:
"I need that schematic, did you finish it yet?
And there also some tests I'd like to get -
how was your week-end by the way?"
I start my computer, don't remember what I say ...

I grab some coffee, half a day is gone,
the PM pressures: "I want that asap done!"
I am cluttered in tasks and bullshit, too:
"Go fuck you right now - yes, I meant you!"

I don't say what I like to, I mentally punch a wall,
I crank some more code out and git-commit it all.
Some devRant on the lunch-break, some shallow talk,
I leave the building and take a short walk.

My mind rotates, I cannot enjoy the scenery now,
I return to my desk, and figure out what to handle and how.
But my plans are crashed by a colleague dashing in:
"I need you to do a test setup! I need to begin -"

I do the setup, I do some other stuff,
At the end of the day I feel totally rough,
Work is piling up even more -
"Tomorrow", I think and close the door.

At home, I just flop on on my bed -
I should be learning instead ... -
with some pizza and chill.
I think about sleeping, I hope that I will.

...

It is now Friday,
my brain is fried, too.
I am finished with this poem - how about you? :)

When I'm tired, I can't do a damned thing. If it takes effort or concentration, I'm useless. Games are just frustrating. If it's something enjoyable, I simply can't care enough to enjoy it. If I read a book, I can't focus on the words, and won't remember anything I read. If its mindless like watching Netflix, I won't remember the next day, or rather I'll remember just enough to ruin it for myself.

So why not sleep?

Because I've been feeling like this every day, all day long for months. No, that vile liquid called coffee doesn't help. If I rest my eyes and stop thinking for a few minutes, I wake up a little and can function normally for a minute or two before passing out again. I'm not depressed, or at least I don't think I am. I feel like my brain died or got replaced with a lizard's.

And this sucks because I'm still during the probation period at work, and learning the sprawling and intricate codebase is actually challenging. And they're giving me large tickets because I was a dummy and impressed them too much.

Idk what's wrong with me, but I hope it stops soon.
I miss being able to think and plan and do anything besides just struggle to stay awake. 😞

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

So I used to do some freelancing in web development last year, nothing too fancy just some simple PHP websites. Comes the worst meeting in my life. So I am from India and we have a lot of long lasting business here being passed on over generations. TL;DR the guy was the owner of a very old business which was actually very huge and the guy was educated too, so I assumed that he'll be sensible as compared to other people.

The meeting was in an expensive cafe and he paid for it, he even told me upfront that meeting is on him. Great, right? So we sit down, order some coffee and then start discussing what he needed.
The guy needed an ecommerce website built with backend and logistics system integrated. We discussed possible designs for the website and stuff too and so far the deal looked promising to both of us.
I explained him the cost estimate and told him that I would email him the final quote from myself once we discussed server cost and shit.
So now comes the bargaining part where he asked me to give him server and domain for free.
At this point, I suspected that he didn't know that servers and domains are not something that you make. You have to purchase and renew them periodically.
So I told that guy that he didn't understand the cost estimation and explained to him that X is the cost of making this fucking thing and Y is its monthly maintenance cost, if he wanted annually could be done too. And this Y did not include server and domain costing.
Now came the fucking tide, the guy straight up turned to his shit and told me I am lying and trying to con him. So I gently asked him if he had ever gotten any website made. To which, he said No, but he knows how the costing works.
I was like "Bitch?". So I calmly tried to explain that that's not how websites are done, delivered and maintained.
He didn't seemed to be understanding and kept on fucking repeating that he knows his shit and blah blah.
At this point, I was like "Okay. Fuck this dude then. I can find another project. " and then I told him that he'll need to find someone according to his needs.
Interestingly enough, the guy called someone and then walked out of the cafe while talking on phone. I waited for 5 minutes and he didn't come back so I decided I would pay for my coffee and leave. Turns out the guy had paid his bill before my arrival and ditched me with the excuse of the call.

But oh well, I think working with such an idiot would have been much worse than paying for that coffee.

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

My Perfect Day : Assumption

Woke up at 6. Went for morning walk or do yoga or some sort of stuff.

Came back at 7. Went for daily routine, like bathing and all.

Went to prepare breakfast at 7:45. Prepared some eggs and bread and coffee.

It is 8:15 now. Reading news papers or watching tv and doing breakfast.

At 9 check mails and prepare some stuff.

At 9: 30 went for office. Reached office 5 minute before 10, safe and sound.

Came back at 7 by evening. Did some rest. Prepare dine till 9. Take a bath. Complete the dine.

At 10:30 ready to sleep.

Actual Scenario :

Woke up at 8:30. No time for yoga or morning walk. No time for preparing breakfast as well. Went straight to bathroom. Came back in 20 minutes. Made a cup of coffee. No time for newspaper or tv.

Feeling lazy and tired already. At 9:10 went for office. Before reaching office stopped at fast food joints. buy some junk food. Eat them. Got traffic jam and reached office late.

Started working but feeling lazy. Boss asked twice about the project status and i am unable to think a single line of code.

However, days passed. Boss scolded me. I promised him to finish the work after reaching home.

Reached home at 7:30. Late for no reason. Went straight to bed. Sleeps a hour. But took 20 minutes to leave bed.

Started working on projects i did not complete in the office.

Time fly and it is already 1 in morning. No dinner. Tired as fuck but hungry as well. So made some eggs and eat. Wrapped the task but it is 3:30 in morning and i jumped to bed for sleep.

Loop.

First time my laptop acted as a CV.

I've been in a personal project with my pal for like a three months. We meet sometimes at a cafe which is a very nice workplace, we often see more people with laptops, so we are not the only ones that thinks so.

My pal was waiting for me, he got a table early and then I arrived. there was a guy nearby us.

Me: (this guy has a newest new macbook pro, fucking riche)

-- I sit, put my laptop and start to work with my pal --

The guy starts looking at my stickers without hiding his doing at all. I noticed that instantly

Me: (Crap, he's gonna ask something :( )

-- I kept discussing stuff with my pal for like 5 minutes and then it happened. the guy stands up and... --

Guy: hey! how are you? sorry for bother, are you perhaps developers? I'm asking because I saw your stickers

Me: mmm yes

Guy: Do you have a job currently?

Me: We are in a project (No need to mention this is personal project and I got my full time job)

Guy: Oh, ok, no problem, you see I got a company, and currently we are looking for people to work with us, we want frontend developers with javascript skills preferable, but anything is welcome. Interviews starts next week, so if you are interested or know someone that could be, I'll give you my card and please write me at my mail if anything.

Me: got it, no problem.

-- I tried my best to hide my displeasure face(but I think I showed it a little), for him to being a riche with a new macbook pro, and you know, the interruption, I wanted to be focused while working in da project --

-- I got the card, I read it a bit, didn't dig into too much, there was stuff to do at the moment. the guy already returned to his chair and my friend --

Pal: Excuse me Mr Guy, what's the job tittle?

Me: (FUCK! dude!, we're working in our shit, don't give him more reason to try to scout us. we are behind the schedule and I need to explain this shit to you FFS)

Guy: Oh yes, will be frontend developer(again), but if you are a full stack that will be a plus too, we got some stuff with angular 1.x(ugh), and sencha touch(ugh) and ...(don't remember what else was it)

Pal: Ok and the job is full time in site? or are you open to work remotely

Me: (ok man, you sound interested, that makes me look interested too >:( )

Guy: preferable in site, but we would consider remotely depending on the person.

Pal: Good! thank you very much Mr. X

Guy: cool

-- Later on, like two hours, my friend goes to the counter for more coffee --

-- I text him: dude, I feel the guy will kidnap me or something --
-- then the guy start looking again at my laptop and... ---

Guy: hey! Jhon was your name right? Do you have experience with devops? I see your aws stickers

Me: yes

Guy: do you have experience with microservices?

Me: yes, a bit with lambda, also I've done some stuff with kubernetes, opsworks, rds and whatnot. no biggie

Guy: oh cool! we have a devops job too, there is a migration we need to do for an app to micro services. again if you are interested or know someone that it does. please mail me :)

Me: gotcha

There were no further interactions with Mr. Guy the rest of the day.

I'll be thrilled if someone ask me about my bee and puppycat sticker

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.

2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.

3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.

4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.

5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.

6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.

7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.

8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.

Want a backend in Node? You got it. PhP using the plethora of frameworks available? No problem.

Feeling like a gipsy guitarrist and want to lay it down with Django? Good taste!

In a hurry and need your startup off the ground with React integration in rails? Piece of cake.

Feeling springy and want you some coffee and Java with your app? A la carte.
Wanna pull my leg and force me to do .net? Mm ok if you insist.

You sure you want Perl with that? Ok no problem.

.....but you sit me and my awesome powers of backend mastery and force me to do css and design all week and you literally destroy my soul......this shit is soul crushing I swear.....

You know, I am getting really fucking irate posting them rants about how shitty my job is.

I'm more than fucking competant, but this company is turning me into a blithering, raging, frothing maniac.

I am sitting doing my devOps at the moment. On top of that I am the network admin, the sys admin, the sec admin, the fucking fuck admin (you get the point) and now I am being told to go out and work in the field because "The technician is busy with calls, and doesn't have time". These calls are ALL FUCKING PRINTER CALLS. SET UP USERS TO PRINT AND FUCKING SCAN.

I am not being a shithead by saying no. I have spent the last year or so doing favours for these bastards, I don't get any compensation in any form for it, and it is just making my life hell. The reason I went into devOps is so that I don't have to fucking deal with shit like this. I spent years in the field, and I fucking hated it. I was good at what I did, but I fucking hated it.

Now I am back there. They earn more than i do, those printer techs, but I am doing their fucking work for them. I have even made them simple little fucking scripts so that 90% of their work is done in two clicks.

Fucksakes. Now my motherfucking right shift key doesn't want to operate properly. Been using this keyboard for about 6 years now, and now it decides to fuck out. Fuck.

As standing, I am fucking sick and fucking tired. I am drinking energy drinks and mass amounts of coffee just to stay functional (because I sit up until 12AM trying to get through all my work - everyday of the week). Reported to tech director, doesnt give a single fuck. "Stick around, things will get better".

Yeah, fuck you.

Seriously thinking about freelancing.

Don't know if it pays well though.

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

Dutchies and some other peoples who want to join the Dutch devRant meeting!

Since nothing is being decided or whatsoever, this is the plan as for what I think would work best and based on feedback/comments/the chat.

We'll meet up at the The Hague train station around 2PM. From there on it really depends on what everyone wants to do but my idea would be (depending on the weather) to go to a park or get a coffee or something like that.

So, what do you guys/gals think?

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

I started drinking coffee when I started as a junior dev.

I loved its boost, but after a while being on coffee was exactly how I felt before as normal. I incrementally upped the dosage, while my resistance creeped up too. I reached a moment when I drank a liter daily, so I witched to yerba maté instead, which resulted in more potent brews. Then I got used to its strength too plus it tasted like horseshit. I switched to caffeine tablets, takingg more and more. Soon after I reached a level which was described medically as the top one should be allowed to take.
I no longer felt any boost. In between caffeinated moments of normalty, I felt like a brain-dead zombie. When I was caffeinated, I was jittery, my shoulder and eyebrow was glitching, my stomach was flexing like before taking a huge exam.
After some miserable time like that, I quit caffeine entirely. I was fatigued, dull and my mind was hazy for te next 1-2 weeks.

I then finally, became gradually normal again.
I drink tea and coffee only socially, perhaps a few times in a month, and never after too much later than noon.

Now I can't wear my "Programmer. Converts coffee into code" shirt anymore. Apart from that, I'm much better off :)

What's your coffee story?

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

I had this a while ago. I just pulled an all-nighter because of some servers issues so I went to a coffee shop at my usual train station on my way to my study to get an espresso. I had some difficulties with keeping my eyes open and then these teenage girls walked towards the starbucks (nope I don't do starbucks) saying something like 'Oh my god I need caffeine otherwise I won't survive today omg'.

Five minutes later they came walking out with a few huge 'coffees' with shitloads of milk and whipped cream.

I kept myself sane but I just really wanted to scream 'THAT"S NOT COFFEE/CAFFEINE, THAT"S FUCKING DESERT YOU FUCKING FUCKWITS'.
I really couldn't stand those girls at that moment nope.

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

So I'm feeling a lot better today than I did yesterday. This shit's finally starting to give me some peace.

In the middle of my (first) morning cup of coffee, feeling pretty good about life for once. So I figured..why not do a face reveal?

This picture was like 5 months ago, but the only difference in how I look now is my hair being a bit longer

Story time!

Like I mentioned in a previous rant, I’m (or was) a coca-cola addict. Coca-cola has caffeine, right?

This happened a tuesday. I forgot my mug at home (I wanted to draw it a bat🦇) so I bought a jumbo coffee at a store near my office. I drank it, and then, all my partners went to the kitchen for coffee. I went with them and I refilled my cup.

I was working on my code, and suddenly I felt a strange sensation on my chest (I don’t think I could describe it, it feels like when you have intestinal problems and gases, but in the chest). I didn’t give it importance. One hour later I started trembling. I googled my symptoms and I found I had a coffee overdose 😱 But how? I drank a lot of caffeine in soda, but this only happened to me with coffee. This lasted 5 hours 😓

You, specially the most experienced devs and coffee addicts, how can I drink more than 1 cup of coffe per day without trembling? Btw, I have no heart or pressure problems, so I don’t know... this happened because I don’t drink much coffee?

Argh,

Today - you son of a bitch.

It all started with a 2 hour flight out of town for business, and I mean started as in I needed to be at the airport at 4:30am!

Despite 2 coffee's to get me out of bed I proceeded to indulge myself in the magic juice, 3 cups later and it felt like my heart belonged in a Grand Prix.

Now here is the sticky part, we where briefed that we would only be doing 2 site meetings and that was it.

Low and be hold it got worse, turns out that we would be pitching our product to 3 highly regarded CEO's, now bare in mind that my position on this trip is as the lead developer, and don't get me wrong I am well up to date on every aspect of the business, hence why they sent me.

So more coffee down the gullet, and eventually the conversation leads back to a project that I had developed to allow authorization of debit orders online, now usually I'm quite a well presented person in these types of situations, but you don't realize how quick this can change.

A quick jump to the geography of the location I was doing business. Johannesburg, South Africa - its as dry as hell, smoggy and at a very higher altitude "as in above sea level".

Now unfortunately none of the above factors where helping me much at all.

Now back to where I am being asked about my project, and never in my life have I tripped over my own words, I went completely blank, I'm surprised I didn't pass out to be honest.

Now despite the death stare and my colleague kicking me under the table, I am feeling pretty terrible, fortunately I had a kick ass team that was able to cover my ass!

Luckily I was able to recover ( 2 muffins and about 3 bottles of water later). We where able to salvage the meeting and it turned out pretty well, I regained my energy and we made it happen!

Must say the flight back was amazing! Almost empty and we all had a row of seats to ourselves, which resulted in some major comfort stretching!

Thanks for tolerating my essay, I'd love to hear if anyone has had anything of the sorts happen to them.

Have any of you already felt that you really like what you do (coding, of course, among other things), but you hate "the place(s)" where you work, specifically some of the people from there...?!?!?

It's 9AM, you already got your coffee, is comfortably sat, with your precious headphones, all ready for some gorgeous lines of code to gain life... but...

... your coworkers are arguing cos one prefer braces when using an single-line if statement, the other not...

... another one is discussing about how bad he's paid after discovering that a dev (at the same "level") receives more...

... the coordinator comes to convince you that the manager is not good, has not all the needed "certifications", and vice versa ...

... the designer didn't like the UX's work, and this is just an enough reason for a BIG gossip with the rest of the team (or even with people from other teams) ...

... the QA complains all the time about everything: the testing environments are a shit, the other QAs are a shit, the system is a shit, his life is a shit (even though he has not yet realized it) ...

Sometimes I miss that time when I got into the coding universe at home, giving my first steps and was creating things all the time... against the toxicity we find in a lot of enterprise "habitats"...

I know we might think we need drugs to accomplish something. Like coffee to get work done or alcohol to socialize better. But honestly, you are better when you are sober - because you are perfect just the way you are :)

Got a coffee grinder from my grand parents. Pretty old school, but I like it!! 😍
Just brew a big cup of coffee. It just tast delecious. ❤

Purple, Ahh yes, the nice colour purple... dont you love looking at something and thinking, "Wow, thats some nice purple"

well, I fucking dont, fuck that piece of shit colour, I FUCKING HATE PURPLE, why?
BECAUSE IT DOESNT FUCKING EXIST! FUCK PURPLE, FUCK IT, ITS FUCKING BLUE! THERE IS NO FUCKING PURPLE!

WAKE THE FUCK UP PEOPLE! IT DOESNT FUCKING EXIST! THERE IS BLUE AND RED, BUT. THERE. IS. NO. FUCKING. PURPLE!

And dont get me started on brown, that nice brown chocolate, these coffee beans...
IF IT WOULDNT LOOK LIKE DARK-GREEN I WOULDNT FUCKING HATE IT! WHY DOES IT EVEN EXIST!

(if your wondering, yes. I have a red-green colour deficiency)

Had a longer talk with a friend today.

Acquaintances of theirs were at a restaurant (!) a few days ago, complaining about how much they paid for breakfast buffet. Their rant went on how the restaurant didn't even include coffee in the breakfast buffet.

I know this restaurant. I really like it there. They roast their own coffee in the back. They have a transparent bakery with spelt flour, from certified organic farming. They support the regional farmers, even the meat for the cold cuts etc comes from a local butcher, livestock is from regional free range farming.

If you wanna know what's wrong with customers, that's the prime example.

Not only didn't they bother at all to look at the menu... They ignored at all what they paid for. Just stuffed themselves without any thought at all.

Then they wondered why the price was so high.

Of course, high price = bad, so they rant everywhere what a bad restaurant they visited.

It just made me so fucking angry, cause that's the same shit I have to deal every day with. Not giving a damn, not reading any information at all - but spouting nonsense and foul mouthing everything is okay.

Fuck those kinds of humans.

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

It's starting again. I can feel it.

You had a decent job, but you had to think otherwise. Then you had to go to that coffee shop tell some people you're the fucking bee's knees, didn't you?

Well, you know that's how the band plays.

Yeah, but now you'll have to live up to the hype, my friend. And you know pretty well that the pocketknife on your belt won't cut it anymore.

I can always learn as I go...

Sure you can. Except this time stakes are higher. They'll be expecting you to deliver on all your bloody greatness. They'll be relying on you. Not only them, but also the person who chose to be with you. And you know you're not enough, for neither of them. Now you'll fuck it up and let all those people down.

But I could build things little by little, lay out a solid groundwork and build up from that. Just like that other time when...

Of course you can. But can you make beautiful sparkly things? Can you make them sexy?

No... But I can make them resilient. I can follow best practices and intelligent design patterns.

Right. Cause design patterns win contests and prizes. Sure.

Well, it'll make things work better. And then when someone else comes along...

They'll say your work smells and let everybody know how it should've been done, because they need to prove themselves. You know that's what people do.

But that's just not fair! Solid work is solid work!

And a fraud is still a fraud. And that's what you are.

Boss: we can't accept your MR request until you fix the problems we highlighted, everything is blocked and the client is getting angry

My brother in Christ, I understand your concerns but I need you to understand: you decided to block a perfectly working and documented PR because you didn't like having "<!-- -->" in a couple of HTML files and menial bullshit like that.
It may not be the most elegant thing ever but don't put on me the responsibility of your blocks or I'll smash your face with the coffee mugs I've used to work until midnight so that you could deliver the product in time after someone else delayed the deadline twice already.
Thanks and get fucked ASAP.

Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.

I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.

So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.

I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.

Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.

Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.

Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.

Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.

Hey guys, you won't believe what happaned to me, I left my laptop open in a hacker coffee shop and went to take a piss, and when I returned I fou d out that someone stole all my crypto CockRingCoin 😭😭 I lost a million and a half Shekels but then remembered my brother has a cousin who knows a lawyer who's wife is a friend with a wolf who knows a real matrix hacker who can hack CIA using only his toes, I contacted him and you wouldn't believe it but he got all of my cock coins back to me, I don't know what I would've done without him. If anybody needs help recovering crypto I can more than reccomend my dear holy saviour LeHackerCockSucker
WhatsApp: +972-50-EATMYASS-0
Email: ciahacker@cock.gov

But then as I was happily looking at my crypto returned I notice a few payments I don't rwmember making, turns out, my wife was cheating on me! And using my crypto to buy her lover stuff!
So I contacted the afformentioned lawyer who's a friend of the cousin that my brother has, and he helped me file for divorce and punish my cheating wife, for anybody needing a marriage lawyer:
WhatsApp: +972-54-DeliciousPussy-6
Email: eatmypussy@lawyers.porn

I am now happily married with the wolf who's the friend of the lawyer's wife and he fucks me in the ass every night. If you want a good life like mine you know who to call.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

IF YOU UPDATE AN ADM PLATTFORM FOR FUCKS SAKE DON'T DO THE FOLLOWING THINGS:

1. ONLY DOCUMENTATE IT IN A POWERPOINT

2. WRITE DOWN IPs AND PORTS ONLY ON A WHITE-BORD

3. MOVE TOOLS TO OTHER SUBNETS OR DOMAINS WITHOUT PROPERLY KNOWING THE WAYS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM

4. USE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS AS RESET OPTION FOR LICENCE-MANAGEMENT ACCESS IF NO ONE KNOWS THE PW

5. LEAVE THE COMPANY THE DAY AFTER THE UPGRADE IS DONE

Because the guy who has to take care of the upcoming problems is not going to like you!

BUT having to deal with all of this at once would not be a problem if your, so called team (30 People who work with those applications e.g. as test-engineers) would actually work together instead of having that "not my daily business, I am going to drink coffee" attitude.

Apparently I am the only one who has enough balls to see, admit, and report a problem to our leadership.
This always leads to Me fixing the issue...
....that's alright I am learning a lot...
...BUT IF A TEAM-MATE, WHO HAS THE SAME DEGREE AS I AM GOING TO GET, LEAVES EARY BECAUSE: "HE DOES NOT KNOW WHATS WRONG", IT TRIGGERS ME!!!

- The apprenticeship guy

PS Needless to say hundreds of clients have access to those systems and I worked through a shittload of official tool docs just to get to know the tools first...

VSCodium, just for a little moment, please go fuck yourself.

I mostly use netbeans but for just a little I'm using VSCodium (VSCode without the Microsoft calling home bullshit).

Just had this error I didn't see that fast and then, usually, whenever you put your cursor on the tee underlined code, it tells you the error in this drive-by popup thingy.

The goddamn popup disappears so fucking quick that its impossible to read.

Ended up trying to capture a screenshot in time which worked at try number 10+, then saw the error and corrected it.

VSCodium go fuck yourself. I'm not ready for this shit when I've just woken up and haven't fully drank my first coffee yet (or this is more like a triple espresso as for strength)

😡

My mom bought my very Italian boyfriend an espresso maker for his birthday. He bought the best Italian espresso grounds he could find here in Germany, and we just had a cup at 10pm (our sleep schedules are fucked up).

I've had a lot of coffee and a lot of espresso in my life, but right now I feel like if I jumped hard enough I could fucking fly. I feel like bashing my head through my computer screen for no particular reason. I feel like I could divide by zero and be OK.

Holy shit you Italians are fucking crazy.

Double coffee time!

A partner of mine have soluble coffee, so I decided to compare it with the office coffee. The advantage of having two mugs :D

Actually I don't need it but I'm so bored :( (I've already finished my code and I'm waiting for bugs or something like that).

I was a tad drunk last night because the week was... more than exhausting.

I felt like a pinhata yesterday - pretty beaten up and gutless.

Woke up this morning still a lil tipsy and decided to just be happy and don't give a damn.

Decided to take a hot bath to get nice and relaxed.

My smartphone decided to commit suicide and slided in the bath tub while I was in the kitchen making coffee.... And water was still running.

:) Bye bye smartphone, no more annoying messages.

While bathing, I relaxed a bit too much I guess.

Felt a bit of pain but then so much better because something in my back "plopped" back to where it belonged I guess?

I managed to rip off the shower curtain with my foot since it was a very short moment of "fucking frigging shit that hurt".

During that moment I also created a great flood, bath room is still wet...

And the funniest thing is: I don't give a damn.

Smartphone is definitely dead, ordered a new one, will arrive next week.

Guess I should stay the weekend on the couch before I accidentally blow up the mansion.

:)

I don't know where this good mood is coming from, but damn it has been a long time.

This is what happened today in our dayli:

Lead: We need to profile our software

Me: You can use the chrome devtools as remote profiler, even on prod, or make HAR files for later inspection.

Lead: Yeah but no that’s just collecting data on every tick, we need something like “has been called x times”

Me: Yeah but you can filt -

Lead: Yeah no, so back when I wrote code in Delphi...

Me: *oh god no not this again*

Lead: ... We could have clicked a button in our IDE and it would wrap the function call with the API call to profile that function ...

Me, to the secret dev group in slack: doesn’t a simple method decorator and node performance api help with that?

The people in the group: We had this topic last Friday all day...

Me: oh well *get’s coffee and ignores lead*

Observation

Usually happens when hitting some heavy development after waking up to an idea at 5am and rushing in to the office to make it happen. Then you write for hours straight refilling some coffee once in a while.

At some point you start finding other people at the coffee station and the smalltalk starts. For some reason I can't turn my brain into social mode. Someone asks me stuff like "How was your weekend?" And the answer can be anything between "I like turtles" and some totally uninhibited and unintended truth in the TIM category.

Flow is strong but it totally fucks up my social capabilities. It also makes me happy =D

Oh how I like devrant everyday more and more- can you imagine if every job kind would have something like .this? (e.g waiter.Rant) this is so inspiring how everyone is opening up and speaking about motivation, inspiration, fails, mistakes. We are not perfect and we should learn from each other, so the message the devrant unconditionally says is 'be opened ' speak up . P.s this is like coffee for thinking, stimulates to not just sit and work but think and inspire Do something bigger and share , Move your thoughts thank you devs especially founders

So flashing microcontrollers gets kinda annoying when you have to simultaneously fight Windows defender's urge to flag the flashing software as Trojan every 30 seconds like a 10 year old kid with ADHD that just discovered coffee.

It doesn't get easier when suddenly only one of three USB ports recognises thumb drives with the current Windows version, and only after two reboots.

Maybe I should just run it in a VM like the three remaining QA testers at Microsoft do, but on the other hand I don't really like the idea of flashing firmware from a VM. Just feels even dirtier.

I don't know if we can be friend...

I don't like cable art, my desk is messy(no setup), no stickers on my mac, don't care I have to use mac or pc or unix, I don't code at night.....anymore, I don't have problem with ;

But....I love coffee.

Had an interview with a local recruiting company for a series of jobs they posted. It started with two of their interviewers casually talking to me at a Starbucks. After a while they realized I met the criteria for one of their own job postings so they texted their boss who came down to the coffee shop about five minutes later. Which is when it got weird. She asked me regular questions about the job, then started asking me about non work stuff. She was sitting next to me at a 4 person table. We talked a little about hobbies, I'm really into biking so we talked about that. Which is when it got super weird, she felt my leg up and ran her hand around my chest. I didn't even think anything of that until the interview ended honestly, but it's freaked me out until this day. Never had an interview like that before. Ironically, I didn't get the job, and if I would have gotten the offer it would have had to have been really really good to take it. She gave me the heebie jeebies despite being attractive, who does that, in an interview none the less.

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

!rant
if you're someone who grades code, fuck you, you probably suck. Turned in a final project for this gis software construction class as a part of my master's degree (this class was fuck all easy, I had two weeks for each project, each of them took me two days). We had to pick the last project, so I submitted final project proposal that performs a two-sample KS test on some point data. Not complex, but it sounds fancy, project accepted. Easy money.

I write the thing and finish it, it works, but it doesn't have a visualization and that makes the results seem pretty lame, even though its fully functional. SO I GO OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY to add a matplotlib chart of the distribution. To do that, at the very bottom of the workflow, I define a function to chart it out because it made the code way more readable. Reminder, I didn't have to do this, it was extra work to make my code more functional.

Then, this motherfucker takes points off because I didn't define the function at the very beginning of the code... THE FUCK, DUDE? But, noobrants, it's "considered best prac--" nope, fuck you, okay? This class was so shit, not once was code style addressed in a lesson or put on any rubric - they didn't give a shit what it looked like - in fact, the whole class only used arcpy (and the csv mod once), they didn't teach us shit about anything except how to write geoprocessing scripts (in other words, how to read arcGIS docs about arcpy) and encouraged us to write in fucking pythonwin. And now, when the class is fucking over, you decide to just randomly toss this shit in, like it was a specific expectation this whole time? AND you do this when someone has gone out of their way to add functionality? Why punish someone who does extra work because that extra work isn't perfect? Literally, my grade would have been better without the visualization.

I'm not even mad at my grade - it was fine - I just hate inconsistency in grading practices and the random raising and lowering of expectations depending on how some grader's coffee tasted that morning. I also hate punishing people for doing more - it's this kind of shit that makes people A) wanna rip their eyeballs out, and B) never do anything more than the basic minimum expectation to avoid extra unwanted attention. If you want your coders to step up and actually put work in to make things the best they can be, yell at a grader to reward extra work and not punish it.

this is cool, I just added a phone and a coffee on my avatar. I can add more thongs but I like t keep it minimal and clean

Dear Coffee,
I ask for your help.
I need to pass this exam, and at the same time a client is angry.
I invoke you.
Like the function I'm in.
A function of time, a function that will probably never halt but you cannot prove it. You hope it will stop soon, but deep inside you know it will continue to compute.
I beg you, Coffee. Make this function of procrastination stop. Please.
I see no escape.
It is a tail-recursive function. You realize it as soon as you reach the end.
You can do nothing about it, you're trapped inside this loop. At each iteration you hope to reach the bottom, but you never know. You can only hope that the bottom is close.
This is the last one, you keep repeating to yourself.
Please Coffee, let it be a non-pure function.
Make the environment change.
Only then we can be saved.

Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.

And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.

For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.

Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.

Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.

Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.

So a team of 3 went to a hackathon. One of us didn't know how to code, the other just front end and I back end.
So we started with some ideas and choose one, starting to code it.
After we were about 80 precent into it at the end of day 2 (the event had 3 days) one of the coaches came to us, saying our idea is already a launched startup out there and we had to have a change of idea at the beginning of the third day.
Other two completed the simple front-end of the new idea about 7am and went to sleep.
And I, while was awake for 50 hours already, had to code backend of a minipay app from scratch in 10 hours.
That was HARD for a newbie like me, but in the end I did it.
We didn't win anything. But that was a really great experience for me. Plus coffee was provided infinitely there ;)

So today is a very lazy day for me.
My code doesn't work. Don't feel like bug fixing.
Just feeling sleepy BUT THE COFFEE IS BLAND!!
Sooooo. Here I am, typing away.
Writing these cute commented lines.
I'll thank myself later.

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

Be a fellow who's distracted af. You just had a presentation in another city. You're driving home and a light lits up saying you need gas. You stop at the petrol station, pour in some gas, grab a cop of joe while you're at it, pay and leave. You're 15minutes away from the gas stop already and an unknown number is calling you. You pick it up. A male voice says

Voice: "hello, this is police. Did you just leave a gas stop 15 minutes ago?"

You: *wtf, what the fuck did I do now!* "yes, I sure did."

Voice: "you forgot to pay for the fuel"

you: *oh shit, he's right! I remember now - I only paid for the coffee! Shit! I'm in trouble now. *
"oh.. Right, you're right, I forgot... I'll turn around and come back to pay

Voice: "wait, don't rush, I may be able to help you. I'll call you back, keep your phone close" *hangs up*

5 minutes later phone rings again.

Voice: "can you pull over, please? Here's a phone number of that gas stop. Give them a call, I'm sure you'll sort it our. Have a nice day!" *hangs up*

you call that number. A woman picks up.

You: "hello, I forgot to pay you for the gas, gimme a few minutes - I'll turn around and get back to you"

Operator: "do not worry, I think I can help you! You can pay for it at your home town if you like, but I'm afraid they might not be working today. But they will tomorrow! Would that be OK for you?"

you: "umm, yeah, of course! It's my fault - anything is OK for me!"

operator: "ooorrr.. I could pay for you now and you would pay me back. Would that work? Here's my bank account, I'll pay for you when you send me those 50 something €"

a fantasy story? Made up story? Bed time stories? Dysney movie plot? Phishing? Canada?

No. This is Lithuania :) believe it or not, this is a true story, and there are more like this one.
Respect to the police!

I finally bit the bullet and got a 2018 macbook pro i7 with 1 terabyte ssd. I've been needing a personal laptop for development for awhile. I thought about going full Linux but it's tough finding Linux laptops that support thunderbolt 3 charging.

I tried to make Windows and WLS work. But it's a pain getting my Golang, GCP, and Kubernetes workflow setup on it. I keep having to jump command prompts and it annoys the shit out of me. Going multi monitor helps a lot, but I like to be at coffee shops and code.

I feel sick a out giving Apple more money especially $3,000. But it was money well spent. My workflow is seamless and unlike on my Windows laptop I dont spend 3 to 4 days just setting up my environment.

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

Wk59

After almost 20 yrs, i hardly see daylight, i have become allergic to bright websites/applications.
I have lost my fitness , became fat and coffee is no longer a luxury but a daily nutrition.
8h sleep in a row feels like a week vacation used to
Saturday mornings i still wake up after a blackout but in stead of from drinking it is now of lack of sleep from the workweek.

!Dev

Sitting in a bus on 19 hour ride with my class to England a few things to rant about came to my mind:

Why the fuck do you have to blast shitty german rap music out of your fucking JBL boxes and why do you have to turn up the volume so much that I can still hear it although I am wearing headphones, listening to music and sitting 5 fucking rows in front of you.

Also why the fuck do clocks in buses never display the right time? How hard can it be to make the clock display the right fucking time?

Another thing: why does this bus which is especially made for long rides not have a fucking trash can?! Seriously wtf?

Rants aside I am really looking forward to staying in England for a week although I won't have a computer for the next week :(

Another thing: why the fuck is the coffee you get at pull-ins so fucking disgusting ?
Like srsly, it is made by a machine and still tastes like thrown-up.

And why the fuck does everyone look weirdly at you when you buy a can of red bull but everything is fine when someone my age drinks 3+ liters of beer and then throws up? What the fuck? People look at me weirdly when I tell them that I don't drink any alcohol, heck I am actually not even allowed to do so because I am 15 and not 16 (beer is allowed in Germany if you are 16+ but nobody really cares about that). Heck where I am from they even encourage you to drink beer? What the fuck??!!

Anyway looking forward to England and also sorry about the long non-dev related rant. Just had to rant about some people and society.

P.S. do you know any (preferably free) Android apps / games where you have to code or just solve problems with logic?

The Cup Saga
My cause is valiant. My warrior's hearts were true... And quite frankly we are sorry if we have offended you.

Background: been missing my favourite cup at the office. I brought said cup from home like many of the devs do, we have our preferences you know? For 3 weeks I have been drinking mediocre coffee and the endless quest for my cup perused... I couldn't find it.. It was just missing.... Where could my trusty cup have gone... Its been with me since my second job in 2014, and its gotten me through so many late nights and early mornings, the reward of the perfect ratio... Turns out... Someone took it because... Well they liked it and habe been holding on to it ever since.... Why? No one really knows.. But I have my cup... And I intend to guard it... Since unlike the other cups it cannot be left in the cupboard.. It has to be defended.... Valiantly we recovered the cup... And tirelessly we will guard it now.. Sweet cup of mine...

Never thought I would like a standing Desk, but this is pretty great. Got horrible sleep last night, was falling asleep at my desk, so I stood up and pulled the desk up and WAM! No more sleepiness! Who needs Coffee or Soda when you have the power of STANDING.

You may be familiar with work philosophy known as "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work."

Or a favorite of mine "in this together" and passove aggressive work place signs about safety, inbetween being told to operate machines that have faulty safety mechanisms and almost took a guys forearm off last week, when the machine was supposed to be locked out.

Also dont let them blather on about being a "family", or any of the worse horseshit they spew.

I knew a women who would take those "hang in their" and other inspirational posters and burn cigarette holes in the eyes.

I didn't understand what her motive was then but now I know she was a revolultionary, a visionary even.

It's all lies. It's all "Human resources" department brand managament by neurotic executives and glorified coffee secretaries with 100k student debts for degrees in "humanities"--while lacking any humanity themselves, let alone brains or a soul.

And in between an army of overpaid middle and district managers, checking for the fifth time that day, if you have finished that tps report, or that ONE task you just started or finished. As if a little internal robot timer has told them, not that a task needs managed, but that the task, having been started and done, awaits their preternatural ability to know, and arrive 'just so', and justify (barely) the continued existence of their mediocre job and their mediocre lives.

And out of the woodwork of generations, like a horde of oblivious fuckwit melonheads, comes a tidal wave of these brush-mustached fucks, speaking in aphorisms and happy turns of phrase, while people increasingly dont show up to work be cause inflation has all but destroyed the future so many saved and worked for.

And the shelves gradually empty.

And the wheels grind slowly to a halt.

Because we will not accept the bullshit anymore about being in it together.

Not when a floor guy makes 15k a year, and a district manager makes 120k.

Raise your wages, or say good by.

We were never in this together.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

Well it was that moment when I realized how all that shit fits together. So it was that sunny day during summer holiday. Me and I was learning some c++ and I'm like "why the fuck am I doing this. I should be playing with friends". But I was too lazy for shit and you know :)

So it was the second empty can of coffee that day and I was making me a new one while there appeared this little spark in my brain. And I'm like "wait.... I think I just understood how the world is working".

I was so fascinated btw that I spent the whole holidays doing c/++

# Don't like ice coffee
# not in a mood for hot drink
# but I need coffee

Most difficult decision
🤦

I don't like when depending on something, e.g. smoking or coffee, but
still have to carry on dependencies in node_modules.

ITS FUCKING COLD IN THIS HOTEL!!!! I’M FREEZING TO DEATH!!!

I really am in a coding mood right now but I’m tired anyway and the lack of warmth doesn’t make it better..

Gotta find an internet coffee shop or something like that..

I have ordered 60 Liters of Cola twice this month.

I don't like the taste of Coffee but need the Coffeeine :D

I've been reading devRant at work for the past 6 months and it kept me sane through a few moments. Thanks. :)

And now I finally started to feel that maybe even I could have some horror stories to share. (I've been in the company for more than 4 years)

(Sorry for long post.
TL;DR: break time laws suck in my country.)

One example would probably be how our company decided to cut 5 minutes from our lunch time (down to 25 minutes) and add 3 minutes to our 5 minute coffee break(*"gifted" by our CEO) in the afternoon.

You're probably asking yourself, "What happened to the remaining 2 minutes?".

*Well, it's simple. In my country it's somehow still legal to have only 30 minutes of break time for the whole day if working hours don't exceed 10 hours. It's actually written in the law that you CAN divide that lunch break time to be placed at different times. To me that sound like fucking nuts...

Thankfully nobody's taking that time change quite literally and most people still use the full 30 minutes. But some people here have been fired for much less, so I don't play around. I just pretend to work while reading devRant. 😎

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

Almost 2 years working at this small IT company that has 7 developers and I just had my first small-talk conversation with the lead senior developer that was not related to work.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I like to be able to chat to my colleagues instead of just saying "Good morning" and "See you tomorrow" and discussing my tasks. In any case, I'll go get a coffee and get back to coding.

Just graduated, first real internship.
So basically I'm the only one who do what I'm supposed to do, nobody can help me because they are on project that are totally different. Even my superior who hired me don't know what my predecessor exactly did, he just gave me his gitlab and said "continue... Whatever this shit was".
So I'm alone and the code of my "predecessor" doesn't work obviously because the half of the files are missing, the code has no explanation and he's not joignable. I have to build an algorithm of deep learning from scratch and to do a presentation in one month to explain to everyone why I'm not useless.
Is it really like this everywhere?? Is it the reason why DevRant was created??
I read the quotes when I was in school like "oh no c'mon that really never happened". Foolish boy I was..

But there's nice coffee

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

So I do not get why people use ReactJS. I hate it. for 3 years passionately. And I have to work with it every day.

- one-way data binding
this makes you write twice as much code, which will have twice as much bugs, you need to read through twice as much code from other devs.
- mixing html and JS
after all I like to pour my coffee on my omlette so I can eat and drink at the same time in the morning. This kills productivity and ugly AF
- not unified
Every dev uses their own special snowflake framework with React there is no unified way of doing things and you cannot use your familiar tools. Every project you need to start over from zero.
- Bugs bugs bugs
infinite loops, max update depth reached, key not present on list element. Let me ask you something dear ReactJS. If you know that there should be a unique key on that element. Why cannot you just put it there and shut the f up?
- works reeaally slow when compiled with TS
ReactJS was never designed to work with TS and now the tools for it are really slow. And why TS? Explicit contract is always better than an implicit contract. TS helps you in coding time, but for some reason React devs decided to worth 3 seconds to wait for compile and then realize you mad an error. ReactJS is bad and inefficient so stop making projects with it please.

I shouldn't drink coffee but

found a coffee maker that wasn't electric and also didn't have a reusable filter but a permanent one

impulse bought it

my health issues act up if I have stimulants, raaggg

having a bad day so I gave in and made coffee in it

this is so cool. I feel like a witch making brews

but also coffee coffee coffee coffee

!rant

For the first time, I solved a pretty serious optimisation problem in our codebase without any external input. It's a little thing, but small victories like this are part of what makes the job so much fun for me.

Currently rewarding myself with coffee and chocolate. I feel good!

To be honest I would like to have the possibility to make coffee over htcpcp... But i don't want to open up my coffee maker

Caffeine is crucial but I’m trying to moderate it! What good does it do if you have to drink 5 cups of coffee everyday to feel normal! I drink coffee like Hobbits eat! Breakfast coffee, second breakfast coffee, elevensies coffee, lunch coffee, onesies coffee...

The Coding Apocalypse: A Dev's Rant

June 14, 2024

Okay, gather ’round, fellow code warriors, because it’s time for a good ol' developer rant. If you're reading this, chances are you’ve already faced the dragon that is modern software development, and you’re somehow still using "Agile" as a life preserver while the ship is sinking. So let's dive into the chaos that our world has become.

Here’s the thing: We’re living in a paradox where every other day there's a shiny new framework promising to be the “ultimate solution” while ignoring that it's just recoil from the last big mess. I mean, can we talk about JavaScript for a second? I’m pretty sure if you stand still long enough, a new JavaScript framework will spontaneously generate from the void. Do we really need another one?

And don’t get me started on Sprint Planning. It’s like playing Tetris with stones while blindfolded, hoping that all the blocks land perfectly. Spoiler: They don’t. The product manager’s eyes glaze over as they nod approvingly to your estimates, secretly extending deadlines in their minds. The 'flexible' deadlines then become rigid, unattainable goals, and who gets the heat? The devs, of course.

Also, can we address the insanity of microservices? Sure, splitting a monolith into microservices sounds fun—until you’re drowning in API calls and Docker containers. Debugging a distributed system is like trying to untangle a pair of headphones made of spaghetti.

Oh, and if one more person asks if we’re "leveraging AI" and "blockchain technology" for our simple CRUD app, I might lose it. Sometimes, folks, the wheel doesn’t need reinventing. It just needs a little grease.

Finally, remote work. Blessing and curse. Sure, I enjoy the freedom of working in my PJs, but the endless Zoom calls are killing my soul. Breakout rooms? More like breakdown rooms. The Slack notifications? Let’s just say my sound settings have a hair trigger on mute these days.

So here’s to us, the devs. The ones who stare into the abyss of JIRA tickets and laugh in the face of mounting tech debt. May your coffee be strong, your code refactored, and your deployments ever in your favor.

End rant. Back to the trenches. 🚀💻

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

Not sure if coffee or deadline, but i am stressed like hell today

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

A day in the life of @C0D4

Yay it's Tuesday.....

So morning goes something like coffee, yea no coffee no @C0D4, get to the office, get busy with normal morning routine - run the almost automated scripts I have to run - delete the 100+ emails I don't actually need from last night, read the 2 I do care about - yea 2 freakin emails out of 117 🤦‍♂️
But what ever that's what outlook rules are for... except I actually have to glimpse over them all just in case something of mine broke.

Go get another coffee,
Start working through the days tickets - ok cool nothing major to worry about, let's get back to writing tests from yesterday.

Well fuck that was a bad decision, no matter what I do this little fucker won't pass, yet doing this process step by step, detail for detail, it works - no issues, but automate this fucker and it screams its head off.

So fine, I give up and go to lunch,
Come back... spend next 3 hours on this 1 problem... 1 FREAKING problem 🤦‍♂️🥴🤦‍♂️🥴🤦‍♂️

This thing has beaten me, and for no apparent reason - it just doesn't like running under a test scenario.
Would have given up hours ago, except its a vital piece of code I'm trying to cover 😑 of course it is.

Well somewhere in there I managed to do a deployment for another project and change a few things in there.

This week is starting to look like hell,
Yay hump day tomorrow!!!!!
That's something, the week is coming to an end.... right? Please.... right!!!

i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.

i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.

when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"

this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.

imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have

- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience

on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.

our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.

etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.

when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...

but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.

it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...

So for Father's Day I bought my dad premium coffee (Single Origin, Now Bottle Voyager pack). Very expensive even compared to Starbucks...

We brewed a few but they taste like crap. I thought he was doing it wrong. So today I dropped by the store and brought myself a cup that they made to see how the pros do it...

Well this is what I got for $5... And it also tastes like crap...

So now my question is do we actually like drinking coffee or non-carbonated sugar water that we call coffee?

Log 1:

Day 10 of crunch time. I have entered a sleepless zen state. Lord willing, I will be able to get 7 hours of sleep Saturday night. The building is terrifying at night, as there are a lot of noises. Security guards are nice, but curious to see me all alone. Must not show weakness in case they think numbers will give them an advantage over me.

Supplies are low. Only one type of energy drink left in the machine, and coffee gone for the night. My phone is out of fast data so Pandora is spotty at best. I have battery to get me through the night at least.

Tomorrow and Saturday decide the fate of the project. My team lead has not slept in at least 2 days. I feel guilty napping when I do, but she is driven like Ahab so I will let her obsession carry her.

If I am alive tomorrow I will report in.

After I was woken up in the morning by my friend that had a meeting nearby.
We went for coffee and as part of usual Wednesday I also decided to go to cinema to see Dr Dollitle ( not verry funny ).

I felt relaxed as everyone fucked off from me since Monday.

I was so happy of doing nothing after the movie I decided to try to make both frontend and backend for new application screens in finite time.

I could have waited for frontend developer to be back from his vacation but since I can also do it I decided to do it myself.

I did frontend part first with mock data and after finishing it before 2 pm asked if client will have time to discuss it. He didn’t so we decided I try to add real data and publish it on test environment.

Well those are mock up screens anyway so I decided to eat and smoke to chill but also try to work anyway.

I just finished backend for those screens and switched test environment to new branch.
Looks like they’re working for biggest client customers.

Usually it takes about a week or two to describe frontend developer what client wants but let’s see if I still have some frontend UX empathy left and can speed up development by couple of days.

Why the industry jumped on photoshop as a web design and layout tool is beyond me. It's like trying to stir coffee with your thumb. I'm a descent photoshop user but have always used inDesign in web mode. Far quicker for chucking around layouts and options (as page). It also exports as rgb png's either full pages or selections with or without transparency (at any resolution). Which are perfect for then optimising in Photoshop (Pixelmator these days) or any other less costly image editor. I hand code my sites then in Coda, love it.

I think I need glasses (or at least more coffee) but every time I think about contributing to an open source project maintained by a "Comunity", i find out that I missed the smelly bits in theire massive coc that they want to ram down your throat.

Eigther I missed them every time or some fuck puts them in after I read them.

The first time it's about mostly Standart shit like: don't troll/flame/insult/detract. But than I start seeing: Sexism, Racism, xenophobia, hetotonormativity (wtf nodeJs)/homophobia insta ban. They even assert that you should apologize even if you did nothing wrong and your not allowed to stand your ground or your banned.

And if the mod pulls a fast one on your buddy, not allowed to be discussed in any public forum or your banned too.

What happened? I was sure that only the bigger repos had that shit (like the Linux kernel (that bans you for being pro trump). Have I missed something?

Fuck every repo that does that shit. They ain't gonna get my time or money.

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.

Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.

Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.

I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.

I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.

It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.

Manager to External : <badEnglish>We have problem with data feed, please fix</badEnglish>

External: Here's the situation <gives situation>
Me: Thank you! Here's the situation, but corrected <corrected situation>. Can we arrange a phone call on Friday or Monday?
External: Sure! whenever you like

Manager, this morning: where is the meeting for the phonecall?

Now I'm her fucking assistant. I had a glance a her calendar, it's full of full.

She'll soon ask me to cook for her and make her coffee too...

Shitty I don't have the qualifications for a proper developer job :((

TLDR; My laptop's CPU temperature becomes +90 C when I compile stuff.

I have two different laptops that have the exact same configs and OS. I use one as a desktop and the other one is just for school stuff and homework. As you might think, the one that I use as a desktop is looking like a mini desktop. I was into DIY stuff while ago so I made a custom case and separate the LCD as well. Don't ask me why though.

Today I was working on a personal project that has relatively complex build config. Since the compilation always took 3 to 5 mins I went to the kitchen for some coffee. Bumm. My laptops fans are working in a way that one can think they're in the airport. Seriously. All 8 cores are +90 C when I checked them.

The next thing I did was compiling the same project on the other laptop which I used for school projects. It took like 20 mins to compile but the max temperature was like 50 C.

So, in the end, I'm still trying to find the reason for that behaviour.

one more time, I proud of my team and MD too.

XYZ is our office boy. He completed his BSc IT from 3rd Grade college due to family condition and lack of knowledge, he has to work as an office boy.
So my team decided to teach him web development. We are starting it from very basic. We get total 1:30 hours of a lunch+snack's break so each one of us will give 1-day to teach him but It is not free. We will need good coffee in this deal. Our MD like this idea and promised us that once we gave him a green signal. He can do his first internship here.

Man.. I wish I became a barista instead of a software engineer..

Like I know we make a lot but think about how socially acceptable we’ll be once we make coffee in a cool way for people..

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

I love my gf but she broke her leg 4 weeks ago and since then both of us are stuck in home WFH. I feel like my soul is being sucked out, I am being suffocated with the neediness, responsibilities and I alone have to take care of everything in home including taking care of our dog, food on the table and running errands. Its hard to even force myself to have sex anymore since my hormones are fucked up and Im in a constant state of stress that I rely on now just to get through the day.

During the day to numb myself emotionally I cope with coffee and smoking. During the evening to relax I cope with alcohol and nettlix and to sleep I take a xanax. Staying until 3-4am kinda became my alone getaway time.

I pray that in 2-3 weeks her leg heals and she goes back to the office and then I will again have my daily 10-11 hours of uninterrupted work/personal time again.

Were together for 4 years already and she expects me to propose to her and make babies soon. I dont know if I am capable of having a family if Im thinking of breaking up after 4 weeks of taking care of her. Idk what I will do but for now it is what it is.

Anti-fav maybe

Nothing changed for me. The problem now is I can't go out as much.... And somehow I'm slacking off less...

Might have something to do with manager now expects everyone to be in at 9... So that means I gotta get up at 8...

Usually wfh I get in a 9:30 no questions asked... U know 30 mins for coffee, bathroom etc...

Now I gotta make an effort to at least login...

I feel like taking a sick day but now those seem scary too since they'll think I might've caught the virus...

Lately I had a motivation crisis, that made me almost quit (passing from programming in C# to Visual (*fucking*) Basic).

But I can't quite quit because of personal reasons, so during a break I went out and eat something sweet like an ice-cream (coffee flavour) to explicitly alter my dry low mood(like alcohol does for many... But strangely I'm immune) and started thinking from scratch, thought that I should stop complaining like a little bitch and instead focus on finishing the project at hand as soon as possible, so I can move on, hopefully, to better projects(most of the other projects in the company are in C#).

So apparently explicitly messing with my brain chemicals and resetting the though on the issue worked for me

Maslow's Hierarchy breaks down five human needs. You need to meet the lower numbers in order to feel fulfilled in higher levels (i.e. You likely don't feel like you belong to a community when you're struggling to find food & water.) :

1. Physiological (Foods, Water, Clothes, Sleep)
2. Safety & Security
3. Love & Belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self Actualization

The company I'm at is struggling financially so nobody received raises. There were no promotions to celebrate this year. There was diminishing pride in working here. Multiple re-organizations shatter my view that I belong to a team. Multiple rounds of layoffs shattered my feeling of job security. Multiple meetings start with my co-workers buying time to brush their teeth, scarfing down what food they can eat quickly, brewing another cup of coffee.

I firmly believe it's a manager's job to watch out for the culture and build up their employees through this process, but the managers are watching out for their own backs, and probably struggling with the same things we are as individual contributors.

Hey corporate management, while you were off at your executive off-site, your employees are failing to meet some basic needs. You wonder why we bitch about 4-day work weeks and needing less meetings. You think we're entitled when we ask for food and snacks delivered to our door.

We're not entitled. We're broken.
We're not lazy. We're burnt out.

You say we get unlimited time off, but you frequently comment about how much time we're taking off in public forums.

You say you pay us competitively, but that was last year, and shit costs 60% more now.

You say we're responsible for the success of the company, but you're responsible for the morale of the company.

Me this morning(On Way to Work): Not going to let anything upset me today, i'm going to work, succeed and then have lunch with fam :)

Me In office(Still morning): This song is awesome(song i don't really like)
PM: Meeting Now!
PM In Meeting: What do you have to do?
Me: Some CSS shit. Gotta make things look pretty after they work so beautifully.
PM: OK but be more specific
Me: Layering issues with the popups, the alert input needs some tweaking.
PM: What are you busy with now.
Me: Layering issues.
PM: *As she writes on board* So that's alert, popups, layering issues, input and CSS.
Me: No it's just two tasks.
PM: You've got a lot of work, get started.
Team Leader: It's only two tasks, it's not five.
PM: Oh i thought they were all different.
Me: :|
Me: *Breathe in... Breathe Out*

Me (around 12ish): Fuck! This Dense. Bitch!!

PM 1ish: Meeting Now!
Me: Fuck!
PM: How far are you?
Me: Well i'm about done, just gotta test the changes, if it fails debug it a little and done.
PM: *Explains some shit about what i have to do*
Me: *Knowing what she's already going to say* *Slirps coffee really loud*
PM: You listening?
Me: oh yeah sure.
PM: *Gets pissed says it's because she didn't have coffee yet*
Me: *Slirps coffee while making eye contact*
Me inside: Mwahahahahahahahahaaa!!!