Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.

[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.

[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?

[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.

[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.

(a few months later...)

[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.

Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.

[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.

(angry client calls immediately...)

(dev transfers to manager...)

(client transfers to client's boss...)

[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.

[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.

(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)

[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...

Too much stupid today..

Client: "Our server is almost full, fix it"

Me: "Okay, you can upgrade the VM, or I can see if theres anything that can be cleaned up?"

C: "Clean it up"

Me: *Finds 5 extra MySQL DB's that amount to 50-60GB in total*

Me: "Well I can remove some of your extra databases, and some of the local backups, as they're also backed up offsite. They're currently unused and dated back to the beginning of 2017, everything is out of date anyways."

C: "No"

Me: "Okay, is there a reason?"

C: "No"

Me: "Okay, so we'll upgrade the VM?"

C: "No"

Me: "I'm sorry, but those are really your two options"

C: "Just fix it"
...................
...................
...................
What in the ducking fuck !@#$#%?
If you're so fuggin smart, then why do they pay me?
I'm clearly stupid and unable to read your mind.

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Parents:why is my iPad so slow?

Me: It's old (1st gen that came out in 2010)

P:well just clean it up and make it go faster

M:Theres nothing to clean... Theres only a browser app and solitaire....

P: well just fix it so it's faster

M:....... *turns it off and on again*

M: All fixed

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

!dev

I'm moving out soon and normally when the hallway is filled with stuff/boxes, the landlord doesn't like that and you might get a warning.

I take that quite seriously and thus always tried to keep it clean.

Now I'm moving in a few days, hallway is filled with stuff and the landlord told he doesn't like that at all.

I can't be bothered much, my new room is already available, good luck with kicking me out now 😋

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

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

We have a new developer working in our office. He is fairly new, which is understandable, so he asks for help regularly(which I actually appreciate). This time however, he asked for help, and every step of the way argued it. He said he needed help making a small circle(it's just an indicator on a table).

I told him if there is a mat-icon it would be simple, but if not it would still be pretty simple with CSS. He argued that those two options seem messy. I pointed out they are extremely clean actually, and showed him how it was only about 4 lines of css. and 1 if there was a material icon. He agreed it was pretty easy, and then went with a complicated way to have green or red. I let him know that was really trivial, and even gave him the exact code he needed for it(at this point, he could have copy and pasted, adjusted the conditional to the name of his variable, and be done).

He proceeds to take 3 more days to complete this task, making a new component for a colored circle, using templates and nested css in the html, and hard coding the color as opposed to using the material colors we use site wide. All in all 100+ lines of code. And he felt my solution with fewer than 10 lines was messy.

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

I feel that people are quick to blame PHP for a lot of things. But come on, you have to admit it has the most straightforward debugging workflow:

Take a ritual knife out of your desk drawer

Sacrifice some blood to the PHP gods

Clean the knife

This is my work desktop. Since I'm working in a Japanese office, they're very specific about making sure your workspace is clean and tidy at all times. Also they expect you to have very little to no personal items on your workspace.

The mini whiteboard is my best tool. It makes it easier to work out minor concepts or to explain things to co-workers.

The most pissed off I've been at work?

Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...

MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."

Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.

The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."

WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.

I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.

The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.

FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.

Root rents an office.

Among very few other things, the company I'm renting an office from (Regus) provides wifi, but it isn't even bloody secured. There's a captive portal with a lovely (not.) privacy policy saying they're free to monitor your traffic, but they didn't even bother using WEP, which ofc means everyone else out to the fucking parking lot four floors down can monitor my traffic, too.

Good thing I don't work for a company that handles sensitive data! /s But at least I don't have access to it, or any creds that matter.

So, I've been running my phone's connection through a tor vpn and sharing that with my lappy. It works, provides a little bit of security, but it's slow as crap. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, REGUS.

AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, CLEAN THE SHIT OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM FFS.

Ugh. $12/day to work in a freaking wind tunnel (thanks, a/c; you're loud as fuck and barely work), hear other people's phone conversations through two freaking walls, pee in a bathroom that perpetually smells like diarrhea, and allow anyone and everyone within a 50+ meter radius to listen to everything my computer says.

Oh, they also 'forgot' to furnish my office, like they promised. Three freaking times. At least I have a table and chair. 🙄

Desk? What desk?
Fucking hell.

Okay so about a year ago these FUKKING IDIOTS decides, against my recommendation, to do this quick-ugly-hack and ninja it into production.
I tell them its a FUCKING BAD idea that will blow up in a year or so...
But no, just go go go!!!!!!!

Now a year later, shit blew up badly. A total FUCKING derail. These new idiots asks me to "fix the problem", the same fucking problem I predicted and warned them about a year ago. So now i have to clean up their ducking mess because "Nobody else knows how to fix it".
What the FUCKING HELL do we pay them fuckkkers to do?!!

New idiots you ask? Yep, because 3 out of the 4 original fucktards already left the place in order to go and make some other new collegues lives fucking miserable.

FUCK YOU FUCKING MOOTHERFUUUKKKEEERRRRRSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2019 resolutions/goals recap: (non-personal ones)
1) Improve diet (did; e.g. ramen and fast food to clean keto)
2) Lose weight (did; lost 24 pounds!)
3) Find a good job (did, twice)
4) Buy a harp (did not; large and expensive, no place to put it, and I have small children who would absolutely break it)
5) Keep house clean, even if it's by myself (did, somewhat; I cleaned some, managed to get one other person to clean semi-regularly, and another sporadically)
6) Work on social awkwardness (did; read and applied Dale Carnegie's The Art of Public Speaking, which netted me my last job offer. Still pretty awkward though)
7) Move out of the desert (did not; not enough money, and job didn't allow remote work)
8) Stop bloody waiting on people (did not; still very guilty of this...)

I don't remember the rest 🙁 didn't write them down last year. But I still accomplished 5 out of the 8 I remembered, with one being a pass, so 5/7!

-----

2020 resolutions/goals:
1) Finally move out of the desert
2) Invest 20% of my income every month
3) Reduce bills by 20%
4) Solve/address some health issues
5) Make a schedule so things regularly get done around the house, e.g. cleaning
6) Find some friends and make time for them
7) Replace Debian with something else
8) Revamp my backup system
9) Be proactive and stop waiting on people
10) Build a (stationary) coil gun for fun

Today we moved to a new office in the next building.

It is a very big upgrade, since it is bigger and nicer.

So I ask where the bathroom is and go in the direction told, and the bathroom is so nice! Huge mirror, everything is clean and new.

On the way out I find that it was the girls bathroom....

I was just trying to fix a "bug" for 2 hours and then found out I only had to "clean" to project..

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

My boss is a grumpy 25 year oldish "Mr. I know it all". We all hate him for that attitude.
Just joining recently, the code base which I got introduced to was totally new and I was overwhelmed.
Boss told me to write an Sql query to wipe the table data. I being reckless wrote a query to wipe the table only and submitted it to my boss.
Few hourse later we were informed by our peers that a certain url was not working. On further investigating we found out that my boss carelessly copy and pasted my query and executed it which wiped an important table clean.
Now he doesn't talk to me straight and I can't look him in the eye because obviously I burst into laughter.
Job well done☺️

That feeling you get when you run

$ php tvVolUp.php

And the god damn tv’s volume goes up a level 😆

Now to clean the shit out of the chaotic mess I just made and make it work from a Rpi which I’ll then add to my voice activated list for my google home.

Coz you know voice activated TV remote in PHP 😍

Stupid shitheads among the web designers, fucking listen up. Your fucking design is not the point of websites - the content is. You are not supposed to shove the content away to have your moron design shine in its purest debility.

Yeah I know, white space minimalism yadda yadda, clean interface - and you dumbasses just remove functionality to simulate a clean interface, to the point of using hamburger fuckups on desktop. Pull your heads out of your asses, that's not how to design an interface! Not to mention that you idiots still guzzle through the megabytes and dozens of domain lookups for your chickenshit minimalism.

While we're at it, not everyone is 20 years old like you youngsters - you won't believe it, but there is life beyond 40, and while such age is unthinkable to you because you are so dumb that you will hardly reach that age anyway, others on this planet have managed to get there. No 20/20 laser sight, you know.

Fuck you with your light grey thin fonts on white background because it looks "clean", it just SUCKS you wankers. Fuck you with your stupid ghost buttons that don't even look like a button. You know how to operate the shit you made, but reality check here, users spend most of their time on fucking other websites than on the abomination you have designed!

Get that into the shit bubble that you call your brain and read WCAG 2.1! That's not only for disabled people, but everyone will be able to use that shit better!

Today I was asked to decide on a handheld or "madonna" microphone for a conference I have to speak at in 2 weeks. Its time to come clean, I never thought the day would actually come, i'm far too terrified to actually go through with it. I just wanna write code in my dark little corner and be left alone. I wonder can I get out of this or is it too late

I write loads of services, tools, programs for myself (unpaid) which I could just as well open source.

Only thing is that the code is usually not that clean and refactoring would take time that I don't have so I'm kinda anxious about putting it out there 😧

I joined a "multi-national" company in middle-east where 90% of the developers are Indian. And since it's a "multi-national" company with 50+ developers I thought they already figured it out. Most of them have 5-10 years of experience. They should know at least how to use git properly, deployment should be done via CI/CD. database changes should be run via migration script. Agile methodology, Code Review - Pull Request. Unit testing. Design Patterns, Clean Code Principle. etc etc

I thought I'm gonna learn new things here. I have never been so wrong in all my life...

Technical Manager doesn't even know what Pull Request is. They started developing the software 4 years ago but used Yii v1 instead which was released almost a decade ago. They combined it with a VueJS where in some files contains around 4000 lines of code. Some PHP functions contain 500+ of code. No proper indentions as well. The web console is bloody red with javascript errors. In short, it's the worst code I've seen so far.

No wonder why they keep receiving complaints from their 30+ clients.

Fuck off cancerous piece of shit on stackoverflow whose dick is an obvious inverse proposition to ego and incapablility to read.

I asked if there's "clean" way, of doing something. I provided my solution to the problem

Your answer and coments make it pretty obvious that you:
* don't really care about (code) quality
* value your reputation just as much as some teen on facebook sucking cook for likes or whatever they use now
* downvoted my question because you can't handle critique in the slightest
* You immediately replied with "but op said..." even though I am the fucking op and if I say _imo_ a fucking for-loop within function is less readable than 3 chained function-calls it and does not include the feature I asked for, it means you have to justify your answer and not get triggered and downvote my fucking question.

After I confronted him about this shit he just said "If you had studied the language for more than 10 minutes you would have known than you can't do that."

And if you had some a basic reading skill you could improve my workaround or tell me just that, instead of providing me with that useless information you vomited out just to get some ez SO reputation.

Piece of shit didn't even deny the anyyhing.

Shove a vibrator up your ass until it arrives at your skull and activate it. Maybe that will stimulate your brain or hopefully upgrade it.

I don't care how much "reputition" you may have "earned" on the internet. I am not afraid to call your bullshit or your sheer pathetic existence out.

People like this are are the reason SO gets so much hsge and even tough I got an improved version for my workaround (from an other user), I'm nowhere near happiness.

Note, the Useful-to-retarded-ratio is
1: 3

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

Currently on the train to work:
*Guy pulls out his laptop

Me: *Oh nice. Dell laptop. Oh wait, shoot, that’s a Dell XPS 15. 😎Sweet!! Looks super clean. Get it boss, I salute you. Anyway, it’s probably running Windows 10 as expected. It’d be super cool if it run Ubuntu though.

*Guy lifts laptop lid.

Me: *Ahh, look how clean it is too. No fingerprints or smudges on the screen or keyboard. That’s my style. I like this guy. We can definitely share laptops.

*Guy powers on laptop

Me:*Woooooohooooo, no way!!! Gets a little tear of joy in my eyes. I want to hug this guy. This guy rocks. Oh mann, I want to start a conversation with him but can’t because another passenger is standing between us.

*The laptop run Ubuntu! 😍😱😁

"Mature codebase"
"Our entire team are senior devs"
"Almost everyone that worked on the project is still here and available, so nothing's lost! We can ask whatever we need to."

You would think this would mean the code was clean and easy to read, and you could ask the person who wrote it for help. But. no. It's kinda the opposite.

Here's an example:
I'm trying to write a mailer, and I have no freaking clue how to get it working. I talked with two of the more senior devs, and both assured me it was very straightforward, and then walked me through the quite complicated mailer structure and got lost. The first pretended not to, but glazed over a few holes in his tour, and said I could figure the rest out. The second one ended up admitting that he's totally unfamiliar with it -- his last commit on a mailer was from about 8 years ago -- and doesn't know how to get it working anymore.

So, I'm on my own.

I wrote a super basic mailer for debugging (no idea if/how it actually sends a mail, but I think I can construct one?). But whenever I call the mailer, it gets run twice? Somehow? Apparently I need to start a bunch of daemons to get that part of the system to work. Which is cool because they don't work fresh out of the repo. Got some further help, and now my ostensibly working code throws errors for an undefined var that i'm not even using, and to make it easier: without a backtrace. joy! There's so much inheritence and extending and including going on that it's going to take me hours to track this down. ugh.

I'm keeping my paystub in front of me for some desparately needed motivation.

Okay so even at my advance 52 years of age, I still pull all nighters to handle emergency remediation projects, and clean up other peoples messes. I don't mind, I'm a geek, I get high on the challenge of fixing shit that is broken all to hell.

But tonight was different. Tonight has me raging.

I am tasked with renovating a website, and building a sister site to that main site as well. no bother, I haven't done any web dev in 15 years but I'll power through pulling 18 to 20 hours a day for a couple of weeks to get in the groove...

Little did I know... CSS is a pain in the ass to be sure, but FLEXBOX is total and complete bullshit.

I don't give to shits about all the fancy shit it can do, it can't do simple shit worth a damn. Fuck Flexbox, and anyone involved in producing that useless layout model.

The sheer number of idiots promoting that hunk of shit a solution that is to be applied to any task other than wiping my ass is astounding.

Fuck all you jerk offs out there posting your shitty mark up turds as if they are gold, when you know better than anyone it works, sometimes, then doesn't, and is so easy to break it may as well be called "Web Design Jenga".

I'm still tired as hell, and tomorrow I will go back to slogging through CSS as the layout method, but at least I feel a little better now.

Oh and before I forget FUCK YOU FLEXBOX you piece of shit.

I'm currently rewriting perfectly clean and functioning Scala code in Java (because "Enterprise", yay). The amount of unnecessary boilerplate I have to add is insane. I'm not even talking big complicated code but two liners or the lack of simple things like a range from 5 to 10.

Why do I have to write
List<Position> occupiedPositions = placedEntities.stream()
.flatMap((pe) -> pe.occupiedPositions().stream())
.collect(Collectors.toList());
instead of simply
val occupiedPositions = placedEntities.flatMap(_.occupiedPositions)

Why on earth does `occupiedPositions.distinct` suddenly become a monstrosity like `occupiedPositions.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList())` where the majority of code is pure boilerplate? And this is supposed to be the new and better Java8 api which people use as evidence that Java is now suddenly "functional" (yeah no, just no).

Why do APIs that annotate parameters with @Nullable throw NullPointerExceptions when I pass a null? Why does the compiler not help prevent such stupidity? Why do we use static typing PLUS those annotations and it still crashes at runtime like every damn dynamic, interpreted language out there? That's not unfortunate, it's a complete waste of time.

Why is a simple idea like a range from x to 10 (in scala literally `x to 10`) not by default included in Java? There's Guava's version of Range which does not have a helper for integer ranges (even though they are the most used ones). Then there's apache.commons version which _has_ a helper for integers, but is strangely not iterable (wtf I don't even...).

Speaking of Iterable: How difficult could it be to convert an abstract Iterable<T> into a concrete List<T>? In scala it's surprisingly `someIterable.toList`. I found nothing like that so I took to stackoverflow where I found a thread in which people suggested everything from writing your own ListUtils helper class, using Guava (which is a huge dependency!) to using the new Java8 features inline (which is still about three lines long). I didn't know this was such a hard problem in computer science, TIL.

How anyone can be productive in this abomination of a language is beyond me now, even though I've used it for many years while learning to code (back then I didn't know there were much better ways to do things). The only good part is that I have to endure this nonsense for only about 3 days longer then I'm free again!

My older brother just moved out today. For 18 years I've shared a room with him, and now he's gone. I have a ~30x10 foot room all to myself (it's the entire second floor of my house).

I do love that now I'm able to play music anytime, and with his stuff gone, it'll be less space taken up in general, that type of thing.

I've been in this room with him for over 8 years now, after my oldest brother moved out, and I've always had this feeling that one portion of the room was mine and the other portion was his. Now it's just...weird. I have both portions now. I have this whole big room to maintain myself. I don't have to worry about my stuff conflicting with his for whatever reason.

The past few weeks, when he's talked about moving out, I've always told him that I was looking forward to it, to having the whole room to myself. Now that he's gone, I just...can't. I can't bring myself to move his stuff that he hasn't taken over to the new house yet, or clean his part of the room.

When we were kids we didn't really get along, and I HATED sharing a room with him. But over time, as we grew up, we started to get along better, and for the past couple years, we've always just talked in the middle of the night when we were both awake. And now he's gone (the new house is maybe a 10 minute drive away), and I know he's not coming back. I know that this whole space is mine now.

I'm gonna miss the talks in the middle of the night, and us keeping each other in check (whenever one of us isn't home in the middle of the night we tend to text each other like "bruh where the fuck you at"), and waking up in the middle of the night (when I'm able to actually fall asleep kinda early) to see him playing Skyrim or Fallout. Hell, even coming home from work or wherever to see him passed the fuck out.

I know that I'm gonna have to clean the whole room soon, and that I'll just have to get over it. I've always been the one in my family that doesn't really show emotion very often, unless I get angry, so when people were crying earlier, I just sat there with an emotionless look on my face. But that's also because I wasn't really feeling much at the time, it didn't really hit until I got home and came upstairs to my room. Hell, right now I'm sitting here just expecting to hear his car alarm as he locks his car like I normally hear every night.

Manager: The way you built this doesn’t accommodate any of my future plans!

Dev: What future plans?

Manager: I have a bunch of different ideas, I haven’t decided which ones to go with yet or how it will all work but you’re making it so we’re running out of room in the UI. It’s too busy, you need to clean it up so we can add more stuff!

Dev: …

Atother story about PC hardware and being... Not so careful.

A friend complained about his PSU fan being too loud. I said "well, maybe bearings are dying already".
The next day he messaged me and asked to suggest a new PSU. Ok, I threw him some links.
Leter, he told me what happened:
He decided to clean the PSU, because he thought the noise could be because of dust. So he turned off his PC and removed PSU cover with a screwdriver. While doing this, he accidentally hit the circuit board itself. Then "Puff", black smoke and smell of sth burning. Turned out he didn't switched the PSU off. Luckily, the screwdriver handle was rubberized. I'm glad he is alive ._.

Refactoring

When wrote some abstraction,
commented out the old stuff,
replaced it with the new calls
and after it passes all tests
get to remove all the old crud.

( ☼ ◡ ☼ )

I feel clean again.

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

Today is the first time my pc fully crashed. I keep always everything updated and never had a problem. I didn't know what went wrong. After I opened my pc up I found out that a mouse family was living in my pc. Maybe I should clean the hardware more

A few hours ago I decided it was a good idea to to clean up my keyboard. I did so and took a walk leaving the keys to dry.

After I came back I hoovered the -board and decided to put back the keys. I started with the special keys since they were the easiest to find (and some required a metal thing).

Now, I was quickly made aware of something that I had never known nor noticed before. Bear with me here as I'm not a person that cares too much about hardware unless I need to. (Hardware here meaning stuff like mice, keyboards, headsets, and stuff like that). But I learned that

Not all keys are the same size. They look really similar to someone like me. But I manned up and put the keys back.

A little under 1.5 hours later and I now posses a keyboard that is in uncanny valley. It doesn't feel like it though, and it shouldn't be that big of a problem since I never look at my keyboard anyway.

Messaged one of my m8's about and this was his reply

"nope
one kind per row
usually says the row on the underside"

Now fantasize about the elasmobranch fish which is characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton of which I am the proprietor at what he said. I pulled a key out and, sure enough, "C28 R1".

Now I am not sure about the 28th column, but it did fit in the first row.

Fuck me

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Climb into bed, feel something wet under leg. Wtf? I check. Bloody slug...

There was freaking slug in my bed...

Clean it out, change sheets and all (at 4am, I got lost in the code) and then see another one climbing up the side of the bed

I've always liked the idea of a virus that attacks other viruses. An antivirus virus, if you will. It would infect a computer and clean out all the malware and perform a bunch of random system improvements, then delete itself without a trace. To the end user, one day their computer would suddenly start running a little better for no apparent reason.

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

I really need to let this out somewhere...

Why the f...? Srsly.. Why would anyone do that? I'm joining another project. Apparently lead dev has adopted a coding style, where:

1. Every dev writes code however he likes, i.e. no clean-code requirement at all.
2. All services are crud-only. I mean all service classes. All must have those 4 methods; no more, no less.
3. Half of the business logic is inside controllers.
4. Not a single comment... Interfaces, models, etc. -- not a single one.
5. Xmls -- tabs, classes - spaces.
6. Xml schemas are downloaded with each build rather than stored downloaded once and stored locally.
7. I can keep going on and on.

Is it just me or are these some really weird decisions?

I've just revived an old desktop computer today. Turns out that it was running Windows XP, Avast free antivirus, and had Bearshare as a default search engine (in other words, that thing is NOT going to be connected to my network).

But, it also had Chrome installed. So I thought to myself, with 1.25GB of RAM, there's no way that it could run Chrome smoothly. Opened it, and....

It consumed 80MB of RAM. 80 MEGABYTES. And that's not even a clean installation of it, it's a (likely) malware-infested one from a user! Compare that to the Chrome of today.

When you look at a layout and consider the hour it will take to refactor and clean stuff out to remove built functionality.

Nah fuck it - display: none !important;

Ah.. the beauty of clean code.

I wrote a very cleanly written program two years ago. Proper variable names, not too many, right naming, right design pattern,.. Now I come back to it and I am able to instantly figure out the code again. It only took me half a minute.

The importance of clean code... that's something the industry needs to understand more. Well, then there's the money issue. lol

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

Be careful when you go down the rabbit hole of creating custom observables (rxJS).

I wasted half a day just to find out that there are hot and cold observables and that the whole time I tried to use the wrong one.

It finally works. 01:00 in the morning.
My boss will be proud when he pulls the changes and the code looks completely fucked up (clean, well structured code, but he doesn't really know observables).

Now something different: Sleep. Cya.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

Hey, it's 2023.

If your component isn't written in TypeScript, I'm not using it :)

"TypeScript is overly complicated!!!" why, because it pointed out everything wrong in your JS code?

"TypeScript is not flexible!!!" why, because it makes you not rely on fragile "only possible in javascript" patterns?

"TypeScript isn't needed!!!" why, because you've never worked on a project with more than 100 lines of code where dependency management and clean code policies were implemented?

god just stop with the JavaScript purist BS, you aren't going to win this battle, and it's even worse because not only are you injuring everyone in the software community, you're injuring your own productivity and skillset

actually, you know what, fine. just use pure JS and HTML implementations. see you in 10 years when i'm retired and you are still running around in circles wondering why the world has left you behind

My life didnt go as smooth as i expected. Everything happened as expected, i knew what going to the uni requires, i knew everything...
But i didnt accounted for my mental health. Since forever i have thought that im lazy or something like that, that i can do everything i just have to do it. Oh how wrong was I. It went from my projects being frozen for a long time due to lack of motivation to neglecting important living activies. Even my health suffered a bit. Everytime i failed, even the simplest task no matter why i always felt even worse. Even the most basic tasks were unimportant for me. Even some minor tasks that i failed gave me huge guilt. Not to mention that my family wont help me with my mental health at all, (they cant see what is realy happening they always think im lazy) (but maybe they could fucking figure out that being sad liteary for years is bad). My contact with friends is limited, im always scared to go or more often scared to ask is they have time to meet because they are ALWAYS busy...
So that was my life, alone, against people who were demanding (and my mother who thought that her hard work was everything i needed, but no. Money, food and clean house isnt everything that human requires to propely function!). Now I have scheduled a meeting with the specialist, i hope the uni has better ones than the other ones i had. I hope he will help me and i will get out that life downwards spiral.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

Instead of a rant I have a story for you.

I was browsing my emails and eminently pissed off, as I usually am. Came across an email from
michael@michaelnthiessen.com

and thought "fuck this guy and his adverspam!"

Because whats more rational than hating someone you don't know, over something they didn't do, because of something completely unrelated to them of which they have no control?

Totally human.

The email looked like this

"I have some fantastic news for you:
Clean Components will be released again on April 21!
"

With a "🎉" emoji. I'm in a more vile mood than usual today.

It goes on.

"Even better, I'm significantly dropping the price, so you'll definitely want to pick it up!"

How presumptuous.

I fire off a quick reply.

"What a bunch of bullshit.
I decide to change careers and a month later, just like in 2008, this fucking pandemic happens and the economy and hiring
Starts collapsing.

And here I am getting sent this bullshit.
"

I had to rewrite and shitcan the response a few times for civility. I guess this is me being polite, but I was suddenly compelled to vent to this total stranger over what in all likelihood was an *automated* email.

Six and a half hours later I got a reply.

"Hey James, I'm sorry this pandemic has been rough on you.

I hope things turn around for you soon.

If it would help, I'd give you the course for free, but if you've switched careers I'm not sure it's relevant any more?

Michael
"

My god. A lone voice of calm in a wasteland of 24/7 bad and worsening news. Sometimes simplicity is the soul of class.

Hes got it in spades.

And here I was thinking "today might be the day. Thank god for giant bottles of hydrocodone."

It's not true that all gingers are soulless demons.
Some of them are angels in problem glasses.

No but seriously, hes a cool guy in my book.

Check out his site if you're interested in Vue at

michaelnthiessen.com

• Plan out everything by taking notes on the rough functionality of the project and how it could be done in a preferably simple way
• Writing code, but documentating it while doing so
• Also trying to write clean code so it can be more easily built upon
• Also keeping everything simple. If I'm using nasty, unreadable one-liners because of efficiency advantages, I'm putting a comment there for what could alternatively be used + explaining it
• Abandon it because side projects never get done

Why do programmers take so long in the shower?
They read the directions on the shampoo bottle and follow them to the letter:
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
If only shampoo used for-loops in their instructions...
while(hair.isDirty){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse ();
}
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}
Come on man, we should still stop if we run out of shampoo even if the hair isn't 100% clean yet.
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty() && tap.waterStillHot()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}
This could go on forever, I mean the adding of special cases.

try {
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty() && tap.waterStillHot()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}}
catch(sexException) { self.f___(spouse); } // spouse showed in in mid-rinse
catch(deathException) { spouse.arrangeForBurial(self); } // user died while showering
More importantly, you also need to catch a hairNotFoundException in the event that the user is bald. Or more properly, wrap the whole thing in "if(hair != null)". You don't want bald users throwing an exception every time they shower.

-- From a reddit feed a while back.

Me: Hey, guys, this stuff is seriously flammable. Like, I’m surprised it hasn’t caught fire yet. I really want to clean it up. Here’s how I’d make it better.

Management: No. It’s fine, it works. Don’t touch it. It’s getting replaced anyway. Just add the things on top like we asked you to, and call it a day.

Me: Are you sure? This is seriously going to be a problem.

Management: We just said it’s getting replaced. Don’t. touch. anything. OK?

Me: alright.

… Eight weeks later …

Management: so this thing caught fire over the weekend, and the fire spread to other areas. We’re doing some emergency cleanup. The new guy looked at it and figured out why, and has some great ideas on fixing it, so give him some well-deserved praise!

Me: Hey! I told you about this months ago!

Management: Yes. I tuned out during today’s firefighting meetings. But it’s important to strike a balance in everyone’s style. Do you have any other concerns?

Inspiration to code kicks in!

Kids asleep, everybody’s asleep, house is quiet. The kind of peace ive always wanted and wished! (Parents here will understand.)

Get to my laptop, opened up code editor, start fresh and clean! Created new file, about to type my first code and.........blood dripping from my nose. It doesn’t stop there, its like flowing for a while!

I noticed it keeps flowing while im projecting the inner excitement to code. When my mind drifted a bit, the nose bleeding stops. Wth? Its like my body is ejaculating when im excited to code, yeah.. it ls blood shot out of my nose, wtf!

...and i have to stop what im doing. Then the ideas just spoofly gone. Suddenly i dont know why im staring at an empty code editor.. (what was im about to code again?) i totally cant recall, it simply gone. Damn it. That could be a million dollar apps! Wish i can go back to an hour ago and record myself when i received that historic inspirational moment. 😔

So, it's 22:40 here and I'm sat on a bench staring out at a pond because my stress and anxiety is at an all time high after a couple of weeks of hellish arguments with work and my personal life so as were all developers here to some degree let me convey my fucking thoughts here.
If you care more about maintaining your fucking superiority complex over writing good clean efficient code then get the fuck out of the industry.
I don't give two fucks whether you use Linux or Windows. I couldn't give two fucks about whether you use sublime, Emacs or VIM. I couldn't give two fucks about the framework you spend more time defending than coding in, because absolutely none of it matters if you code like a retard on bath salts you pretentious cunts.
Stop feeding you fucking ego. Absolute cluster fuck of an industry.

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

It's killing me.

This senior keeps doing all his fixes in the the same branch (named "develop-copy-{hisname}") and keeps merging it directly into develop and deployment branches. He has a lot of experience and therefore the manager gave him direct access to the branch.

The problem will arise when the QA team sends back one of the issues in the release back for changes. This never happened till date (his fixes are early and we vet all in-team changes, therefore he gets time to clean up his mess before the release date) but someday this will bite us in the ass.

I'm really unsure about ratting him out to the manager but I couldn't convince him to use separate branches (or separate commits) for different fixes. I couldn't convince him to add JIRA links/numbers into the commit messages either.

And, the junior devs I manage are getting inspired by him, and won't listen to me when I try to enforce separate branches, creating a political mess (probably I'm kinda like a contractor and they are permanent employees).

Sucks.

Bind learning c++ chapter 3

Fuck whoever says that java is easier than c++. If i populate memory i can just fucking clean it out. I have access to the literal fucking stack my code runs on. I can integrate assembly. I can fucking make my program run in -3 seconds for fucks sake, this is so much easier than java where i have to fuck around with scopes to nudge the gc to start cleaning up and i need a separate engine to access jasm code.

My job sends out emails with things like "You won a prize!" In the subject line with embarrassingly vague reasons to click the links in the email. If you do, the links take you to a site where they slap your wrists for clicking an unknown link and teach you about the dangers of phishing.

It's fake spam. Ironically enough, though, it's the ONLY spam I ever get. It's more annoying than real spam because it never gets blocked by the system like an actual phishing attack would...

It is driving me crazy having to delete these stupid messages every day and they're clogging up my otherwise clean inbox! I don't even know who to contact about this bullshit because they're so "haha we got you!" about it, there's no department claiming responsibility. They're creating their own spam trying to prevent spam. What the hell?

Well I WAS going to develop a side project on my day off today (a network of Arduinos and a Raspberry Pi) but the woman my wife hired to clean our house flaked-out, so now I get roped in to fucking housecleaning.
This was going to be an awesome day. Was gonna work on my project, chew some tobacco, and then go shooting, and out for wings for dinner. (where I live, chicken wings can be an entire meal)
Now I'm cleaning the shitter and scrubbing countertops because the little precious snowflake of a cleaning lady is in the middle of a (so-far) 3-day emotional breakdown.
Dear snowflake cleaning lady: Fucking learn IPv4 socket programming on the fly, when you've got an imminent deadline, and a crying, teething baby in the next room, at 3am, and don't fucking lose your cool at any point during all of this, then tell me about your fucking "emotional breakdown."

So before the Age of JavaScript, when programming was trying to be an engineering discipline, I felt like we were getting close to figuring out what worked and what didn't. We had rules of thumb (more general than Patterns) and code smells.
Then JavaScript came in and no one had time to think about "engineering" anymore. I'm fine with MVP and small iterations, but the disdain I see for making code clean and extendable and improvable is baffling (and annoying). First-time coders might never have had to fix someone else's code, but two weeks in a chair should have fixed that.
It's not that understanding code is so hard (although it can be); understanding the _intent_ is hard. This MVP is great, but when no one had time to document what is actually supposed to happen, programmers have to reverse-engineer the *design*.

Step 1. Learn to code .
Step 2. Exchange code for money.
Step 3. Exchange money for car, soap & a clean shirt.
Step 4. Profit.
[GOTO: Step #1]

Lol. OK on a serious note coding improved my love life, it drastically reduced the frequency of dates - but dramatically improved the quality and duration of my relationships.
I used to believe that anyone/thing had the potential to be great - and (like me) all they needed was a little time to seize an opportunity.
This essentially meant there were no deal breakers and I spent a lot of time giving people benefit of the doubt and investing a lot of time & effort supporting and trying to build on aspirations that would turn out to simply be fantasies I was indulging.

I still idealistically believe that everything/one has infinite potential - only now I know which problems are worth solving, which are purely for fun or a thought experiment and which should immediately be thrown out and refactored.

All the ambition in the world is void without drive.

One time I took out a colleagues letter keys except the ones needed to spell freezer (in croatian) and left the message freezer on the keyboard, took the remaining keys, put them in a bottle which I filled with water and put them in the freezer overnight (left work the day before earlier than him).
A positive was that the keys were real clean. Negative was the rest of the keyboard was dirty :)
Was a good laugh, though.

Microsoft.. MicrobrainedSoftware-devs.

SamsungCloud died out and was replaced with OneDrive automatically. Alright, my data is still backed up, so.. No biggie.

OneDrive was syncing my pics and videos automatically, even though media sync is disabled. Umm.. Okay?

My phone is constantly very low on free space [idk why], so I decided to clean up some old photos. I'm removing and removing, until I reach photos with a cloud and an arrow replacing their content. Hundreds of spoiled pics that do not open. And in info their path is /OneDrive/*. Umm.. Wat?

Open mydrive website, log in only to be greeted by a fully loaded onedrive webapp covered by a non-removable modal 'we have an app for this. Use app'. Wtf?? Just let me disable the modal and use the webapp!! Wtf!

Open onedrive app. I'm greeted with a red warning that I've exceeded my storage limits and my account is frozen and my files will be deleted in June '23. WTF????? A heads-up would be nice!!

The popup lists my options:
1. Unfreeze the account for 30days, but I can only do that once. If after 30d I'm still exceeding my limits, my acc will be again frozen w/o an easy way to unfreeze.
2. Once unfrozen [takes ~24hrs], I can either
2.1 pay 7€ to M$ monthly for 1TB of storage in onedrive
2.2 remove my files from OD and my phone [since even if media sync is disabled, OD app is still syncing my media]
what the actual fuck?!?!? M$ is now keeping hundreds of my photos on my phone hostage.

Go F* yourself!

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

Half fact: Code reviews help to maintain clean codebases.
Full fact: Code reviews are a way to find out who secretly wants you fired.

Im getting tired of this fucking scrum team.

First of all let me introduce our backend team which takes 3 weeks to add one fucking column to database and in the end turns out they fucked up RabbitMQ RPC implementation so the column is not syncing with our app at all so now we have to wait 2 extra weeks until that will be working. Best part is that backend fucker who fucked up doesnt even feel like hes blocking a feature and would rather sit for extra few days and do nothing until he gets reassigned his pile of shit back to him than clean up his own shit.

Then we have business analytic who doesnt know how to define tasks properly so I have to record each grooming meeting so I would know what to fucking implement because he doesnt even bother to take proper notes. Which results in not fully defined tasks, which results in unexpected behaviours and MR's stuck in limbo for weeks.

Also lets not forget QA guy who doesnt even bother writing scenarios, I as an app dev have to write them myself just to be sure that fucker will test everything thoroughly.

Then we have fucking devs from consultancy agency who apparently have 6 years of experience (I have barely 2) and these fuckers are spamming me daily with the most basic questions. After each grooming they rush to assign themselves tasks which are not even defined properly yet and not even in this sprint, but fuckers are lazy so thy want to reserve easier tasks for themselves. Pathetic.

At least I have a decent senior on my team, but sometimes he patronizes me so much that I start asking me what I am doing in this team.

Fuck this shit, I asked for a 43% raise and if Im not getting it in 2-3 weeks im outta here. Fuckers.

Dear Apple: FIX YOUR FUCKED UP IDE!

Generating IPA file takes ages, freezes the shit out of the mac and to make it even worse a full clean -> build -> Generate Signed APK on slow ass gradle takes barely 5 minutes while XCode takes ages

Things to do while you encounter a bug and haven't resolved in some hours:
- Leave it and get clean air so your brain relaxes.

What i do:
- Stay there trying to figure out why the fuck this shit doesn't work and considering falling from the window a very good option

I'm a python fanboy, not gonna lie.
I love everything about it. It's clean syntax, ready to use out of the box-ness, convenient built-in functions.

The one thing I hate is the official documentation. It's ugly, hard to navigate and a cluster fuck.

But it has proper information, so it's fine I guess. tsch

Go find the most cancerous Instagram page in the "coding community" and multiply it by 10.

Bonus points if they:
>>post vague and utter bullshit motivational captions with completely irrelevant pictures.
>>Have the word "entrepreneur" in their bio
>>Have emojis in their bio
>>Mention coffee in their bio

Oh and you know the shitty clean versions of songs that filter out anything that is slightly offensive words? (I recently heard a song that filtered the words "balls" and "vagina." Apparently anatomy is offensive to the snowflakes now.) That's gonna happen to our code. We're gonna have shitty censored versions that remove all "offensive" words.

tl;dr - install ‘Pop!_os’ and try it out if you haven’t yet, it’s pretty damn good!

Heavy Micro$haft user here, have tried using ubuntu a bunch of times in the past and fucking regretted it every time. Ran into issues with stupid shit like the apt cache growing exponentially until the drive was full, or something like the the system python getting borked.

To be fair, I’m 120% certain my dumb-assery is what caused the problems. I’m definitely not trying to blame the OS. But my experience was shitty, even if it was at my own hands lol.

Started playing around with Pop!_os from the system76 team. And I’m seriously in freakin’ love with this OS. It’s clean, is performant, feels way less buggy or just feels more stable somehow. I know it’s based on ubuntu, but I’ve had a great time thus far using it. I’ve got ansible, docker, aws toolkit, aws cli, sam-cli, vscode, dynamodb-local, serverless, npm, brew, and working on steam now.

Everything has been a breeze and again the system feels really fast and snappy. It feels a lot like mac on the smoothness scale, but snappy like a windows box with beefy hardware specs.

I’m still just in the testing phase on a VM, but I’m seriously thinking about blowing away my windows install for Pop!_os.

(I’ll try arch someday when I’m up for some hardcore masochism)

So, these guys came to me at work, asking if I knew how the "Low Orbit Scanner" worked...
I said: "no, what's that?"
They said: "It's that tool used for DDoS attacks"
So I replied: "Oh you mean Low Orbit Ion Cannon"
them: "yea that, you know how it works?"
me: "ye, but what do you want to use it for?"
them: "just want to learn how it works"
me: "you download it, run it then fill out the things?"
them: "but I tried it and it doesn't take out the server I tried"
me: "Means your PC is to much of a filthy casual, buy a new one"
them: "can't you help us getting it more effective"
me: "yes, but I rather not end up in jail... I have a job and a clean document..."

The looks of their faces, love to see that disappointment of my colleagues when I say (or atleast hint): "go figure it out yourself"

Windows - how can someone possible get something done?

I gave up and are now installing windows for my son so he can install a game that only exists under windows.

Did a clean install, no network drivers found. Looked under device manager and tried to find out what network card there is on his computer. Unknown device :@

Finally found the manufactures dvd, ofcourse we get some bloatware, killer network manager.

Tried to uninstall it, the drivers was also uninstalled. :O Had to install it again and do some googling and finally found some pure drivers. Uninstalled the f*** Killer software again, and then installed the pure drivers. It works :)

Then I tried the speakers ... :@

Thank god my son is in school and can't hear my language right now.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

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

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

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

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

Update on my previous rant -

Mac restart after upgrade got stuck due to a fucking corrupted kext file, had to switch between recovery and safe/verbose mode to isolate that bastard, move him out of the folder and then do a clean restart.. Then, after 7 hours, it said 15 minutes remaining to complete installation...

Finally, it came up fine, doing healthy :)

Dear Mac, You, Sir, gave me a scare during a restart and are becoming like Windows (note: bsod) :(

Today another story in this stupid company:
A freelancer created a feature to pay orders online . It took him 3 months (!)
Problem: sometimes people pay, but orders are not stored. Every morning, it takes 1 hour to check in db if the orders are stored, and if not, create them manualy
Yes, orders are created after payment.
Manager wants to fix it by creating the order before the payment, in 3 days (!)
Turns out that the freelancer has written a lot of obsolete code, I now have to clean up. 3 fucking months vs 3 fucking days!
And on top, the shoppingcart was stored in localstorage! (Already fixed by now)
Fuck this, I'm getting another wodka

I'm a junior dev less than 1 year into my first job out of college. I'm halfway done reading Clean Code (my first software book out of college) and I'm really enjoying it!

What should I read next? I was thinking something about design patterns. Should I go for the classic GoF book or continue with Robert C Martin and read "Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices"?

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Java teacher writes code on blackboard in comp lab

He tells us to try it out at our workstations.

We do. The code does work. We tell him.

He says: "There is something wrong with your compiler..."

Question is...we were around 30 students. Can all our compilers not work if we had used the lab before and the code we run worked clean??!?!?!?

We were flabbergasted

The good and bads of Seoul subway system

So the subway here is clean.
Yes. Clean.
1000% cleaner than the one in Paris.
And it is super cool here.
Awesome air conditioning available here.

But, it isnt friendly to foreigners. They cant understand most of the announcement. Why? B'cuz it is mostly in Korean.

So today i experienced some foreigner desperately looking for help.

Our subway needed some quick fox or rest or whatever, so it had to stop and go to the garage(?).
If that happens, all passengers should get off the train.

B'cuz the announcement was in korean only, he was the only one who stayed in the train.

I wanted to go to him and say to come out, but because there was so many people around me, i just beckoned him to come out. He did.

I just felt sorry for no reason.

I mean, just.

Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfffffffddddd

Motherfucking shitty depression kicks me around like a fucking wet teabag.

Shit doesn't get done

Motherfuckers are annoying me

And this constant whining....

Why can't we have new hardware....

Because it's fucking 'rona and you had a motherfucking frigging shitty ticket to clean the shit up so we don't need frigging fucking new hardware that takes ages to delivered

Now I have to give a seminar thx to some special guys showing up stoned on work law....

... Getting chewed out by management and tons of laughter was exactly the extra care package I needed… thx for the nice reminder that you are all shitbags.

I love my job and the team mates close me.

But the rest of the people seemingly nuked their brain and are really grinding their teeth down my emotional barriers.

Why is everyone seemingly obsessed with stupidity since Corona began...

<deep breath>

2 more days.

Remember, just 2 more days.

Weekend is near...

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

Got to scratch of one of three remaining old (14years and counting) design mistakes this week.

Together with a colleague we replaced a 1.5 billion row table that I out of ignorance then designed with a 3 column composite primary key instead of an identity column.

Moving the data while keeping all synchronized (the table gets up towards 2 million new rows and 2 million updates a day while constantly being queried) took 1 week.

Just 2 skeletons left to clean out, any year now ;).

One of my worst WFT moments was just over 2 years ago.

A former colleague had been tasked with “upgrading” our solution for handling customer specific CSS on our platform for building newsletter emails.

He had been with us for about 5 years and ported most of the front end gui over that time from classic asp to .net and C#.

This work started in November and with a pause over dec-mid jan for high season and Christmas leave he continued.

In the beginning if mars we had the first of multiple WTF on that when I realized that his solution required a lot of special CSS or rather LESS, more than the a actual HTML for the template, and all was custom less rules that was very hard to understand.

We found that he actually never really understood how LESS worked and had tried to do things in a very backward way. Another colleague jumped in and manage to clean it up a bit so it got down to manageable levels.

Then in the end of Mars came the next bigger WTF. This is a newsletter building application. Turns out the new LESS based solution was entirely dependent on the js version of LESS and only worked when running in the browser. Guess what, the email send engine is not a browser and css classes and rules generally does not work in emails.

The new solution was impossible to integrate with the part that built and sent the emails without some very heavy rework.

Oh, and it was also completely incompatible with 12 years of old newsletters and customer templates that just did not work.

And of cause, he had not shown any of this in code reviews but rather just merged it part by part to the new version branch interleaving it with 5 months of other work.

He left the company short after.

We need an open-source alternative to stack overflow. They have fucking monopolizing pieces of ratshit admins there and lame ass bots.

I HAD A FUCKING 450 REP :/ and now i have "reached my question limit"

I mean its okay of you want to keep stackoverflow clean , but straight out rejecting the new queries should be against your god damn principles, if those mofos have any!

If it is so easy to downvote and delete a question for the mods, why can't they create a trash site called dump.stackoverflow.com ? whenever a question is not following their stupid guidelines , downvote it to oblivion. After a certain limit, that question goes to dump space where it will be automatically removed after 30 days. Atleast give us 30 fucking days to gather attention of audience !

And how does a question defines someone's character that you downright ban the person from asking new questions? Is there a phd that we should be doing in our mother's womb to get qualified as legitimate question author?

"No questions are stupid" is what we usually hear in our school/college life. And that's a stretch, i agree. Some questions are definitely stupid. But "Your questions are so stupid we are removing you from the site" is the worst possible way to deal with a question asker.

Bloody assholes.

Now, can anyone tell me that if am passing a parcelable list of objects in an intent before starting a new activity, how can i retrieve it in the new activity without getting any kotlin warnings?
The compiler is saying that the data coming via intent is that of list<Type!> aka list of platform type, so how to deal with this warning?

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

ClientA: We need a minimalist design.

Me, took around 2 weeks to come out a very clean and sleek design with minimal elements.

ClientA reviewed and said: Can I add this and that? I think add in more picture can help to strengthen the credibility. How about......

If I ever get the chance to start my own company or pick out the dev team I work with... I will never, ever, ever work with anyone who doesn't understand how to abstract out a problem. Our prod DB is a mess and our API is a mess because we left it to some dudes who are dumb as shit and doing everything ad-hoc. Now their ad-hoc shit doesn't work anymore and I get to clean it up. 😫😞FML

Fucking hate Qt.

Spent all morning trying to figure out how their bullshit QThreadPool works with their bullshit QRunnable but after a bunch of bullshit asynchronous testing I figured that my thread object was being collected and deleted before I was done with it, for no reason. Now if the race condition was documented... This wouldn't be an issue. But every google search brought up nada. Eventually I resorted to turning off autoDelete on the runnable, but then I just have a memory leak, obviously.

I couldn't find a way to manually clean up a QRunnable in Python. What the fuck.

I just went back to good old fashioned QThreads... This is why I quit Qt in the first place.

OK Mr CEO/President whatever self aggrandizing title you want to call yourself today, where the fuck is your spine! You want to have support help boost your sales but don't tell sales that you are letting support handle some sales and sales is mad. Now you are quivering under the thumb of the Lead of Sales. What the hell. You are the leader of this company.

Why did you not stand up for your decision to begin with? I'm not going to get into whether or not it was good, but if you are going to make a decision to experiment with new things fucking stand by it and let everyone in the company know.

You've exacerbated the division between departments and ton this company further apart. If you don't start standing up for things, you are going to destroy all that you've helped build! Furthermore, I will not simply be your loyal vassal and watch all the people doing support for my products get fucked over. I will leave you high and dry if needed. I really hope you don't make it needed. You gave me a great shot to be honest, I'd hate to have to turn my back on you in anger. But don't think for a second I won't do it.

Your entire programming department has also been put in the cross fire of a fight you just made so much worse. You are the only one who can clean this up. Are you going to stand up for us? Are you gonna stand up for your self? Or will you just break and show us where the real power lies? We will find out soon.

So I did a clean Windows 10 restore recently on my laptop from Insider program to just Anniversary Update . Went away from my computer for a day or so by the time I got updates completed and Visual Studio up and running. So earlier today I went to start back up development on a project of mine to come across the emulators not working. The thing is that I lost 6 hrs of production to figure this out. I tried everything possible so I gave up and reinstalled VS to just remember I forgot to turn on my Hyper-V in BIOS setting. So I'm half way in VS reinstalling and I can't do anything about it. GOD FUCKEN DAMMIT W10!

It took me a long time to admit, but I think I'm finally ready to out myself: I kinda love JavaScript.

Seriously, if you avoid classes in favor of Object.create and if you make use of lambdas instead of bind/apply/call whenever possible, it might successfully give you the illusion of a clean language.

My new routine after getting Elden RIng has been:

1. Get home and work out.
2. Drink protein shake
3. Take a shower, clean up and play with me pp
4. Get out and play elden ring until my wife unglues me from the controller.

And i fucking love it. Beast game in my opinion. FS really hit a home run with this mfker.

Tldr: fucked up windows boot sector somehow, saved 4 months worth of bachelor thesis code, never hold back git push for so long!

Holy jesus, I just saved my ass and 4 months of hard work...
I recently cloned one of my SSDs to a bigger one and formatted the smaller one, once I saw it went fine. I then (maybe?) sinned by attaching an internal hdd to the system while powered on and detached, thinking "oh well, I might have just done smth stupid". Restart the system: Windows boot error. FUCK! Only option was to start a recovery usb. Some googling and I figured I had to repair the boot section. Try the boot repair in the provided cmd. Access denied! Shit! Why? Google again and find a fix. Some weird volume renaming and other weird commands. Commands don't work. What is it now? Boot files are not found. What do I do now? At this point I thought about a clean install of Windows. Then I remembered that I hadn't pushed my code changes to GitHub for roughly 4 months. My bachelor thesis code. I started panicking. I couldn't even find the files with the cmd. I panicked even more. I looked again at the tutorials, carefully. Tried out some commands and variations for the partition volumes, since there wasn't much I could do wrong. Suddenly the commands succeeded, but not all of them? I almost lost hope as I seemed to progress not as much as I hoped for. I thought, what the hell, let's restart and see anyway. Worst case I'll have to remember all my code😅🤦.
Who would have thought that exactly this time it would boot up normally?

First thing I immediately did: GIT PUSH --ALL ! Never ever hold back code for so long!
Thanks for reading till the end! 👌😅

Was playing fallout 4 a couple days ago. About 20 minutes in. The computer just shuts off. Like no power at all. I start up the computer again. Try fallout 4 again. It shuts off at the beginning video. WTF... I try Skyrim wondering if video card is busted. Skyrim runs perfectly fine. I startup Fallout 4 again. It runs. WTF...

Next day I try fallout and bout 20 minutes in power off again. Now I am assuming cooling issue and I am trying to see temps with programs. Cannot really tell.

So today I take apart my laptop and vacuum every cooling orifice out. Vacuum any dust looking crap I can see. There was dust in the fans. All clean. I run a memory test for a couple hours. Memory passes (it was brand new memory, thought maybe flaw in ram). Now I run fallout 4. Runs fine, zero issues for about an hour.

Me to myself: CLEAN YOUR DAMN COMPUTER MORE OFTEN! Okay...

In between I read about Fallout 4 causing system reboots and shutdowns due to loading and heating. Apparently something about Fallout 4 causes this more than other games. Wild... Pretty sure it was thermal shutdown protection going on.

Todays story: conversation between me and my brain about a app that i have planned for a long while.

The application is just a huge, specyfic json editor/manager for a game that i like. The game uses json files to determine unit charactetistics. So in order to make modding easier i want to make a tool for that that is fancier and easier to use than a notepad.

Brain> Lets make a app that allows you to mod the game easier!
Me> Good idea. How would you want to make it?
Brain> Lets use C# cause you main that lang currently and you have experience with json parser lib.
Me> That is true. So what do you wanna implement first?
Brain> Oh. I have thought about it before! I want to implement: (10 000 features) and maybe few more later!
Me> It sounds like a infinity project, shouldnt you implement like 1 or 2 features at first and then jump to other ones?
Brain> Yes... but i dont wanna refactor those features latter so let just implement them all at once!
Me> Dammit brain! Let just implement just one feature now! Like a simple json editor. You can use inhieritance to reuse the code later.
Brain> Ok...
* Starts with that one feature but one day later starts coding 6 more *
* Cant publish the app yet, the code looks like shit, gui is unfinished because brain wanted only to test those 6 unfinished features without propely implementing them *
Me> Brain WTF! You said that you are going to focus on one feature at the time!
Brain> I got carried a bit...
Me> ...
Me> Ok. I understand. Let just refactor the code and clean the project out of those unfinished features.
Brain> No. I have a depression now...
Me> FUCK.

* 2 month passes by without any progress on ANY of my projects*

current day

Brain> I still have depression...
Me> Ok i dont care about that anymore! Tell me something that i dont know!
Brain> Oh I have good news as well!
Me> ???
Brain> What about the home server that is going to store all mods made by the users so they can share it? It would be a good practice with networking!
Me> * Gives up *

Other Team: "our builds don't clean up properly"

*docker rm -f $(docker ps -a)*

Other Team: "our builds keep filling up machines"

*docker rmi $(docker images -q)*

Random Team Member: "My builds keep failing on service foo randomly exiting"

Other Random Team Member: "Why is there no caching on our builds"

...

team panics thinking it's their fault as our main job still passes, as it's on another machine.

...

When we find out after tracking build history

KMS

Boss needs certain stats pulled from database once a year for board meeting. This time I delegate it to a junior dba/sysadmin. He looks at my 3-year-old docs that I hastily jotted down and pasted and included my rambling notes with results from way back then. Mostly they were just to jog my own memory, not to be a really neat, clean instruction guide. He does the queries correctly, but in ticket for boss he pastes also all my notes from the docs. boss gets confused, "what is this other number, I don't get it?!" We have to have a meeting of the 3 of us and waste an hour or so just to figure out what went wrong, finally I realize what junior guy accidentally did. Moral of story: to avoid baffling the nontechs, always simplify, simplify, simplify. Alternate moral of story: before delegating a task that seems old hat to you, always review your notes/docs and make sure they're ready for someone else to use them.

What was supposed to be a simple HDD to SSD upgrade for my brother ended up taking 3 fucking days.

His computer's idle temp was fucking 90c because of fucking YEARS worth of dust preventing fans from breathing, one of them was even dead so I had to go to best buy to get a new one.

Had a power outage happen in the middle of cleaning the damn dust out before replacing the bad fan. It took close to 24 hours for it to come back, and I just didn't bother until the day after cause fuck that.

When I go back to it, I finish cleaning the dust, clone the old HDD to the new SSD, do the swap out, replace the thermal paste on CPU cause why the fuck not at this point. Then turn it on to test, yeah from 90c down to 20c : |

Yeah... so I charged him for the new fan, and the hour-ish it took me to clean the damn dust and replace the fan... (drive was agreed to be done for free as a favor) Yeah not really worth charging for but I was pissed and that was the 'nicest' way I could show how annoyed I was with him not properly caring for the PC. Like honestly 90 degrees celsius. I refuse to believe he didn't notice impacted performance in his games

To get into the zone I need 5 minutes to focus, think and lay out a plan. Need a clear schedule the next 4 hours, minimum. Clean desk, headset on, water refilled and a fresh coffee. Away we go.

10 minutes later someone taps me on my shoulder .. fuck!! Every damn time

I dare you to spend the last 3-7 hours of 2020 NOT looking at your phone! Go masterbate... talk to yourself... read a book... drink!.. Play chess... just lay down and groan... clean the kitchen!!! ANYTHING! And maybe even the first 24 hours of 2021!!!!!

Get out of your own ass for a while! Or into your own ass - but out of your fucking phone!!It’ll be fun!

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:

There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.

Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm.

Got a new job a couple days ago, cleaning cars at a dealership. One of my friends works there doing the same and he told me I should apply.

The hourly rate isn't much more than I was making at McDonald's, but I have very consistent hours now. I'm only scheduled for 35 hours a week, but normally we don't get out on time. On Friday we didn't get out until an hour after I was scheduled to leave, so chances are I'll get overtime here.

Basically all I wanted in a job was to have consistent hours. Come in at 2, leave at 8, rinse and repeat. McDonald's was basically, come in at 4, leave at 10, maybe stay until 11. Next day you're coming in at 7 and closing, next day you normally work but now you don't. Just very inconsistent, and basically no chance at full time unless you're a manager's favorite.

I like the new job, I get to drive nice cars and clean them, and that's basically it. I got to drive a car that's the same model as my mom's car, but 7 years newer (she has a 2011, the one I drove was a 2018). Even got to drive the exact model of the car that hit me a few months ago (same year too).

I've never been a huge car guy, but I really like it there. There's just something very satisfying about driving a brand new car. Also, at McDonald's I wasn't allowed to have a beard. At the new job they don't give a shit, as long as I work.

Day 2 of devWholesome...

Have another great day! Have fun and do something productive! It is always a great feeling when you finish something that requires a lot of time and effort. Finish that project that you started but never finished, clean your room, or maybe just catch up on school work! Make sure you are also taking care of yourself with your hygiene and to eat all your meals and drink plenty of water. If you are feeling stressed today, take a break and relax! And again, make the most out of your day!

!dev

I just had one guy coming back to the house at 4am, again, and he made his usual grand entrance, slamming the doors, stomping on the wooden floor making all the creaking sound as he walk all the way to his room, which is right beside mine. And when he went into the bathroom, which is on the other side of my room, he slammed he motherfucking lid on the toilet bowl which was so fucking loud I literally jumped out of bed. I ended up not being able to sleep (I have a lot of trouble falling asleep), and when I tried to sleep in the afternoon to catch up on the missed winks, another motherfucking bastard started blasting fucking hardcore electronics in the living room which is right below my room. The same bastard also plays loud movies or music at 2-3am. I’ve told that bastard that comes home late to watch his noise but man he only minds the noises I told him and nothing else. As for the other fucker, he’ll say he’d keep it down but continues doing what he’s doing anyway.

I moved here cause I know that it’s usually a quiet place and away from the party kids, but I somehow ended up with a party kid and an insensitive fucker (This motherfucker had the loudest sigh of frustration when I knocked politely on his door last night. Yes I calmed down before I talked to him, but ended up deciding to not utter a word at all when I hear that sigh).

I should move out, but I can’t find a place before next term cause it’s way too late at this point. I am on a lease, but my landlord understands my situation, and he seems okay with breaking the contract.

Having been here as an international student for almost 2 years now, and having moved 5 times, this has been the worst nightmare of a bunch of people to stay with.

For those that has read of me ranting about this elsewhere, yes it’s that same fucking bunch that doesn’t clean the house.

I was once handed a very old PHP project that I had to make some changes to. I thought it would be a piece of cake. But the moment I looked at the code, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. It was so poorly written, it took me hours to figure out what was actually going on. Now these were the times when I was already quite disturbed mentally and emotionally, and this shitty PHP code only made it worse. At one point, I was like, fuck this shit I'm gonna quit this job.

Thankfully, the client soon emailed that the requested changes weren't needed anymore.

I personally have nothing against PHP. I have created some amazing stuff with it. But it's the programmers that don't follow the best practices that piss me off. I mean, how fucking hard can it be to write clean code. You might save your time today by taking shortcuts but you'll make life hell for the people who might have to maintain your code in the future.

When do you know something is being overdesigned or overengineered?

The applications that the other programmer started building are killing me. He's using Clean Architecture and it has like a million different classes and shit. It's not messy or anything, but fuck it's overwhelming.

Just to figure out wtf was happening when getting the currently signed in user's email, I had to go through like 30 folder and files. Maybe more. All files were fairly simple on their own, but the entire flow was mindfucking me. Use cases, schemas, gateways, repositories, entities, models, etc etc

And that's the client facing application, I haven't checked the API yet, though it seems like that one is simpler.

The worrying aspect here is, any time anyone else has to mess with this, they'll also have to deal with this shit. This needs some really good documentation.

PM tells me to merge (large feature) work that's heavily under WIP.

In that is a performance optimisation he instructed (with an aggressive DM) me to stop looking at even though it's a concern for larger clients that I had to fix before as it's "unnecessary" - thought whatever I'll leave the code as is then

I tell him him the PR is not ready yet, there is still a lot of clean up to and tests to write

Just do it

A ~week later "wow you write really selfish code like look at this"

Shows a wrapper class from the optimisation with 2 properties and getters and setters (and override some of super's properties). I explain to him why it's there, "that should have been a comment". I tell him I write detailed comments as part of my refinment process which he wanted me to stop.

This is after he tried to merge a release branch into main while sneaking in some "corrections" and I pointed out it breaks Dev.

hey guys yesterday I got roasted cuz I was using a pc instead of Mac for development work and this was my reply. For me I don't gonna spend 2000+ $ only for 1 sec faster app loading and only for writing codes if someone willing to spend lot of money then they have completely command on there system Mac is very overpriced and overprotective it doest allow dual boot tell u what Mac sucks in 4k video editing,games,it don't even support maya or 3ds max rendering on Mac is gonna hit you hard , and there is same for linux but because it's free I don't much care about it but it is extremely crash and error prone I've installed Ubuntu nearly 20+ computer and after few days some kind of internal error occurred if u cancelled any ongoing installation it's going to hijack your system not let order program to install unless you manually clean that shit out ,yea Unix systems have bit faster app opening time and I appreciate that .
For nerds like me it's not only about coding stuff I like to do crazy stuffs

I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.

We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.

How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.

I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.

Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...

Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.

Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.

Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.

I work at a company that sees front end developers as, basically, lab rats. I make less than my coworkers, who are all underpaid, and also turn out more clean code (based on mutual agreement, plus the only person who documents anything) than the rest of the team, and at much higher quantities.

Why? Because I get my ass handed to me by depression and anxiety every morning, and end up coming in ~1 hour late everyday. (For nearly a year now, even with medical intervention)

I'm probably going to be fired for it fairly soon, as well as get swallowed in medical bills.

On the bright side, I finally fixed a bug with my portfolio website that I've been working on, so I've got that going for me which is nice.

There are a couple of things I like to do before sitting down to code for the first time on a project. Throughout all of this I'm (sometimes unconsciously) planning out the project.

- Clean the house;
- Buy groceries;
- Buy/prepare food & eat;
- Arrange everything on my desk so that everything looks slick as fuck;
- Actually sit down to do something;
- Realize it's past midnight;
- Go to sleep.

Sometimes I wonder if I have OCD...

I don't know about others, but I would love to go back in time and start webdev in the early days of the internet, the idea of starting off in a place where no one knows for sure what we can accomplish with the new tech. Unlike now the small things have been discovered. Honestly I might just be crazy and narrowing my thoughts, but I rather be in the time that we would get excited over a 12mb thumbdrive than to be excited for a 2tera. Back when websites used to use flash unlike the standard "clean and flat" we have now.

I can only imagine how much fun it would've been literally starting out.

I needed to log in on a website in someone else's pc and didn't know the password by heart. I thought I'd log into chrome, if I log out later, what could go wrong right?

Apparently, a lot. It facking merged my bookmarks, history and passwords with hers! And she had shitloads of them! It took me facking hours to clean up the mess chrome created. I trust her, but I still didn't want her to have my passwords etc.

Omg I'm never logging into chrome again elsewhere, what a frustrating facking waste of time

Worst prod scenario experienced - on site in small African country working on CRM/billing system my colleague was testing some new SQL and after finishing decided to drop and recreate the DB. She thinks the process is very slow and suddenly realizes she is dropping the prod DB. In a panic she shuts down the system and starts doing a restore from tape, but is so stressed out she writes "tar cv" instead of "tar xv" and overwrites the backup with the broken DB. Took a while to clean that one up...

It's my yearly cleanup day, when I fully nuke down my windows installation, to clean out all the installed trash and residue.

Have moved all important data and I will be ready to fully refresh my computer as soon as it syncs, heres the question though.

I decided this time I'll create a dev vm, so I can just each time reset to point 0 and also because I miss having local development.

What new linux distros or flavours are out there that would be worth looking at? (I saw things like ubuntu budgie being mentioned)

If you use it and it doesnt break if I sneeze, mention it, I am open to getting to know other environments, even if its not my usual debian homeplace.

I'm doomed.

My first production worker script is making multiple active attribute of a user. My script should be able to deactive the old attributes if there is new one.

Months ago, this issue occured. My teammate from team A take over the script to investigate since I am busy working with team B.

Yesterday, I found out that I, myself, overwrite the fix my teammate made for that because of a new feature.

I have to clean up the affected records on production on Monday..and i have to explain to my manager. T.T

LPT: ALWAYS PULL REPO before developing new feature...

How to fuck a web developer:
1- Introduce a shiny new shitty web component that is nearly impossible to figure out how to change it’s fucking background color, yeah.
Welcome everyone to 2019 why even it was so easy to change and customize your own shit, let’s just introduce thaaa faaacking web components and fuck everyone else. Let everyone learn again how to do the simplest shit ever.
Yes fuck everyone that is used to change and customize in an easy way.
“yUo wAnT uS nOt tO UsE SoC anD cLEan koOde?”
No no no. We will fuck you instead.

Since I've started writing in clojurescript a 1.5 yrs ago, I can barely look at JavaScript.
I started to realise how ugly it is.
Seriously waiting to the day browsers will work with clojurescript out of the box, without the need to compile.

The language is so clean, clear, easy and data oriented, I find it hard to go back to js.
Also, the docs are much better.

Long live concurrency !

Bragging about knowing how to hack the company's emails definitely gets you into trouble. And then coming out clean and saying it was all a bluff still gets you into trouble. Hacking jokes in the office is same as a bomb joke in public(crowded) places.

Don’t you feel like development with Android Studio is 50% figuring out why the f*ck is not building, or running, resetting cache, clean build, rebuild… etc, and 50% coding? Or is it my lack of experience?

I refused to get into python pretty long but yesterday it happend. I got the py. :')

Coming from Java/Netbeans I tried installing it again (for personal projects), but since Apache took over and Java 10 got released I never seemed to be able to accomplish a clean IDE install.. I gave up while I wanted to turn a current python programmer to java and, again, Netbeans fckd me over. I tried IntelliJ again afterwards but Netbeans seemingly fcked over the whole JDK installation too, so I gave up for real.

Everyone in my vicinity told me about python and it's coolness. I just.. no.
No {}, no semicolons, indentations are relevant... idk. I did not want to, but some part of me still wanted to try it. I want to work in the infosec branche so it definetly should be one of my interests shouldn't it?

So I tried yesterday, installed PyCharm and in literaly minutes (of course with trusty Stack Overflow behind me) I had a Qt based GUI which functioned as a basic webbrowser. I was intrigued. Well, I took like 100 times that time to get a working .exe out of my .py with all dependencies, but with the help of mentioned python friend I also got this to work. Python is cool now, I guess... ;b

- name: "Clean up {{ project_dir }}
file:
state: absent
path: "{[ project_dir }}"

Took me 2 hours to figure out why this wasn't deleting files

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us