Boss: “Our YouTube channel doesn’t look at all like our website.”

Me: “I’ve made it look as close to our branding as YouTube allows for with its limited editing controls.”

Boss: “This is unacceptable. I expected more from you.”

Me: “I cannot accept the blame for this. YouTube is setting the design parameters for all channels and I can only do so much.”

Boss: “You can call the YouTube, can’t you? Why didn’t you call them?”

Me: “.......and ask them....what?”

Boss: “You don’t ask! You tell! Our company has been around for 140 years. Our brand name carries that weight. They’ll change their design to what we need if you’re assertive enough.”

Me: “Ma’am, that’s just not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”

Friend: *deletes something from the internet*
"Thank god, now it's gone forever!"

Me: *Laughs in French*
"Hahahaha!"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "No, I'm pretty sure almost everything you put on the internet stays on the internet."

Friend: "ARE YOU STUPID??! The button says fucking DELETE. What else would it to do? Please use your brain for once."

Me: "You realize that text in the button is just a string right?"

Friend: *Looks confused*
"Stop trying to be such a smartass. Why would it be called 'delete' if it doesn't delete? Your logic make no sense whatsoever."

Me: *Makes quick simple app in order to prove my point*

App has 4 buttons:

-Play Music: Shows a picture of a dog

-Stop Music: Starts playing music video of Never gonna give you up

-Close App: Changes the interface to a random color

-Delete App: Pop up that says "The app has been deleted"

Friend: *Installs and tries the app*
"Dude! Did you even test your app before sending me?? Your buttons are broken as hell. None of them works. They all do things they're not supposed to do. How do you even call yourself a programmer? Sorry dude, nothing personal but this app sucks."

Me: *I need a new friend*
*sigh*

I've always tried to live by the philosophy that you should never burn bridges, but my god some recruiters make it very difficult. I've had a handful of occasions where I've had to type out a nasty email to a recruiter and then just not send it after I realized I wouldn't want it getting around/you never know who they known.

The latest incident where I did this was with a recruiter who emailed me 3 times within a week. But my issue wasn't with the amount of emails or even the fact that he was shopping me frontend positions despite my resume clearly stating I'm a backend dev/data engineer.

My issue was... THE GUY FUCKING REFERRED TO HIMSELF AS "BATMAN". That's right - an adult human being so desperate to get the attention of developers that he set his email name to "Batman", signs his emails "Full name - A.K.A. Batman", and lists his phone number like "BatPhone: xxx.xxx.xxxx"

If I didn't find him so pretentious and he actually sent me a kind of relevant position, what would I do? Pick up the phone and call him and say "hey Batman." Jesus fucking Christ. What an absurd gimmick. Maybe I'm overreacting but it seems so childish.

And you know what, if the guy read my resume and sent me relevant stuff I probably would have said "meh, he's doing good work, if he wants to stand out/be silly whatever." But no, he didn't even look at my skills. Instead he thought 3 shitty emails where he called himself Batman would convince me to write back to him.

I was close to sending him a ridiculous response and signing it "Robin", but decided it wasn't worth it.

Just a joke I found online:

One day I was facing some issue with Outlook and I raised a ticket to get it resolved. I got a call from the Service Desk lady after some time and it went this way:

Lady: Hi I'm calling from service desk, what is the problem?

Me: (I explained the problem).

Lady: Can you please share your screen and give me the control so that I can solve the issue?

Me: (I shared the screen and gave the control. She solved it!!)

Lady: You may close the ticket from your end, the issue is solved.

Me: Thank you very much, I will close the ticket.

I opened her profile in lync and had a look at her profile. The display pic looked small in size. I instantly messaged her Employee ID to my colleague and asked him to have a look at her. He replied "She looks good in some angles".

I tried searching her FB profile with the help of her name, but there were too many results.

I started searching on Linked In instead, I found her profile this time. I was trying to enlarge the profile pic and suddenly a message popped up - it says

"I'll share my better picture with you on your outlook ID but you may please stop sharing your screen??"
😂

TL;DR: Don't ever interrupt me while taking a shit.

>be me taking a shit comfortably in the bathroom, not bothering anyone
>hear my cousin outside calling his gf
>nofsgiven.jpg
>suddenly stuff comes flying through the window and hear her gf laughing in his phone speaker
>stupid asshat was trying to make his gf laugh by bothering me while in the debug room
>scream from the top of my lungs for him to stop interrupting my defecation process
>stuff keeps coming from the window
>my brown creation comes back inside like a scared turtle
>pull up pantaloons
>get out of thinking room
>open up laptop, start ubuntu
>sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng
>enable monitor mode, get phone, ap mac addresses
>vim shittyvengeance.sh
>write small script that deauths his phone and then waits some seconds and then starts over again so he doesn't think it's me
>:wq and make script executable
>sleep 180; cowsay ding dong ur vengeance has arrived; sudo ./shittyvengeance.sh
>tuck into bed and close laptop before sleep time ends
>his call suddenly drops
>"Matt are you messing up with my WiFi again?"
>"Nah man. Not working for me either. Must be localcompany's problem."
>mfw he can't talk with his gf for more than 15 seconds before losing connection
>omgitworks.jpg
>figure that it was the most useful thing I had made in a pc in these two years at uni
>be proud of me for making a stupid script
>think about going back to my pearl white throne
>no longer wanting to drop my supplies
>go to sleep
>mfw forgot to wipe ass

My first story in devRant! Was lurking for quite a while and finally felt like sharing something 🙃

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

I misclicked an nsfw channel on discord and I got a dialog asking my age. I wasn't interested in loading the channel and you cannot close this dialog - it even reappears if you restart the app because the channel will still be selected.

I input 0 years just to cancel, which lead to an instant account ban and an email about scheduled deletion. In order to retain my account I need to send in selfies of myself holding my ID.

That's... a surprising user flow from a misclick. May I suggest a little x in the corner, as we professionals call it.

Dev: Breaks unit tests

Same dev: Merges it to master anyway

Same fucking dev: Can't merge to master coz CI is screaming at you? Merge locally and FORCE push.

Me: Hi, I'm blocked. I can't merge to master coz of this failing test, can we get on a quick call and figure this out?

Same fucking fuckface dev: *after 3 fucking days* Yeah, I don't know why it's failing.. the results seem to be inconsistent..

Jesus Christ. I am so close to leaving this side-project because of the frequent shit I have to go through with this fucking idiot.

God I wish I didn't need the money.

I am officially my Manager's own personal google.

"What is the Wifi Password?"
"I can't print this, can you help?"
"How do I switch keyboard layout?"
"How do I turn on the computer?"
"How do I close the door of my office?"

Soon she's going to call me "Ok Google, <stupid question>"

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

I'm starting to think customers know when I'm busy and take that moment to break their products.

I JUST WANT TO LET MY LEG SOAK IN EPSOM WATER... your users are going to bed soon, it's a freaking Saturday, and you need to go get laid because you have too much time on your hands. I'm in pain and cannot help you restore service if you don't stay on the line. So please... don't. Fucking. Call me. Unless you're going to stay on the line to test. You're pushing my limits, and if my voice gets any quieter, it means I'm about to find your porn accounts and register you as an amateur, uploading cows fucking to get you banned from all the services. Congratulations sir, you've pissed me off so bad, I'm using my "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" voice I learned from my mother. I hope you're happy. I'm so mad I'm not even swearing anymore. I always swear.

Edit: if my voice ever sounds sweet and demure over the phone, someone is about to get fucked with a red hot fireplace poker. This fucker getting close.

Always deliver the goods.

Even if who you work for are idiots, and the product is useless. You never know who will see what you've done.

- I did a six-month underpaid project for ShittyCompany.

- Strived to write it nice and clean with unit tests and good(barely) documentation.

- Got a call up a year later from a consultancy company who integrated with the application I wrote. Now I work for them, and it's as close to my dream job as I could hope for.

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Dear son: when I ask you to stop using Netflix because I need all the network juice for a work-related call, please do close it or play a downloaded movie. Don't just turn the volume off...

TL;DR: disaster averted!

Story time!

About a year ago, the company I work for merged with another that offered complementary services. As is always the case, both companies had different ways of doing things, and that was true for the keeping of the financial records and history.

As the other company had a much larger financial database, after the merger we moved all the data of both companies on their software.

The said software is closed source, and was deployed on premises on a small server.

Even tho it has a lot of restrictions and missing features, it gets the job done and was stable enough for years.

But here comes the fun part: last week there was a power outage. We had no failsafe, no UPS, no recent backups and of course both the OS and the working database from the server broke.

Everyone was in panic mode, as our whole company needs the software for day to day activity!

Now, don't ask me how, but today we managed to recover all the data, got a new server with 2 RAID HDDs for the working copy of the DB, another pair for backups, and another machine with another dual HDD setup for secondary backups!

We still need a new UPS and another off site backup storage, but for now...disaster averted!

Time for a beer! Or 20...

That is all :)

I got my very first dev job! After first making it to an interview where I didn't think I did all too well, I got a boost when on the 22nd December they called me asking for a referral. I gave them one but the person could not be contacted before the 23rd - close to xmas.

After an agonizing wait over the xmas period I finally got the call today. One hell of a way to start the new year!

I got a summer job (full time student) doing actual coding! I am so pumped!!!

Interviewer: Here is the interview challenge. Tell me what the expected output is. You have 5 minutes.

** 100 line class with 4 async methods that contain if/thens nested 4 layers deep that call each other and log things to the console

Dev: Ok wow this is a bit of a maze to work through but I’ll try my best.

** 1 minute later of reading through the code

Interviewer: One minute has elapsed. There is now 4 minutes remaining.

Dev: Actually could you please not interject with time updates like that while I’m reading code? It makes the challenge harder than necessary. Just letting me know when the time is up would be fine.

Interviewer: Ok.

** ~2 minutes later trying to comb through this spaghetti mess

Interviewer: What do you think are you getting close to figuring it out?

Dev: …

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Shitty call
Me: what do you want?

Q: I Lost my iphone

Me: (already pissed) ok,do you have an icloud account?

Q: Yes, but i forgot the password.

Me: what!?!, ok, fine, we will reset it, which is your ID?

Q: I lost it too.

*stay calm* *stay calm*

Me: I can't help you go to an apple store and ask there. *I Close the call*

*Add that number to blacklist*

Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.

Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...

Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).

Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"

> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.

What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.

JavaScript: you know how it is.

SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.

C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.

Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?

You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.

FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.

I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.

OK I can't deal with this user anymore.

This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.

I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"

Story Time:

When I first started working where I currently am, the manager at the time decided to send us off to a conference about one of the products our institution was purchasing at the time. She also thought that it would be a good way for me, the new guy, to bond with the rest of the staff.

During the presentations we found out that the people surrounding us were not exactly developers because of a couple of things:

1. Some examples were done with php and javascript for adding functionality to said product. The product gave you the opportunity to script on top of it (think of some sort of CMS, but it does not use PHP as its backend language) EVERYONE from the "class" in this particular workshop said they were developers. But at the sight of php in a group of 80 people or so, only about 7 recognized it, including myself and my team.

2. When they showed an example with Javascript, in particular jquery, one of the dudes in the workshop said (with extreme senior level confidence might I add) "yeah I never liked Javascript because you really can't connect it to any database in a website" <--- my face went 0.o and one of the actual developers doing the presentation did a Jim from the Office and looked at some out of screen camera.

3. During a conf talk, one PHD dude showed an example in the template language the CMS used (an obscure Java based template language)in which he was proudly calling out a technique he used to include one snippet of code into another one.....at that time, one of my coworkers squinted his eyes in disbelief, got close to me and said "is this man telling everyone in here that he discovered how to include a file? like, as a new thing?" me: "lol yes", him: "this is a waste of time, do the docs for this thing show how to do it or is he doing some sort of strange maneuver for something the platform does not support?" me: "let me check....nope, it is included, for some reason he made a function that takes the...name of the file he wants to include and passes it over to that call inside of the body....which as per the docs it is the include function...." him: ".....fuck, what a waste of time and money, fuck it lets spend a couple of more minutes here and then go get a drink or something"

That last part was my favorite really, the man speaking was not just any phd holder, but a comp sci phd holder. To this day my dude would walk into my office and say shit like "I DISCOVERED HOW TO INCLUDE A FILE WITH PHP!"

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Fucking shit fuck! Absolute cunty-chops of a Work phone just went off at 3am because our directory has clearly been leaked.

This cunt right here is on 24/7 fallout so I can nae silence the bastard. It’s going inte do not disturb for the evening now but.

About 6 months to a year ago we started getting nuisance calls on the cunts. On floated numbers that seem geographically close.

Work have done fuck all in this time, because considering changing ours is a pain in the dick, and costs.

But tonight at 3am I got another; call, immediate hang up on redial.

This wee iPhone prick is looking at me like “ho! Got ya ye fucker”... it’s lucky it’s not been punted out the winde where it belongs. Little fucking prick.

If I look like shit tomorrow at the office, if any prick decides to mention I look tired, I’m gonnae tear the ballbags a new hole between their baws and their arse.

It’s now 4am, sorry fe the language, my Glaswegian heritage shines through at this time in the morning.

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

This fucking idiot at work needs to use the pre release version of the iOS app for a training programme, and I swear I have tried my best to best to help him get the app on his phone.

I use Fabric and I chose because of how easy it is to install on a persons phone, but this is the situation so far. Also he lives a couple cities away so I can't do it myself.

I had to waste time waiting for him to call me, beforehand I sent the email, maybe 5 minutes before his call and told him that he needs to find the email, he says oh okay alright well I'll contact you if I have any problems.

I waited a day and sent a follow-up email on what the subject, from email, and even what the email looks like with screenshots.

No response for 3 weeks, and I bring it up in a meeting that I need to help him again.

So it's a literal fucking repeat of the first step, wait for his call, this time close to the end of my work day and he's 30 minutes late for his own fucking schedule, I thought whatever so I say the exact same thing BUT expecting him to get it out of the way while I'm on the phone...

Waited two days and sent him an email today and since I forgot to mention it, I've told him that this is to REGISTER to get the app. Guess what his reply was.

Sorry I can't get it on my phone!

He can't get what a fucking email to open on his phone and follow instructions a small bipedal animal could figure out?

It's literally follow the fucking icon moving they have gifs showing exactly what to click...

So tomorrow I have to somehow not blow up and get this app on his phone, honestly I understand some people can have issues with technical things but I got a guy at work that has trouble with his computer all the time to follow my same instructions without me needing to say more than I'll send an email all you need to do is follow the instructions, he actually enjoyed going through it.

...I swear this guy is just not even bothering, and I made sure I sent it to the right email, also second call he told me he found the email..

Y'all ain't gonna believe this shit... I'm at Starbucks, coding on my laptop. I just came outside to smoke a cigarette and right after I lit it, bird shit landed on the ground two feet to my right. 😥

Close call...

I used to work for a Mexican bank in Mexico, as a developer I opened (and use) an account, since the bank was not famous(most of its business was with the government), going to the bank and see no waiting lines was an advantage, so I started using it as my only bank account even nowadays.

Now I live in NYC, and some years later I see on the news the bank merged(was absorbed) with another bank, 'sounds good, I don't care' I thought.

Well, I open my online account and the nightmare begins:

1) Redirection to the 2nd bank page
2) My credentials does not work
3) Call the original bank(no answers)
4) After several calls and days I got a phone contact
5) 'well, try all other passwords you have' (transaction passwords, operative passwords, login passwords, etc), among many other stupid answers, which by the way, were preceded by infinite question about the 2nd bank, like:

- when did you open the account with the 2nd bank?
- what is your 2nd bank account number

6) after 20 calls like that, they asked for documents, information and screenshots, and send all that to the 2nd bank tech help email.

7) After several days a person responded: 'Go to your bank(which fucking bank?)' and ask for a new user.

8) a ton of calls to know what bank I was assigned

9) called the bank: 'well, you have to come in person(no exceptions allowed) and request to close your 1st bank account and open a 2nd bank account' (I am not sure if that is gonna work)

All the technology nowadays and still I have to travel thousands of miles hoping this 'solution' works.

to be continue....

!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.

One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.

A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.

That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".

After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".

So at work with the Macs we use, we have some guy come in after hours to service the Macs, and that means the security risk of leaving our passwords on our desks.

Not being a fan of this I tell my boss, he knows it's a risk and despite that he doesn't want this guy coming in while we're here.

Though my main problem is the Mac guy Steve is arrogant and thinks he's a know it all, and with the software I have on the Mac may end up deleting something important, I have git repo and all but I feel off just letting someone touch my computer without me being there.

I tell my boss about the software and stuff he just says contact Steve and tell him about it, to ignore the software and such, I say alright, I write up an email telling him not to touch the software listed and the folders of software documents (again it's all backed up).

No reply, I tell my boss and he says call him, I call him and he hangs up on me on the second ring!

Not sure if he's busy, but I left him a message, asking if he got my email, no reply and it's coming close to the end of the day (going to service Macs in the weekend)

I'm just not going to leave my info because if this guy can't check emails or even get back to someone why should I bother with this bullshit of risking my work.

From all the info I hear about him and my previous rants he's an arrogant prick who loves Macs.

Can't wait to leave this company, pretty sure leaving my password on my desk is a breach of our own security policy, and since 8-9 people are doing it, it's a major risk.

But he's friends with the CEO so apparently it's fuck our own security policy.

It was my first ever hackathon. Initially, I registered with my friend who is a non coder but want to experience the thrill of joining a hackathon. But when we arrived at the event, someone older than us was added to our team because he was solo at that time. Eventually, this old guy (not too old, around his 20s) ( and let’s call him A) and I got close.
We chose the problem where one is tasked to create an ML model that can predict the phenotype of a plant based on genotypic data. Before the event, I didn’t have any background in machine learning, but A was so kind to teach me.
I learned key terms in ML, was able to train different models, and we ended up using my models as the final product. Though the highest accuracy I got for one of my model was 52%, but it didn’t discouraged me.
We didn’t won, however. But it was a great first time experience for me.
Also, he gave me an idea in pitching, because he was also taking MS in Data Science ( I think ) and he had a great background in sales as well, so yeah I got that too.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

Fuck our new project manager.

Literally all she does in her time is schedule meetings for others and send us emails stating that X needs to be done by date or why are we delayed with Y. Then she even manages to completely screw us with the meetings she schedules.

Today I woke up to seeing a beautiful gapless column of colorful rectangles in my dairy.... for today. And last time I saw this Monday it only had 2.5 hours of meetings!!

Now a lot of us from our team had the Friday afternoon off so it may be that she did this beautiful piece of artwork during that time, in which case she could somewhat rightfully say that we should have taken a look at it. But we actually have a convention to only schedule planning meetings for Mondays which these fucking aren't and even if she hadn't known this, who the fuck schedules a ton of meetings to Monday?! from a Friday afternoon?!?!

By the way the new pretty pink and orange meetings I have today are about actually important topics in between which I would normally appreciate to grab a tea or at least use the fucking restroom. Officially I only have a 45 minute lunch break all day.

Oh and naturally she sets up the meetings as organiser so that we can only suggest her new times and can't change it on our own.

But naturally PM lady never actually attends the meetings because she wouldn't understand shit. So when my fav female colleague, Sammy and I joined our 11am meeting, the first thing Sammy said - well after I greeted her by "wtf" - is to just leave the call on while we grab brunch.

So here I am sitting in the close by park with my brunch and thought I could use the now extended lunch break time efficiently by ranting my ass of and asking you guys why the fuck such people like our PM get paid.

Call me a spoiled Linux kid but FUCK WINDOWS UPDATE!!
It's not even the shitty deployment cycle that they have for their updates, the real cancer is the fucking update app.
First off, if you fucking piece of shit already have the audacity to load gigabytes of updates over my 0.8mbit/s connection in the background, without my goddamn consent, at least let me PAUSE the fucking download!!! I don't see why the fuck you have to block my connection, and therefore me, from the most basic things like visiting a fucking website for more than a FUCKING HOUR to load useless updates, YOU PIECE OF BLOODSTAINED SHIT, I GOT SHIT TO DO.
And it doesn't stop there, noooo: then you even have the bloody fucking nerve to FORCE ME TO INSTANTLY RESTART AND SIT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING 40 MINUTE UPDATE PROCESS WHILE IM TRYING TO WORK.. WITHOUT THE ABILIT TO DELAY THE UPDATE!!! What the fuuuck?!

It is seldom that I am this 👌 close to just dd'ing /dev/null to my windows partition. Fuck you!!

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Depression and anxiety is a major challenge in my work life.
I could remember vividly when I was at my last job, any time I felt depressed I'll call for sick leave. It was hard for me to pinpoint the cause of my depression because even while on most sick leave I still felt depressed.
I blamed it on my job, blamed it on my family, on my social circle, on my friends, on my lifestyle, on almost everything. At some point it all felt like it was me versus the world, a fight I could never win.
Thoughts came in... Maybe it's because John is now married with two kids, or because Stella is now the new manager, or that David just bought a new Ross Royce and I'm still riding an ice-cream truck, or its because Steve is always on vacation and PM always complaining about uncompleted task with no acknowledgement for the 2 months task finished in a week, or because Boss is always calling for stupid meetings. Different thoughts in my head... Jealousy, Envy, Disappointment, Tiredness, Confusion, all combined at once.

But I did found a cure for my anxiety and depressed nature...
During lunch hours I visit a beach close to where I work, it's called "Tarkwa bay". I'll sit at the rock formations and glare at the shadows of the rising sun, listen to the sound of rumbling waters and passive the complete overview of nature. The feeling I get there is really calming, It occupies my head with neutral thoughts and a love for nature. 🤗
I truly experienced an improvement overall and it's been a while I felt depressed since I started such a routine.
Nature is really a gift.

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

!dev && rant

Can we talk about banks? Those fuckers! Suposed to keep our money save and be competent... They today gave me the biggest scare of my live and I've run one an update query on a prod db without a where clause! (Okay I knew we had a backup but still pretty scarry moment!)

As a few know, besides being a dev I help to organize a small openair music festival here in Switzerland. The openair was this weekend. Every thing wen't well, until I checked our ebanking account today. There was only 2/3 of the money that should be there. A quick call to the bank and they told me, nope they never received it. As we've thrown it in a secure locker during the night, we didn't receive any receipt or something like that. It took those fuckers 3.5 hours to actually go and check the looker, just to find the remaining money in the corner of it. What the fuck people, can't you open your fucking eyes and not give me a fucking heartatack? I thought you guys are professionals!

Note locker: we get a key to open it from the outside, place our payment during the night, as soon as we close it, it falls inside a vault, so there it's a pay in only system, for lack of a better word, I called it locker.

My heart is still beating like mad, because of them.

It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.

The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.

Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.

What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.

It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.

Then, I got an idea.

Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!

So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.

It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!

Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

I just had a boys-out night with my son. Went to some restaurant, found a parking spot in a confusing parking lot (half is more expensive than the other half of the lot, not sure which fee applies to the middle row... confusing), started paying for parking with the app (pays every 15 minutes until stopped).

Went inside, ordered a pizza, some ice cream. Chatting, playing, eating, having fun,... An SMS comes: "You have outstanding fines" and a link to the gov taxes' website.

wtf.. I must have parked in the wrong spot. FUCK! Oh well, it should not be a large fine anyways, it's just for parking....

Click on the link, login with my bank/SmartID creds. Another SmartID dialog pops up asking for a PIN2.
What? PIN1 is for authentication, PIN2 is for Authorization. What am I authorizing...?
Reading through the Auth message: "Paying 2473€ for Boris SomeLastname".

what.....?

Thank God my muscle memory did not kick in and I did not enter that PIN2.
And thank God I know what PIN1 and PIN2 are for.
It would've been one expensive boys-out evening... Even a strip club would've been cheaper.

Stay sharp, guys!

P.S. Later I checked the URL. It used all the right keywords, and it was registered as an .info domain. It was somewhat off, but gov websites trying to be lean do sometimes use some weird ass domains.

I have started using the input lockout when supporting colleagues.

The phrase "don't touch anything" must be code for "close all my windows"

Last one actually rebooted her machine in the middle of a (manager requested) intervention...

I got some very strange looks in the office to my "good afternoon, I'm calling to inform you that you will need to speak to HR to reinstate your credentials as I have accidentally marked you as a leaver while doing some database maintenance, I'll transfer you now, please hold" phone call, especially as we don't actually have access to do that lol

I put her on hold to myself while I finished then advised that "I'm sorry HR are busy, but I've managed to undo the mistake anyway, my apologies"

Kept her away from the machine so it was lawful evil right?

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

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

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

Voice: "you forgot to pay for the fuel"

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

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

5 minutes later phone rings again.

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

you call that number. A woman picks up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.

Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).

Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did

Reverse engineering an applications internal object model and creating an database model for it...

The reason: Several versions of application exist, each deliver flat data by rest. The data is a complete potpourri of several different entities. *yaaaay*

Eg. an example fictional call (real call and data would get me in trouble I think....)

get_fiscal_report returning the fiscal data for _several_ companies, the companies _subsidiaries_ and the respective _segments_ for a _year_ with a key value enumeration.

So it's an happy fuck up of N:N associative data that usually would be a hierarchical relationship...

Year - Company
Each Company has subsidiaries
Each Company subsidiary has segments
Each segment has a fixed enumeration of keys
Each key has then the monetary value (e.g. 'operating_income' - 155_000 US-$)

Example is made up, but my data contains exactly such a lovely nested hierarchical data flattened and misnamed to a point where it's close to garbage.

Yaaaay.

I had now 6 days of untucking this mess to a usable database representation...

Sprinkling Unique Keys everywhere...

Running persist script...

Getting exceptions...

Changing associations...

Running persist script...

Screaming.

Changing associations...

Violently cursing.

Running persist script.

Starting sacrificing interns...

6 days.

I need a new brain and a format of my soul.

-.-

Reverse engineering proprietary software is really an morbid adventure.

So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.

There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.

I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.

He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..

So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...

What do I do?

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update from mg previous rant.

The person who was supposed to set up the home internet arrived before the time frame forced upon us, they gave him the wrong number to call and he apparently waited a whole hour ringing at the door (which I call bullshit, because I was waiting on the couch close to the door in advance.)

Time to inform myself if I can legally send them an invoice for the lost work hours

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

when you're in an online job interview and after it your laptop only has 3% of juice left :)

!dev

I went on a date over two weeks ago. It seemed to go well, but the next week she called me and said she wasn't interested, giving reasons why.

I was disappointed but responded as friendly and responsibly as possible. It was the first time a girl had said no to me, so it hurt.

While it hurt to be rejected, I also felt relief because her reasons prevented us from continuing down a path of mismatched expectations.

The next day, I told a close friend about the outcome of the date because he knew of my interest in the girl. We talked and laughed about it like a missed train on a rainy day.

Just last night, my friend told me he met with the girl, and I was shocked. He said he didn't know why she had said no and wanted to talk to her to try to change her mind.

I was angry because I felt this was a dumb move. He said he was only trying to help because he thought she was a good match for me.

I had already closed that chapter and moved on, so I told my friend I didn't care what they discussed and that I had seen her missed call on my phone. If she calls me again, I won't pretend everything is okay and will let her know that I never sent my friend to convince her further.

He told me to pick up her call and hear her out, but I personally find it disturbing if someone needs to be convinced by a friend to get a positive response.

Yes. I was disappointed by the rejection, but I respected her decision. I was frustrated by my friend's actions, but I will stick to my decision and not pretend everything is okay if she contacts me again.

She just sent a text now! oh my f*cking friend…

Not specifically a Dev job, but I did do a bit of development at this wifi startup. It was a wifi shop where we set up wifi for hotel clients all over the US. Anyways, they said I would make great money doing "on call" support, and me being an intern and naive I said absolutely I'd do it. Well 3 months later I was put on call essentially every day and one weekend I was with my mother and it was her birthday. At her party at this nice restaurant, with all of our close friends/family, I got a call. It took me 45 minutes to solve because of how idiotic the clients were, and after that I got 4 more calls equally as frustrating and long throughout that night. I asked for help from employees, the owner, ANYONE. Nobody helped. Needless to say I emailed the owner and said farewell that following Monday.

My LinkedIn is usually pretty quiet. Recently I've received quite a few messages from recruiters. Some of them put numbers in and I look at them, well, the market looks hot.

I like where I am but doesn't hurt to have a look around eh? So I went through some interviews and shit. No preps, not trying to please anyone, being completely honest. And out of the 3 I tried, 1 got to the final round.

Before the final round, the recruiter kept harassing me (it's their job really) about what my "bottom line" is. She said they really liked me but I'm not up to their expectation as a senior role. So they want to proceed with a non-senior role, then climb my ladder up. I told her, I don't give a shit about the title. The she said for that, the salary will be "adjusted" (reads reduced). I told her, look, I said I wouldn't bother if the offer is anything less than X amount of money. Then she said but this company would offer 10% bonus, which will add up , mind you, "close to" X. She said she wanted to know so we don't waste the director's time (as the final round is to meet the bloody director).

I said, if I need to disclose my bottom line before going to this, which is pretty much my negotiation, then let's call it off. No point wasting my time either.

The next day I received the last call from her. They fucked right off.

I know everyone here already knows. But let me experience be another example of how a plague recruiters is. I don't have any experience like this before but this is probably a fucking lowball case too.

when you have to use one language inside of another, and you basically have to call functions allowing you to call the other's language function within it, and you get the hell confused, since it gets harder and harder to see what is what and who can call who and how, and the compiler ofc. won't say anything about it since it only cares about the main language you are in and not the nesting of the other...
I just have no idea what I'm doing right now, or if my thought process and understanding of this is even close to where it is supposed to be.
D: I'm just confused and insecure about this right now....

time for experiments to figure this out, and get the hang of it

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

I understand that some people have trouble with home office.

Well. I don't.

But at least have the fugging frigging respect and
1) answer my bloody questions, especially if I'm frigging nice and make a questionaire and notify you without a shitty meeting.
2) when you ask for an appointment during non working hours.... Then don't be fucking late and especially don't fucking miss it without telling.
3) And don't... Don't fucking give me a bullshit excuse like "yeah, I forget".
At least an honest apology....

I'm currently really close to murder people or call an meeting where I declare that waiting for appointments will be counted as work time.

(hint: this is the fucking sixth time in 4 weeks someone fucked up. And I'm really pissed)

So, I move house with my amazing, already configured and stable router with built in VPN, DDNS, Port forwarding and DHCP addresses.

Received ISP shitty router at new address and want to use as modem only, so I go read the manual.

"Bridge mode requires you to configure your other router with PPPoE and the ISP's credentials"

Landline is not working, so I cannot call the number to retrieve my password. After 2 days of waiting, engineer visits, installs master socket, dial tone yaaay.

Call number to get password, automated voice message has such a bad sound quality that I cannot figure out if it's saying F or S, and there are two of those letters.

Put ISP router in bridge mode, set other router to PPPoE and put credentials, nothing. Try with F and F, S and F, F and S, S and S... Nothing. Put it back to dynamic IP address, it works.

I resign myself and manually configure everything I had on the good router to the ISP one. A few issues with my server and DDNS, but hey, internet works.

Start missing the other functionality, try the password idiocy again. Nothing.

Next day, go to work, talk to a colleague that lives close and has the same provider: "I just put it into bridge mode and it worked".

Go back home, bridge mode on ISP router, Dynamic IP on good router, no credentials. It works.

Why do I always overcomplicate stuff?

Using the company's desktop computers to solve cryptographic puzzles (like mining) on the company's computers while the boss and someone from the IT were asking to have a look on the machine after one guy already snatched my keyboard.

Very scary moment indeed but surprisingly it turned out: the real reason why they came was because a techadmin recently removed a shared system account but some faulty clients kept flooding the servers with outdated login credentials which also triggered mass SMS on the mobile devices.

Luckily I could somehow take an opportunity to remotely call the script which pulled the emergency brake which I prepared to shut down everything. Close call.

Nowadays I think it itsn't worth to take the risk just to do something that could also be done with the own home computer even it takes five times longer.

I label all packages I know are coming as being for a company: Derp Industries. This is from an old in-joke between my friends and I. This tells me whether a package was something I ordered or not from the label (as I often forget I have a package coming.) However, I just got a call from a DHL driver asking me how long we'll be open. I, uh... I told him we close at 8. He said that's perfect, as he has to pick up from the local holding station at 5 and i'm his first stop.

I'm tempted to call back and tell him I'm just a dude living in a trailer...

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

Man I am tired of my company's dogshit software release process.

We have to commit to fucking estimates for 6 months (2 quarters), SQA shadowing dev by 2 weeks, and freaking estimates and work done at the end are not even close. And then we call it a minor release. These shitty estimates are based on requirements that basically say "we want feature x, plz make it work". It's some fucked up agilefall garbage that does not work for shit.

We rush like motherfuckers during the final weeks because estimates are bullshit but we are still expected to be done with every story points which somehow are days instead of other better metrics.

I swear this fucking bullshit has been designed by the board so they could plan their money entries based on the software release.

The only reason this company actually still holds itself up is because the engineers are good at their job.

Go fuck yourself high management.

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

everytime i buy a new phone ,i feel this sense of extreme regret :(

i bought a moto g 5g phone last year in feb, it was so good . it didn't had any out of the world cameras or some funky stuff, but it gave a decent performance and i couldn't want any other phone.

In October my mom's phone started giving issues so i bought a realme phone for her that was half my phone's price. i couldn't spent any mor e because otherwise she wouldn't take it. she accepted the cheaper phone and within 4 days sue was cursing it. the phone had decent specs but would lag in certain apps like zoom, and won't run some call recorder apps. at the end i swapped my phone with mom's since i didn't cared about zoom or the recorder.

now this shit realme phone's memory has gone around 60% full of my stuff, and its showing its limitations. this shit auto relaunches insta after a few minutes of usage, probably because its runtime memory gets short( 4gb 128gb device gets memory shortages. nice). its video quality is shit and camera also takes rarely good pics.

the worst thing i like about smartphones today is how they over optimise the ui. this insta issue and auto call recorders not working is simply because of the realme skin running over the stock android. i had similar issues with a xiaomi device i bought for my dad sometime ago. (fortunately my dad is more medieval so that crap has not came back to me :'/ )

so overall i am buying a 3rd phone in 17 months.
This time it's Samsung f23 and am worried that it's also going to suck. i was this 🤏close to buying a pixel 6 or even an iphone coz i can afford them.

but the regret of buying such an expensive phone that will need replacement in 2 years made me rethink.

the only android os that have suited me the best is stock and as of now only 2 companies are making it : google and moto(* it's 100% aosp with 3 extra apps but they can't say that, so they also state that they are not stock os) . one plus is also a brand that i have heard makes a good os . but recently i also heard that they have completely scrapped their os and using oppo's softwares . plus the amount of tickets we get for notifications not working in oneplus, am sure their optimization is extremely aggressive.

so everything between a moderate price phone ( that will need a replacement in 2 years ) to a flagship felt unnecessary to me, so i went ahead with a Samsung's shit phone. f23 has almost same specs as moto but it's again a heavily customised os. i wanna waste my money on trying a custom os and declare it shitty.

most of my friends that use Samsung are fan of it but they are also not very techy so i guess it suits them well. i am the guy who first installs nova launcher in his device, so let's see what it brings on the table. from the 3rd person p.o.v, i felt its screen and camera images to he nice whenever i used their mobiles, so let's see what this brings to the table :(

I just remembered some of the "harmless" dev-related insults I've received over the years:

1) most recently, I shared a tool with an acquaintance cuz it bears the same name as something he put together a while back. Background: this guy likes to come across as having infinite programming knowledge and brags to his fb pals about being an expert in multiple languages. While trying to make sense of the cryptic docs of the package I sent him, he implies I don't know what the iframe or html5 canvas are. Claims not to elaborate what package does cuz the docs is meant for advanced desktop and mobile devs

It hurt because this is one of few people who know I built suphle, yet thinks so lowly

2) as you can tell from the first point, I share links I consider interesting with relevant contacts. I'm also quite vocal about my (mostly contrarian) takes on occurrences within the dev space that I'm familiar with. One day on the laravel board, this dude is reprimanding me and asks me to take the opinions I read on blogs and tabloids with a pinch of salt, implying I didn't form them independently but was influenced by what was written by some stranger online

It hurt because I expected him to know better. I felt I'd sufficiently proven to have actually built things that informed my school of thought

3) the oldest happened many years ago but I remember it now because the perpetrator called me out of the blue last week. I was teaching his boss, who managed an office but preferred to keep his student status hidden, to avoid being thought incompetent. This caller guy just so turned out to be learning js at the time. Fast forward some years, we all disbanded. He'd landed a dev job and was doing well. So I sent him one of those js gotchas, asking him to explain his answer

After he replied, I told him his answer was close enough but it had more to do with js passing closure arguments by reference. Dude responded that he knew that was the correct answer but wasn't aware I knew what closures meant. That stung me like hell back then. I missed his call and didn't know who owned the contact, so I searched my chats and saw that last interaction. Pain all over again

I can't recall one single person I can call a mentor, however...

When I first started as a developer I had a senior to work with... I knew close to anything but I was always good at research and learning on my own... But we used an asp.net framework, it was new and there was little to no useful information, only basics... When I asked the senior (let's call him Joe) for help he gave me a quick answer:
Joe: Go to file xx, there's an example of what you need there...
Me: Well, been there and that's great but it doesn't help...
Everytime I was stucked during my first week it was always some sort of the same, so I insisted this time...
Me: so, Joe... I'm really stuck on this one, can you give it a look?
Joe: I know, I've been researching a way to do it for an hour now and can't get it either...
Me: wow! Thanks... But I thought you were an expert on this...
Joe: not really, never used it before. It's as new to me as it is to you! :)

So, that switched me from "this fucking weasel won't help me for shit" to "well, let's help each other"

We became good friends, always challenging each other and from that day on I stopped asking for help, and asking where can I help others...

I had great and greatly bad colleague and seniors. Each one thought me something either what to do or what not to do, how to act or not, how to tackle problems, how to teach...

Everyone I have worked with, worked for or trained is a mentor of mine. Even those I feel like I failed training thought me how to do better next time...

Thank you guys for being grate... Thank you assholes for teaching me how to send a guy go fuck himself! Good luck for those who get stucked with me

In-laws are vacationing in London right now (wife's parents and aunt/uncle), so to keep in touch with the kids, I installed+configured Skype on their phones (these are folks in their 70s, no where close to tech savvy), I think they are good to go.

Last night we try to connect (I 'see' them online)...nothing, so we call.

Me: "Did you see or hear the skype notification?"
Grandma: "Was that you? My phone made a weird sound I never heard before and I saw your picture. I wasn't sure what to do so pressed the red button."
Me: "Its the same sound and picture I showed you before you guys left, remember? That's OK, the kids want to see you and say hi. Hang up and when you hear the sound and see my picture, click the green accept button"

I try again...ring..ring...nothing. About a second later we receive a text "Grandpa hit something and your picture went away. What do I do now?"

So, I try again...ring..ring...they finally pick up (we can only hear them)

Grandma: "Hello...hello? I don't hear or see anything, damn it Fred, what did you hit?"
Grandpa: "Nothing Betty, you aren't holding it right, turn it sideways .."
Wife: "Guys..we can hear you, can you see us?"
Grandpa: "Press this button with the line crossed through it .."
Wife: "Dad.."
Grandpa: "Hey!..See Betty, you had the phone turned wrong. Can you see us?"
Me: "No, you may have hit the video button..it looks like a little video camera, press it."
Grandma: "We did...nothing happened."
Me: "Are you sure? Try it again. The image may be grey or a little darkened, I don't remember."

Then we lose the sound.
Wife: "Oh good Lord they muted us. We're going to have to forget Skype and call them..."

All of a sudden we get video and sound. Cheers all around.

Then I hear in the background..

Uncle: "I thought 'PaperTrail' knew what he was doing? Apparently not."

I heard that and FU you, you old bastard. If you weren't a millionaire and paid for their London trip, I'd take 'knew what he was doing' and shove it up your ass when I see you.

Today I was minding my own coding-committing-pushing business, when all of a sudden, a split second before typing Enter on a command, the obnoxious UPDATE JAVA popup reared it's ugly head.

Normally I just politely recommend it to fuck off and let me manage my Java versions with homebrew on my own time. But I had no time to not press Enter, and so it rapidly started downloading/installing.

Thankfully I had juuust enough time to hit the cancel button. The progress bar it was showing stopped at 81%. Didn't even have time to read what it said. Crisis averted. Them NSA fucks be like, "curses, foiled again!"

This was probably the most intense moment of the year for me. I think my lifespan grew shorter a few months.

Dreaded auto-updates are getting smarter. They nearly got me when I was in a vulnerable state of hitting Enter many times. Stay on your toes!

I told my new Director that I am not one for going with third party vendors. He claimed that I was biased. I am really.

But I told him that support and troubleshooting are the main reasons why I dislike third party vendors as well as the request for X software to do Y non supported thing, they always state during a sales call that they can accommodate, they never do.

As an example, I send them the logs of a support ticket for one particular piece of software that we have, for which I detailed the situation, only for them to NEVER respond and then after 5 days close the ticket stating that I never replied back to them, even when they never replied back.

A custom made in house solution will always be superior to your run of the mill all encompassing app. But try and make a non dev understand this. I wish my old director was back. I miss the fuck out of that dude. Loved working for him.

So after school i was kinda roaming around, taking the odd paid programming job for clients, not really making any money, but also quite struggling because I was walking around with undiagnosed ADHD, for about the last 2ish years, not really making any money.

Since this February friends told me I might have ADHD, so I had it checked. Turns out I have been walking around with severe ADHD all my life :P That explained a fuckload... and now I got medication that works, yay!

Flash forward to 3 weeks ago, still not doing any work, all of sudden I get poked on linkedIn "hey we need a developer, wanna work for us?"

I wasnt really looking and since it was a message on linkedIn I figured it was just another of those overpromising recruiters, but it was very close to where I live so I decided to call them directly to check it out, expecting literally nothing, nor was I looking for work.

Roughly a week after that call I got a job as team lead backend developer...

Wait I was a total mess in the last 2 years, how did I end up as lead over an intern and 2 contracted freelancers?!?! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?

Sofar I am enjoying it.

So so so frustrated why is finding the right job such a fucking hassle! Landed my first junior dev job that was not what I was expecting mostly I work jira ticket written my middle aged morons to update PDF's servers that never had anything deleted from them 100k of files and about 10k folders shit you not. Don’t delete anything co worker deleted a file that took down a couple thousand person call center.

Looking at other junior positions with junior in the title and they want 4-7 years expierence at two different places. WTF if I have 7 years I would think I would a senior dev or close to one.

Just there is such a disconnect between the people who post the ads and vett the candiates to the hiring managers.

Does it get better? Started going to meet ups to meet more experienced devs in my area but still trying to find the right fit.

So I have this code written in node:

Function connect(){
const client = net.blahblah

client.on('close', () => {
Connect()
}
}

As the connect is called from within the close call back, it wouldn't be recursive right? Like if it disconnected a million times, it shouldn't throw a recursion error or use up a bunch of memory right? Or am I thinking about it wrong?

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

The old method of how to deal with semi close friends needing support still works:
1) Redirect their call to voice mail.
2) If the mention computer problems, ignore them for now.
3) Call back in at least 4 hours. By then, they've probably solved it using Google.

(Why "semi close friends"? Because if they're close, I take their calls and if they're not close, I'm not their free support service. And if they're close and want a lot of free labour, they'll soon find themselves distant.)

Our clients came from abroad to have 4 days of business meetings and planing about next stage of product development. Of course they wanted to go shopping and to restaurants etc. Obviously they can not call a cab because they cannot say the name even close to its correct pronunciation. Who do you think needed to babysit them? You guessed right - me. FUCK MY LIFE

You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.

And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.

He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.

He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him

He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.

You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.

I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.

I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.

The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .

He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.

You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.

I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .

Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.

I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”

I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.

You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.

I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread

Fucking Eclipse at it again.

Colleague was setting up their IDE for working with the ABAP R/3 backend, we use. To speed up the process, colleague A is sending the zipped plugins folder to the new colleague B and telling them to put them into the directory of where eclipse is stored.

Like a good and neat person, B renamed the folder plugins into plugins _old and unzipped the other folder in there. Clicked on eclipse and nothing worked, Error message immediately.

B then proceeded to tell A that it didn't work. A then asked "how did you copy the stuff in there?", and B said that they backed up the original and put the new one in there (mind you, technically that should work, because the eclipse versions were pretty close to eachother, only like a few patches apart).

And then A said, "No No No, you need to just overwrite it."
So that's what B did. Okay so original plugins folder has been overwritten with the sent plugins folder. B clicks eclipse.

Eclipse starts, and shows loading screen.

For like 5 minutes.

Then crashes with sone random error message.

B asks A what's going on, and what cracked me up was, that A just said: "Yeah, it's supposed to crash, just restart it".
So B clicked it again, it launched for another like 5 Minutes and then opened normally, with everything where it should be.

B asks then, if that's normal, and the other devs in the call replied "Yeah, we did it like that too"

ngl, that was one of the funnier teams meetings i had in a while

i am seeing this weird pattern of people getting too much close to their work colleagues and i am unable to understand the why behind it .

so one of my homies is a kind of introvert but a smart genius IT guy who ended up with a rich paying job.

now, his job is mostly wfh and 1 day wfo, but he has engrossed himself in his company so much that i fail to understand why. like,
- he would go to his office for 3-5 days instead of 1
- he would plan trips/vacations with his colleagues and bosses
- he would go to different cities/countries to attend the meetings that are happening virtually too( basically a zoom call where some people are joining from office and some from home)
and so on. basically instead of spending time with his homies/family, he prefer spending time with work people.

another guy is doing somewhat similar . basically he runs a legal firm, and instead of having a strict boss employee relation with his interns, he would bring them to his home, celebrate birthdays/parties with them in clubs, and even bring them to our homie gang trips.
as of late ,those trips now don't even include us :'(

-----

i fail to understand why. my work culture is so shit, i just wanna complete a fucking year here and grab my bonus and leave. most of the team that i work with is in a different city, we are asked to work from office that is 40 km away from my home, other colleagues are practical snakes and i am not even interested to see their double-faced faces even during work hours, leave alone after-hours.

another guy among us is a tution teacher and this fella is taking coaching classes even on weekends. i don't know whats wtong with people of my age. we haven't crossed even 26 and we are all running some rat races.

i need some people in my life with whom i can spend some hours relaxing without worrying about my job or backstabbing

Previously, I've shared a story about the internship at an IT department for a local "center for student guidance". This was back when I was in high school.

Since nearly everyone was incompetent with tech, we often got a call for dumb IT errors. We got a call that a user had a black screen and could not work anymore with her computer.

So we went to troubleshoot, she was correct... A black screen but her computer was still booted. So we moved the mouse and the mouse showed up. We pressed escape and she could continue...

She called the IT department because she was on the last dia of her powerpoint and the text for "press escape to close the dia presentation" has disappeared. She never touched her keyboard or tried anything :D

So I'm in college and I work as a web developer for a company inside of the college. I get out of my four hour class on mondays early to get a call from my PM saying that he totally spaced on the fact that we have a meeting in a half hour. Needless to say I quickly brought up what I had done, ran back to the office, and then proceeded with the client meeting when I got there.

The meeting went fine. Client was happy with the progress I had made. My IT lead however went on an hour rant with me on some of the things I said in the meeting and then berated for over an hour. (There's more context go look at a my other rants and you'll find it. )

Needless to say I was pissed. I had made the deliverable the client was pleased and I showed up to an unscheduled meeting. I was this close to decking my IT lead he made me so mad.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.

as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)

-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)

previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...

but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.

friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.

no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.

so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone

------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.

once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.

but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.

if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.

i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.

mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?

but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔

Special work area meeting. Partners from around the globe came in. Call in or you flew in. Close enough, have to attend in person. Hundreds of people there. Starts at 9, broke at noon, picked back up at 1, ended at 6. Focus? Improving sales. About 98% of the people there did not make sales. About 70% did not work on bids and proposals. It was extremely painful and boring. And my project manager didn't know why we were so upset the next day. It had been extremely "informative" to her.

After spending the year after graduation trying to do a business with some school friends, that didn't make a dime for a year, I decided to look for a real paying job.

My first step was to go to a hackathon and hack for the week-end. I got involved in not one, but 2 projects: the second was because someone I met and won with at a previous hackathon asked me to, and I finished the first project early. Let's call her "S"

Then comes the end of the hackathon, and after it concludes I muster the courage to go on stage and say that I'm looking for a job, so feel free to chat me up.

No one really came to me for a job, but S came to talk to me about the startup she wants to launch, and how she is looking for a tech guy. I was close to dismiss it, because I was looking for a job paying $$$, but agreed to met so that she could show me her business plan and try to convince me.

Turns out she did convince me, because the business plan was solid, she was very motivated, and had already started validating the idea: there was a real need.

Now there we are, 5 years later, about 10 employees and paying ourselves real salary.

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

Other guy on a project (in college), let's call him piece of shit or pos for short.

For 2 months pos has done nothing. Absolutely nothing. When I asked, he said he had some exam. Or some other exam. Or some other bullshit. (I have acads too, and juniors have more than us - college is taking its covid frustration out on them)

Yesterday I asked again, to make a presentation to be given today. I worked on this presentation for 3 days but it didn't turn out good, so deleted my work and asked pos to do it (fresh perspective etc). Meanwhile I'm working a second project (which has a different story).

Pos does nothing yesterday. At 1 AM I tell him to send me the presentation if he's done. Pos says he'll pull it off during the night. He doesn't.

A few minutes ago he pings our juniors to give him screenshots. Basically demanding them. When someone responds with emojis, "Don't give me this (emojis), give me screenshots asap". He's done close to nothing for the juniors overall.

How do I get someone like this to work and treat the other members with some respect?

So I'm in college and I work as a web developer for a company inside of the college. I get out of my four hour class on mondays early to get a call from my PM saying that he totally spaced on the fact that we have a meeting in a half hour. Needless to say I quickly brought up what I had done, ran back to the office, and then proceeded with the client meeting when I got there.

The meeting went fine. Client was happy with the progress I had made. My IT lead however went on an hour rant with me on some of the things I said in the meeting and then berated for over an hour. (There's more context go look at a my other rants and you'll find it. )

Needless to say I was pissed. I had made the deliverable the client was pleased and I showed up to an unscheduled meeting. I was this close to decking my IT lead he made me so mad.

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

TYPO3: You can use this hook to modify all links generated on the website. Well, all links except those few over there, which for some reason use a completely different class that does basically the same thing, and will even call your hook, but then ignore the result completely.

Me: Fuck you! I've spent almost a day trying to find the right hook, because they are all undocumented, have stupid names and every time I get close to a solution, some other part of your code decides to circumvent the hook.

Also me: After spending hours sifting through the depths of the TYPO3 core, I seriously wonder why it works at all. Spaghetti code, classes fetching properties directly instead of using the getters, loads of global variables... Wtf is wrong with that thing?

And people say WordPress is shitty code.

Cable/Internet outage. Tried to contact ISP (Mediacom, who are awful)... Reported outage over an hour ago, but no update.

So, I figure it's time to call then...

In support app, selected "Call someone now." Selected sevices. Drop-down for "Tap down arrow for list"... contains the single placeholder "Tap down arrow for list". Plus, of course, you cannot submit the form without making a selection from the list.

Fuck your fucking support app right in the java-hole, Mediacom.

I did not need any more reasons to hate you - you are already at the top of my list, with no one else remotely close behind.

I wonder what the time requirements would be to use a standard lib to animate a robotic arm that chokes people so hard their eyes pop out of their heads

What would be the N per cm2 ? How do I calculate things like mechanical advantage cumulatively over finger segments or should I make it one blunt clamp ?

Is there a sensor I could attach to determine the deformation force and yielding of the flesh beneath the hand so as not to ramp the actuator up too high causing the tips to simply go straight through

And can I wear the thing and operate it via a blue tooth enabled audio capture device so I don’t have to add the scope of a mechanism to lure these bastards close and can just chase them joyously down the halls and position the hand manually around their neck

I’ll call it the mechanized bionic joy inducer

Or maybe arm. The automated rectification machine

Maybe hand

But I don’t know how to fit any word but happiness into that acronym

I’ll think on it again
I hate you all you disgusting garbage filled diseased fucking wastes of space and air ! And who fucking said you people can breathe my air anyway ? It’s my air get your own you chomo fucking fucks !

!tech i don't understand how people makes any place a home?

I have an experience of living with my parents and that is a place where i feel belonging and safe, but i wonder why? like , in your home, you could be awake till 4 am and still sleep like a log. you won't have thoughts of strangers trying to murder you or rob you when you hear the slightest noise. (atleast not occasionally)

but this is not the case when you try to live alone. for eg , i would often call/text someone before sleep when i am staying in a hotel room. and if the hotel isn't a superior one (imagine those close, small rooms w in a broken up 2 star hotel in a quiet and unpopulated area), i would be sleeping with my eyes open, praying the night to get over

So an early conclusion can be this : a person would feel safe and carefree wherever they are with known people. in my home i got my parents. although its weird since they are neither physically nor financially powerful to deal with any stranger situation. But still, a home feels home. and a home feels safe.

maybe it's because of the the people around the home? so most people have neighbours, shops, parks, efc around their homes. some even have forests, police stations or other places in vicinity. so does that make an area safe to breathe ?

For our family, i don't know if that thing applies. our neighbours are crappy dummies who would rather have someone's home burning than coming for rescue, but fight to death if someone parks in their spot or ask them to fix something. If their is a robbery in our area, i would rather suspect one of those assheads to be the culprits than someone from outside.

however, knowing the fact that they know us makes me think that this is a considerable factor that add to the sense of safeness in an environment . i guess that's why even the verbal quarrels among neighbours are done in such a noisy manner.

So if someone is shifting to another location, say in a different city or even a different state, they should spend first few days befriending every neighborhood person? that would be a weird approach. i have seen a few shiftings in my area and the new people rarely try to come into attention. even the people who get shifter on temporary basis (i.e the rent based pg/tenents etc), are always silent.

so how exactly does anyone make a new house, their comfortable and safe 'home' ?

I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.

My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.

I got my first computer when I was 16.

Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.

Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.

My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.

My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.

They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).

They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.

I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.

Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.

long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"

TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!

The rant starts here: you can tell that again, while I'm waiting for the Commercial guy to finish his not urgent at all phone call for us to close a proposal until 2 hours from now. looks great....

Let's say I take a matrix of high entropy random numbers (call it matrix J), and encode a problem into those numbers (represented as some integers which in turn represent some operations and data).

And then I generate *another* high entropy random number matrix (call it matrix K). As I do this I measure the Pearson's correlation coefficient between J (before encoding the problem into it, call Jb), and K, and the correlation between J (after encoding, let's call it Ja) and K.

I stop at some predetermined satisfactory correlation level, let's say > 0.5 or < -0.5

I do this till Ja is highly correlated with some sample of K, and Jb's correlation with K is close to 0.

Would the random numbers in K then represent, in some way, the data/problem encoded in Ja? Or is it merely a correlation?

Keep in mind K has no direct connection to J, Ja, or Jb, we're only looking for a matrix of high entropy random numbers that indicated a correlation to J and its data.

I say "high entropy", it would be trivial to generate random numbers with a PRNG that are highly correlated simply by virtue of the algorithm that generated them.

Last week I got a call I thought it was a screen interview, but turned to be a technical interview for a job I probably applied for back in 2015.

Today, I got a call for face to face HR interview next week which is going to be in the middle of the day and the company is about 1 hour away from my home/work.

Right now, I am feeling good at my current company. Nice salary, only me and manager but we are hiring, and its close from home.

The other company, is a bigger company, salary is unknown, and working hours are less but if you count driving hours it will be much longer! And work will be related with SharePoint “0 Experience” and Web Developments.

PS: Both companies aren’t tech companies!

Even tho I am happy here, I have this thing inside me that asks me to change jobs and challenge myself learning about new technologies “Or technologies I have never worked with”!

However, If keep doing this I won’t settle and If I find myself stuck at a job I hate and try to move to other companies, they won’t hire me because I keep moving!

I hate overthinking these stuff,
and just need to get it off my shoulders!

You dipshits! Yet again...
- use contract X from team WeJustFuckUp
- WeJustFuckUps tell me I "used the contract with the wrong semantics"
- What the fuck how is that possible!? Explain to the fuck ups that if it's the wrong semantics then it shouldn't be documented. Ask what right semantics is... They do not support their own correct semantics...
Fuck you! Just say you fucked up and come to me with a new contract!

Two weeks pass, new contract breaks half the functionality... And they ask me: "is it a problem? Can't you use it as is?"

Now listen here you pile of elephant dung, you have an unresponsive system with an unscalabe architecture... You have twisted contracts and you come to me to fix them!? I have more to do then to babysit your assess!

I am so tired of your bulshit... You are a bunch of prairie dogs hitting keyboards and call yourself developers!? My dog is a better developer, he at least does not break he's own software and when he takes a massive dump he owns it...

I am this close to making a request of changing your work computers to an abacus! It's all you can handle...

Fuck off! You are waste of resources and your parents should be spanked!!