When you want to contribute but Stackoverflow says "fuck no".

I was writing tests at work and rather enjoying myself.

Boss insisted we all go home early because "holiday halfsies," so I semi-unhappily pack up and go home. At home, I write tests for a personal project instead.

Dev life.

1. Promise anything, everything to clients
2. Set unrealistic deadlines
3. Devs can't meet deadlines
4. Blame the devs

Anyone?

"Please read attached email trail"

Fuck you.

someBoolean = (condition1 && condition2 ) ? true : false;

O.M.G....

Fuck you Citrix you piece of shit!

well shit this is in the git history now...

Am I doing it wrong?

I heard scary thing.
A tester found an issue yesterday. He came to the dev and reported about it. Apparently the only feedback message was "something went wrong". They spend almost an hour hunting down the cause for that. It turned out the error message was from one of the try-catch. I do not know much details apart from that. At the end, the dev lead said this (which he had said before).

"That's why I don't like to catch exception."

Every time I got a mandatory security question, I type in "go fuck yourself with a cactus". There's only one answer for all of them.

SQL injection holes everywhere... The original author of the product put concatenated SQL queries throughout the whole application. If it's not the client asked for a penetration test, we as developers wouldn't even be given chance to fix this shit.

I'm actually glad to have the chance. I can't live seeing them every day but force myself to ignore them.

Incompetence of people around me drives me mad. I see a piece of shit code and I can’t stop myself from improving it.
Also better developers around me. I need to find out how they’re better and beat them

I just spent a full hour basically telling someone not to use filter as forEach

Got a gift from my friend. It was from an Indiegogo project. It worked fantastically until it has broken recently.
Although 1 year warranty was promised according to the site, the fact that it's from Indiegogo means that's non existence (I'd say if you actually receive the thing, you're very lucky). So I disassembled it and had a look.
Now I'm thinking maybe I just need to hack my way in to find out what that blown chip is and if I can replace it.
I am also disgusted by the Chinese printed on the IC...

return (this.isBad) ? true: false;

Create value, not work
Can't believe I'm asked to do something that I feel is absolutely worthless
Okay, yes I know I need to get paid...
Let's just say I don't share the vision with whoever came up with these tasks

Still getting LinkedIn messages from recruiters who can't offer 1% I'm asking for.

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

My fellow dev (a younger guy) and I have been having a lot of disagreements with the lead dev (obviously a more experienced, older guy).
We can have arguments with him all day long, to explain and convince him that he's not that right, or not right at all.
Or we can keep silent and wait for shit to happen.
I'm already applying the stfu strategy myself... Because the other way round is exhausting.
At the same time, naturally, I'm looking for opportunities somewhere else. And, naturally, in those job ads, they state "X years of experience".
This further sets me off.
I'm sick of having an argument shut down because someone has X more years of experience, at a higher position, thinks he is better.
I am starting to hate people who boasts his years of experience instead of having the real knowledge and skills to create value.

Boss asks us to make sure out documents/instructions to clients are idiot-proof. I am not disagreeing this but usually clients are more idiotic than the most idiotic idiot you can ever imagine...

Just learned that yesterday someone suggested putting the dev team on "workspace", when I was on leave.

My first question, "what the hell is workspace?"
"It's a remote environment..."
Okay I get it. Are you kidding me? Doing development on remote desktop?

My second question, "Why the hell did someone suggest that?"
"We have had issues with devs using MySQL but the target prod will be using PostgreSQL. That caused issues, inconsistencies... And we found some issues after deployment."

Okay so much for DB agnostic. I called it out that everyone now install PostgreSQL on local. Problem solved, hopefully.

Why we had MySQL in the first place? Yes DB agnostic is one of the reason. The other being I'm more familiar with MySQL so it's quicker to perform tasks (like "can you clone that environment for me" and "can you fix the data on XYZ"). But that's trivial.

Just some ridiculous suggestion that set me off.

I rebooted a device that everyone uses
It has not come online yet
It's been an hour, and counting...

What a good timing we're all working from home eh?

So our HR have recently started to enforce arrival/departure time while also giving us a room for freedom (we can be at work from 7:30 till 9:00 and leave accordingly from 4:30-6:00)
So 2 weeks ago my manager asked me why on a date I didn't checkout/checkin, I looked out in my vacation log and sure enough it was a day off. I said to myself maybe be ause this day was requested last year they didn't remember it no problem
Anyway fast forward to today and my manager asked me why on the 25th of January I left (early) at 1?
What? I don't remember leaving early except for one day last week (Feb 7-personal reasons and was requested days before)
So i check my vacation log to see if I forgot something and i see that Jan 25 is a Saturday. We don't work on Saturdays! I go and check with my manager telling him that.
Then it hits me. I checked my taxi app and on Sat Jan 25 I had a ride at 1:22 AM!! from work to home. Yes i remembered that on that day I had to stay late for a project
WTF HR??!
Sorry for the long post

All of a sudden the Macbook Pro power adapter was broken yesterday. Guess how much does it cost just to replace it?

Fuck you Apple. If you're gonna overprice, it make it durable and good quality dammit.

Customers are so fucking stupid.

You're already on the page with a form with a "password" field and a fucking "save" button. WHY ARE YOU STILL ASKING ME HOW TO CHANGE YOUR FUCKING PASSWORD???

FUCKING STUPID CUSTOMER WHY DON'T YOUR FUCKING KILL YOURSELF???

FUCK!

This is probably not a popular comment, but here are the reasons I sometimes do not like working from home.

- if I don't get food, the kid starve
- if there's a meeting, the kid decides to play piano
- I have to watch delivered food that needs refrigerated to rot, while I really want to focus on that mudafukin bug
- if misus is not sleeping during the day, there is a 50% chance I smell something burnt in the house

Feel free to add to this list

You can type your code like an angry bitch as if you are gonna smash the fucking keyboard. I can live with that. But please don't knock on the desk every so often. That's just pointless and annoying.

Which of the following can successfully lead a company for digital transformation?

A) CEO
B) CTO
C) Covid19

Living on the edge!

One or two years ago I managed to deploy a DDL change directly on the production server. As I knew there was a backup job which will run every day at noon and at midnight. So I run my script some minutes after noon. So far so good. But somehow I tested it badly in my test environment and the UI of the application throws error after error now in production.

Well, just revert the db to the latest recovery point with the backup, I thought.

It became clear then after a couple of minutes of searching the backup folder for the db backup that there was no such file. The youngest backup file was 3 years old.

Now what happened: The backup script had a switch "simulate=true" and then simulated a successful backup on each run. Therefore the monitoring system got no alerts for not correctly executing those jobs correctly. Then the monitoring job which should do the backupfolder surveillance stuck with green, because there was a valid backup file inside. But it did not check for a specific creation date.

Now this database is the one we need for doing our daily business and is really crucial. Therefore It was easier to emergencyfix the application than doing a rollback of the db 🙄

Well, not really a data loss story, but close to one.

Gundam

Okay so my ticket got rejected because the on screen texts are not in the correct case (upper/lower). Totally fair because nowhere in the spec are those texts defined. As a developer I am also responsible for what "makes sense" for the user.

I'm just gonna say this next time I ask for a raise.

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.

Well, this week was a week from hell. It was a short 3 day week, and all of my internal Customers, who are normally pretty reasonable, just all unloaded on me at the same time. "We need this now!" "Have you done this?" "Why didn't you do that?" "We need you to do this, because our migration takes place in 30 minutes." (first notice of the migration). And then to top everything off, I'm creating a rollback DDL, and I've spent a couple of hours pulling my hair out, because a set of columns that need rolled back aren't in Prod, so I can't roll them back, because my own DDL drops them, and broadcast my natural meltdown to the entire DevOps team, feeling like an utter jackass after I realize my mistake. And even at quitting time, they are still walking up, and texting, and emailing. Holy f**k, I'm only going to be gone four days, two of them weekend, and will be back. All of this while trying to sell my house and pack boxes and move to an apartment. Can I retire now? Looks at retirement account... Nope, I'll be working until I'm 95. Just shoot me already!

We have a bunch of legacy applications that runs on Windows only. I'm pretty much the only dev here who doesn't use a Windows machine.

In order to run those applications, I need use remote desktop to a Windows VM.

I use a Mac. And I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Case in point, CMD + L to go to the address bar in the browser.

This happens every time when I need to access those applications.

me: *remote desktop to the VM
me: "oh I need to get to the index/landing page"
me: *CMD + L
VM: "I'm locked now"

Fuck timesheet
It's bad enough someone fucking disturb you in the middle of great thoughts. What's worse, you're QUESTIONED where the fuck your time was spent. So you need to work out how much time you have been disturbed, and put in the fucking timesheet!
What a fucking joke! As if we have too much time for meaningful stuff.

Trying to learn Angular and reactjs, reading up the tutorial or documentation...

Why the hell are there ten million more shit I need to look at first? (such as rxjs, Babel, webpack... and whatever the fuck they are)

Now am I supposed to master those ten million tools/libraries before I can proceed?

Of course there is no ten million but mentally it's no difference. I'm just fed up with this.

So I removed all the Eclipse crap from the repository (.settings, .project, etc), add those to the .gitignore, commit and push. The next thing happened is my co-worker found that broken his copy of the code as on Eclipse. That's expected. I told him it's justified to get rid of IDE specific stuff from the repo. All he needed is to set up the project again on his Eclipse.
...
...
...
And he didn't know how to do it.
...
...
...
I helped him out. Wasted 15 min. It shouldn't take that long if I did not try to explain along the way.

I feel like fixing printer.

Just realised there is a -- button... Who would be that mean to use it anyway?

Just got an email from HR asking everyone to put in leave for Christmas by TODAY.
Christmas is like a month away...
Before this email, there is no similar announcement whatsoever informing we have to put in leave by certain date.
It's lucky I checked my email (because I basically ignore it unless someone comes and tells me he's gonna send me something through it). It's luckier I got my Christmas plan sorted.
But... What if I'm still figuring out what to do for Christmas? Is this reasonable?

I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.

Our QA is acting like a customer, or even more... Pushy, demanding, some times rude... you name it

On the flip side, we have a real (cruel) world scenario in testing. Not too bad I think?

I fucking hate people who want to "perfect" his shit before push his code. Yes damn right. That means he doesn't fucking push his code until it's too late and his "perfect" shit will break everything. Not to mention the cry face he has when there are shitload of conflicts.

Does it bother you when a co-worker keeps talking on phone all day long and it's not work related? It bothers me.

mvn ... -DskipTests=true

Shut up

Go home WebStorm. You are drunk.

End of financial year in Australia
Purchased IntelliJ Ultimate
The cost will be tax deductible
Nice

Run a script, get a shit load of "Permission denied" error message... So I stop it by pressing Ctrl+C
Look at the script again there is this little line:
rm -rf $TMP_DIR/*

Look into the script again and again, $TMP_DIR is never defined...

while(fork())

Most evil thing I have learned...

Lodging a ticket in system A...

Citing the ticket number from A to access the password in system B...

Using the password from B to log into database C...

Then doing our work in C, in which all our DDL and DML permissions have been revoked.

Quick and dirty job to get some data into a DB wasted my entire evening.

Created table with few columns, tried writing to it from NodeJS app and it kept complaining I wasn't providing values for columns that didn't even exist. After ages pissing about decided that the DB gods had cursed this particular table so created a second one with same DDL. Now it worked first fucking time. Then it finally dawned on me, I'd managed to pick a reserved table name and the RDBMS didn't think to give me a warning when I created it. Not only did it not warn me but it kept going as it nothing was the matter and didn't report the extra columns on a SELECT *.

I find sugar (mostly chocolate) wakes me up better than coffee.

We had a course on GUI and Databases as part of my bachelor's degree. It was a basic introductory course (I am a mechanical engineer) where we were expected to design some tables and build a simple front end in VB6.

But the instructor was so bad that he hardly taught any VB code at all. And as far as theory on databases was concerned, about 80 percent of the lectures involved some generic introductory statements followed by an explanation of the terms DDL, DML and DCL. I do not remember him writing even a single SQL query to explain to us how it's done.

As a developer, how important to you that you have the choice of tools/platforms to do your job?

I've worked on some companies that don't give a damn as long as you get the job done, while some frown upon it because they haven't tried anything other than what they have and are skeptical. Some are completely locked because their products are platform specific so it makes sense for dev to work on the same platform.

Thoughts?

!rant

Not sure if it's appropriate here...
I think I am getting more affected by the "depression"... Lower productivity, restless sleeps, etc.
I quoted "depression" because I think it's a medical term that I need to get diagnosed before confirming it. I am thinking maybe I need to see a doctor on this but don't know where to start.
Any Hong Kongers here, sharing the same feel?...

substr, substring and any variants

Confusing af. Added 5-sec of Dev time every time I use them because I have to look up just to make sure.
Why can't they be the same? If they're the same, why are they different?

I just found myself reading "stuff" as "shit" all the time.

Isn't it just great when there have been unrealistic deadlines chasing you and you keep missing, every day, for over a year?

Meanwhile this guy on the other team just talks on phone all day long for personal matters, no giving a shit to progress.

Yeah I know it's none of my business. But just get the fuck off my face. The mumbling is so annoying.

And he's also that guy I keep bitching about because of his desk finger drumming and keyboard smashing.

I don't know what but our customers have put new terms in our contacts. That essentially make us liable if we don't take certain measure to protect the access to stuff.

To me that means I have to log out of my computer whenever I leave my seat. I was told its not necessary if I go to toilet. So I set the computer to require login after 15 min of not doing shit. Usually I remember that and log out manually so that's just precautions measure.

Today before I got lunch, I forgot. And my boss happened to notice my computer was on within that 15 min after I left.

I got a warning.

Fuck this shit. I now set th timer to 1 min.

Now I need to login again and again if I'm reading docs or article.

Fucking shit.

Why is it that in every other goddamn programming language if a function takes a parameter of string you can specify a variable but you have to create a goddamn composed string in t-sql for half the ddl and server functions because they expect string constants ????

And still
This has HAD to have been a complaint for a long time now !
Maybe I want to populate a json configuration file or a table with constants and values for things ?

I know that building a cmds text isn’t that much different but it does add extra annoyances and it really is something that should have been fixed 12 or more years ago in 2008 !

I've been seeing job ads saying they look for people who are "good at node.js" or similar (e.g. guru, expert...) What does that mean? I only use npm when I do my reactjs projects. Does that count?

So we're approaching the end of WebStorm license subscription. Got notified about renewal. Then there's this question... Should we

1. not renew, use the fallback version (2018 something) because we don't need that many updates anyway and renew next year to get essentially a 50% off discount, or
2. renew and get the 20% off discount?

Asking for my boss lol

The moment when you bring up something that's got quite some positive reviews from dev community (of course from the internet), and devs around you simply dismiss your idea of even trying...

"...what I'm looking at... uh... wait this is ridiculous... what is this... how do I update this..."
This new guy I'm supposed to bring up to speed constantly mumbles like this. He's just talking to himself. But it's so annoying that it's like he's constantly asking me questions.

Why do you ask “can you {do this/that}” when “no” is not an option? Why don’t dare dare to say “please {do this/that}”?

Yeah nah I’m still gonna say no. But fuck your hypocrisy too

co worker repeatedly knock on his fucking desk like it's nobody's business

Learning Spring at the moment... The autowiring thing gives me a lot of WTF moments but I think that's why people love it. Can't find any good tutorial explaining what's under the hood either.

And I don't know why I just have this great idea of "let me make it harder" by switching to IntelliJ from Eclipse at the same time. As if it's not bad enough that I need to produce something useful within a short time...

I've been working on a project which has been understaffed (from the beginning, now I know).

All the newly hired guys, who are more experienced than me (in terms of how many years of work experience), use Eclipse.

I use IntelliJ.

I don't think I can make them switch to IntelliJ.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how frustrated should I be?

Why a dropdownlist depending on a dropdownlist from a complex type(Stored Procedure) from EF CF approach is that hard to handle in MVC