EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2018)
-------------------------
Hey everyone! As some of you have already noticed, @trogus and I made a decision (based on the suggestion of some members of the community) to start transitioning all scores on the app to binary. We have started by making all user scores in our mobile apps and website (if you’re logged in) appear in binary. We think this makes the app more fun while remaining usable at the same time!

Please let us know what you think and happy binary-reading!

Buzzword dictionary to deal with annoying clients:

AI—regression
Big data—data
Blockchain—database
Algorithm—automated decision-making
Cloud—Internet
Crypto—cryptocurrency
Dark web—Onion service
Data science—statistics done by nonstatisticians
Disruption—competition
Viral—popular
IoT—malware-ready device

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.

Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.

At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.

Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.

I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!

Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.

And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.

But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.

Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.

We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.

Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.

From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.

Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.

The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.

Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!

Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.

Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.

Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?

Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.

If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?

I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.

(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

Job offer:

"There is no hierarchy within this company."

Bullshit.

Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.

Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.

You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.

Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.

Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.

How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?

That's what I would find much more interesting.

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

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

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

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

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

I learned a valuable lesson today about the life of a manager. I’m not a manager, but I am a senior level dev.

Today I was told there wasn’t room on the new team for 1 person, and I had pick that last team member. I had to choose between a friend who really isn’t cut out to be a dev and a non friend who is a better dev.

I talked through my reasoning and ultimately chose to put the friends job in jeopardy. They told me that I had solid leadership traits for being able to separate my emotions from my decision making. But I felt like a piece of shit.

I cried back at my desk. The friend doesn’t know yet and I can’t tell them. Is this what execs feel when they have to let people go?

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

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.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I told my boss that I felt my job filled the work description of a “senior engineer”. He asked me to write down a few sentences why I thought so, so he could suggest a title change to the board. I did and two months later it went through! Got a 15% increase! :)

I also was kind of “head hunted” for a different job a few weeks before, but hadn’t received any real offer from that company yet. This got known to my bosses boss and he urged me to talk to my boss before making any decision. I think that also helped... :p

I’m now the only senior engineer in my department, just because I take on a little extra responsibility and do a little more than what is expected of us.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

TeamLeader: I need you to stop disagreeing with the decision of the management, the people in there are taking their decision for a reason.

IHateForALiving: When integration tests were failing, the management decided to comment out the ingration tests; god knows how many bugs slipped by.
When users had problems with the idiotic migration process the management designed, the management decided to remove down migrations; it took two weeks before the QA team started screaming, as all their machines were filled with garbage data.
I was writing type definitions for my code, you removed it. You effectively ensured the only person capable of working on that particular piece of code would be me.
I have been proposing for 8 months to make a unified scheduled jobs system, you all decided to create at least 5 different -and incompatible- implementations, at least 4 of them are total garbage with setTimeout, there's no way to ever unify them and God willing they never break, if they do there's NO WAY to find out even where tf they're hidden in the code.
Every time you were making one of those bad decision I was the only one warning you of the problems you were creating. The idiotic change of the day is going MongoDB+Angular: I can keep a low profile if you want, but when this blows up you can be damn well sure I'll handle my 2 weeks notice because there's no way on earth I'll be stuck with the aftermath of you lot taking technical decisions you are clearly unable to manage.

This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.

Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

We do infra as a code, and one of my coworker worked on the project alone. Few months down the road, when shit hits the fan, he just message me this is not working.

First of all, I did not write that shit, and also I was never part of the conversation during the decision making. So when shit hits the fan what do you expect me to do? Do some black magic and fix it magically???

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

I left my previous company because my tech leadership was insensitive and agressive.

However, I am in a start-up right now and CTO is a nut job.

He creates random Slack threads and keeps messaging me like crazy. The co-founders have shut him down multiple times and yet his only success metric is "number of deliveries".

The other day something broke in production and teams were discussing about resolving the bug in one of the Slack channels.

CTO literally wrote this and I wish I was making this up, "let us not look at the logs and trust our code to work fine."

I was baffled and confused. I realised me leaving my previous organisation because of such tech leadership was a stupid decision.

Crows are black everywhere.

So they took away our offices in favour of an open layout. This would have been fine if it was just us 3 devs and the manager, but we're sharing a space with network techs, help desk, the manager's secretary and an Accounts department all with little to no separation.

I'm now in the midst of incessant ringing of phones, idle chatter and raucous laughter with nowhere to retreat to for silence; I have no idea how/when I'm going to get any work done now. 😥😞

The organisation I work for is a f**king joke when it comes to management making any kind of logical decision.

5 years ago, I spent two days in a conference room championing a service oriented architecture, which we had started down the path a year before. The other guy wanted to undo what was done and take the monolith approach. Not making any progress, I walked away and decided to let him have his way. A year later I left the position and quit programming. That whole experience played a major role in the decision to just give it up.

I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

The role of a Product Manager is just a decade or two old. Most organisations, including FAANG, are still figuring out what are the primary responsibilities of a PM.

A vast majority I know, including my dumbass, is struggling to keep things floating while in the role. Learning on the job is one of the only and most effective way to do so.

No wonder, imposter syndrome is so common in this group.

One of the main tasks is to make decisions. Important and impactful ones. The role came into existence to take the decision making load off our engineering friends while building any product.

This shit comes with huge responsibility.

BUT, not everyone understand this. In India, being a developer was a cool thing until 2018 and so everyone rushed into the role. Now somehow everyone started thinking being a Product Manager is cool because all you have to do is sit and shoot orders and things will happen magically.

I get reached out by so many folks every month asking for guidance and when I ask them what a PM does or why they want to be a PM, the narrative is more or less same.

Very few actually understand how taxing the role is or the challenges that we face while performing the job.

WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE SO IGNORANT AND DUMB?

And in another news, my first week at new job was super amazing. Loved every bit of it. People are smart, processes are neat, things are structured, and lots and lots to learn for me.

How are you guys doing? Been a while that we spoke.

Official declaration: I am the dumbest person I know.

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.

I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'

I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out

>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '

now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!

How to make that clear!

Dev: The server is completely down right now. Nobody can access the application, we need to divert some resources to horizontally scaling our app.

Manager: Hm, this was not in the schedule. I need to consult senior leadership on what to do about this. I don’t want to be held accountable for making a decision on this complex and highly nuanced situation.

Dev: No need, I have a solution. Just need a week to build/test/deploy the ability to horizontally scale.

Manager: But that will cause delays to new features.

Dev: New features don’t matter if the app can’t even load.

Manager: Ok you can implement your solution but it can’t take any time. I need those new features out.

Dev: ???????

I've been toying with the idea of making a change to my working life for a while now. Its a big decision, and could affect something thats been working well.

But today I've made that decision ... and i'm going for it ... i'm going to leave my headphones in the office and stop carrying them in / out everyday.

Its a scary thought, but i'm ready for it. Wish me luck, see you on the other side!

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

So after 7years of sound engineering, I started working as an intern in a startup company which does "anything" for money.
( Sending me to a seminar for taking photos of our customers is also in the list. )
Yesterday, I managed to grasp the basics of node and web sockets to build a simple chat app in order to satisfy boss' needs for a small website. He wanted to add it as a feature and assigned it to me as a task but it turns out nobody has any idea about putting it online. Seems like I still have lot to do.
Thing is, this is my 3rd month and I already started making no sense to anyone when I try to exchange information about coding/programming and latest technologies which we should encountered long ago. I am happy to experience and learn different things but I am feeling really alone.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for boosting me with amazing real life experiences and supporting my career changing decision even without knowing.

Have fun ranting!

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

By:Miss. Lucia Wright
Punchline : VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE MY DEAR

 

 

 

Dearest Friend,

My greetings to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am sister Lucia Wright I am married to Archdeacon. Collins Wright whom until his death served as an archdeacon in the St. Micheal's archdeacon in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2005. We were married for eleven years without a child. My Husband died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

Before his death we were both born again Christian. After the death of my Husband I decided not to re-marry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $22. Million in a security and finance company in London for safe keeping.

Presently, my Doctor confirmed to me that I have serious sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Haven known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a church or individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want a church that will use this fund for orphanages,helping the widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavor that the house of God is maintained. The Bible made us to understand that? Blessed  is the hand that giveth'. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don't  want my husband's efforts to be used by unbelievers. I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way,

this is why I am taking this decision.

I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says That? the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace'. I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband's relatives around me always. I don't want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible.

As soon as I receive your reply I will give you the contact of the security and finance  were the amount sum is deposited for you to contact them, I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that Wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply. Due to present condition of my health,I was warned by my doctor to avoid receiving or making any call. For that,I have submitted the information of  the deposit to  my lawyer, As soon as I hear from you I will forward to you the lawyer's contact.

Remain blessed in the Lord,

Miss. Lucia Wright.

Well ok... If you want me to, I can surely help you out 😈😈😈😈😈

MS Access and VBA.

This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...

Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...

Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Macbook keyboard is shit
Especially european variant.

I want to see any person in the world that is braindead enough to think that making short left shift if favour of having abolutely useless button there is good.
This is the most stupid decision that could be ever made.

Not only the symbols used by that button are seldom used, they also are duplicated on they other keyboard keys. But shift is used all the time and must be big enough instead of that shit.

Making the switch over to a Mac was the best decision I ever made as a developer

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

The reason for half the web-dev world sufferings is that Microsoft won't stop choking their users with explorer or edge, and half of the client are too dumb or lazy to download a different browser to test stuff. Fuck this shit man! Nothing works the way it should on this bitch.

Everytime my manager says- It should work perfectly on IE because client doesn't have any other browser, I curse IE for exisiting. If you can't improve it, just remove it you freakin' sadists. It'll not be an embarrassment to load something better on your OS. If anything, it'll get people to like you maybe. Like you for accepting your fuckery and making a decision in favor of the web dev world and innocent windows users, who only use your explorer to download other browser asap. For just that one time and for all your arrogance, you're making the whole world suffer.

I am not the only one that has ranted about this but it needs to be repeated: FUCK QUORA

Can't they just please go out of business already? Services that force you to sign up to read stuff are making me want to torture the company's decision makers slowly to death anyways. Also fuck reddit for promoting their absolute garbage app that adds ZERO value to the reddit experience other than bugs and really shitty loading times.

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

When you want to resign to your full time job but you are having difficulty on making decision.

Reasons to resign:
1. They are giving tasks that are not related to web development such as data entry.

2. I can't see a good future ahead on this company. It feels like it doesn't have a goal to grow. The boss is not focusing on this line and instead she is focusing on her other businesses. The boss also has admitted that she can only give 20% of her time. We don't have new projects and challenging tasks.

3. 4 months have been passed and still we haven't receive the yearly salary increase. It should be effected on February.

Reasons to stay:
1. No salary deduction if you are late or didn't complete 9 hours / day. Sometimes I just work for 7 or 8 hours a day.

2. Office is just 30 mins away from my house.

3. When I don't have a task, I usually do my freelance project at the office secretly. So even though there are no challenging tasks at the office, my freelance project helps a lot.

4. You can play games with your friends when you feel exhausted or you don't have assigned tasks.

I recently received an offer from my remote part-time job to work full time 8-10 hours a day and the salary is twice higher compare to current one.

Google wanted to be politically correct and gave faces different colors. But apparently using "black" or "asian" is a shame too so all of these emojies have same name.

This decision was very poor as it's hard to implement this duplicity in frontend so as always Devs choose easiest choice - just use the first one. And first one is always yellow...

Congrats on making whole lazy Dev world using your "correct" emojies enforcing only one face style.

Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.

Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.

There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.

Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...

So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.

And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.

Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.

I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

I'm currently founding a startup right after graduation. As the CTO with no employees at the moment I'm like every position in the company related to dev and Ops. It's the biggest challenge I've faced as a dev so far. Though I really learn a lot and grow mature pretty fast and it is challenging in a good sense from a technical perspective, I'm facing hard personal problems like insecurity in decision making, doubting my skills since I'm definitely no senior and a mid to high effectiveness to stress.

I've mixed feelings about the pure speed and developments right now, but the good side of things is far more exciting then the bad side is frightening.

What truely pisses me off though, is the missing time to spend here on devRant. FUCK. FML.

Have a good (REST) weekend.

Had you known what he knew (1), had the training he had (2) and had the objectives he had (3), you would have made the same decision

the holy decision-making trinity

don't be quick to judge or question others' decisions. You don't know some things. S/he may not know as well.

The team leader call us for a serious meeting, and he wants it to be productive,

Leader: "we shall not procrastinate anymore. We don't have time left. We should not just talk random bullshit like we did the last few times. Aight?"

We all agree to be productive.

We also set a few main subjects and decision to be discussed. Then, we all get into the meeting room seriously. In a meeting, we try the idea of the upcoming project. But we suddenly went off topic. Then, My friend talk about L4D2. Then we start playing. And, I say, why not try some GTA5? I proudly reboot my expensive laptop from Ubuntu to Windows and playing GTA. Then, we start spotify and talk about song.

We laid in the sofa and talk sexually. My friend introduce me his favorite AV and we compare our manhood's size.

It was 4am already. One by one the attendee fall asleep.

It is lIke... the survival gamr of sleepiness? xD

Only my best boy friend and I were left awake, talking about ourselves, watching the beautiful midnight city.

Then, 2 of us ourselves start to talk about project idea. It is something cool and crazy to think about, like a friend making app. The 3 hours of brainstorming is gay and romantic.

"Okay, so we have the outline. let's sleep, baby" So we sleep till the noon. We wake up. Some left. Some were still sleeping. The birds twitter in the bequtiful skyline.
I did not forget to upload my idea to discord after going home in the morning. End of the meeting. Barely any goal was met in the meeting.

Those days, we make attempt of productive meeting again and again but end up procrastinating everyday. We had meeting in a small bedroom and it was our meeting room. We played different songs, tasted different wines.

And, finally one day, my friend say "I feel that it is much productive to work alone in a separate room. So we won't get distracted by each other."
Another friend: "yea..I know it is harsh... but yea... true... let's work alone"

I almost eant to cry. But we cannot indulge ourselves in the moments of dreamy romance.

We should start real work and don't be gay.

I need to vent or I'm going to fucking explode like a car filled with bombs in motherfucking Iraq...

A couple of months ago I inherited a project in development from our team leader who was the sole developer on it and he was the one who designed every single thing in it.

I was told the project is clean, follows design patterns, and over all the code is readable and easy.

Those were all fucking lies.

See throughout the period he was working on it, I saw some of the code as it was going through some pull requests. I remember asking the dev why he doesn't comment his code? His response was the most fucking condescending shit I've ever heard: "My code is self-documenting"...

Now that I have full control over the code base I realize that he over engineered the shit out of it. If you can think of a software design pattern, it is fucking there. I'm basically looking at what amounts to a personal space given to that dev to experiment with all kind of shit.

Shit is way too over engineered that I'm not only struggling to understand what the hell is going on or how the data flows from the database to the UI and in reverse, I'm now asked to finish the remaining part and release it in 8 weeks.

Everything is done in the most complicated way possible and with no benefits added at all.

Never in my career have I ever had to drag my sorry ass out of bed to work because I always woke up excited to go to work... well except for the last 2 weeks. This project is now taking a mental toll and is borderline driving me crazy.

Oh, did i tell you that since he was the only dev with no accountability whatsoever, we DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT IS LEFT TO BE IMPLEMENTED?

The Project Manager is clueless.. the tickets board is not a source of truth because tickets set to resolved or complete were actually not even close to complete. FUCK THIS SHIT.

For the last week I've been working on 1 single fucking task. JUST 1. The whole code base is a mine field. Everything is done in the most complicated way and it is impossible for me to do anything without either breaking shit ton of other features (Loosely coupled my ass) or getting into fights with all the fucking libraries he decided to use and abuse.

1 whole week and I can't even get the task done. Everyday I have to tell the project manager, face to face, that I'm still struggling with this or that. It's true, but i think the project manager now thinks i am incompetent or just lazy and making excuses.

Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the what and why behind every decision he made with this code. But I'm sick to my stomach now thinking that I have to deal with this tomorrow again.

I don't know if I'll make the deadline. But I'm really worried that when this is released, I'll be the one maintaining that nightmare of a code base.

From now on, if i hear a fucking developer say their code is "self-documenting" I will shove my dick + a dragon dildo + an entire razor gaming keyboard up their ass while I shoot their fucking knees off.

oh... and there are just a couple of pages of documentation... AND THEY ARE NOT COMPLETE.

making 3 branches because the client can't make an app logic changing decision while he still demands big features 😒

I present to you a php framework with an "orm" that doesnt support table joins. Yes, you heard it right.

I just want to say few things to the developers community -
If you are a bad programmer, please spend your time at improving rather than writing frameworks, or making the stupid decision on using SUCH SHIT FRAMEWORK AT A CORPORATE COMPANY!

Also if you are not sure if you are a good programmer or not, chances are you aren't. That's just how it is.

Doubting my decision more than I should even though they're right, thinking too much about it and eventually making wrong decision.

Making the decision to leave a large, safe corporation that I'd been at for 10 years, but going no where, for a small independent software house was extremely difficult. But now I feel like I make a difference and not just a cog in a machine.

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

Establishing an eating schedule was truly a brilliant decision. It allowed me not to eat right before I go to sleep, keeping my stomach empty and making my body lose fat every single night.

As far as I keep breathing, the chemical reaction that makes me alive (CHn + O2 => H20 + CO2 + Energy) just need to continue, and when my stomach is empty, my body is just forced to burn fat.

It works like a charm. No “fat-burning” supplements and other MLM BS is needed. You just need to adjust the schedule so you never feel hungry. If you need to eat five times a day to achieve this, so be it. Just allow two to three weeks to establish a schedule and learn how to maintain it. Recurrent reminder apps are helpful.

I’m off liraglutide for more than two months now and I’m keep losing weight without any meds and my digestive behavior changed entirely.

If only I had emotional resources to make this happen earlier, there wouldn’t be pre-diabetes, numb feet, apnoe, stretch marks…

Got sent to a meeting to overlook the purchase of a new system for one of our departments at work.

The meeting in question was made to go over technical requirements, you know, making sure that everything was in order before a formal decision was made.

I get to the meeting, the vendor had consisted of your standard American sales reps before, standard Joes, Steves and such.

Had to reschedule the meeting because the technical spokesperson had the thickest accent in the world and I could not make sense of anything that he was saying. Neither could my coworkers. The tech person was 100% not from the U.S, and that is cool, but I could not make sense of what he was trying to say.

Oh well 🤡

How do you deal with a developer that constantly challenges your propositions in a rhetorical matter?

For example, say if we have a problem and I propose solution A (along with my reasons why), the developer would then shoot it down - not with another alternative solution or exploration path but instead a rhetorical question.

It has gotten *exhausting* working with this person because every interaction becomes almost a debate. This isn’t just particularly with development but even during casual discussions.

I’ve even tried asking “so what would you suggest?” in which they would answer with confidence in a rhetorical matter - but without any concrete decision making (but at the same time sounding like they did make one).

We work in a team and nobody has taken the reigns of leadership (he’s quiet most meetings), so I decided to take initiative and make the calls. All of a sudden, he has a voice that is mostly axed towards being argumentative than productive. It has come to a point where I’ve just stopped making propositions because I’ve become exhausted trying to defend myself and literally repeating something like 4-5 times, however this is a project that needs to be delivered and because we work closely together, I can’t just ignore him and do my own thing.

I can’t control my thoughts.

When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.

It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.

The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.

Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.

My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.

I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

Internet-based open source platform for democracy. That is, a package of code that you can use as a website that would basically encapsulate all the functions of incorporating the voice of the people into governmental decision-making -- like voting, initiatives/referendums/recalls, contacting representatives or other officials, etc.
This would also be something that could be used to run a private organization or public company as well. Hopefully super flexible.

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.

My dream project is a heavily story-driven game, with plenty of decision-making for the player and a lot of possible endings. With no money or time limits, I would make it with live action scenes. Just a great movie in which you have the final cut.

"A or B ?"
"Yes. A or B."

Why do I bother.

"We unfortunately live in a corporate world where group decision making is made to avoid failure rather than to achieve success." - Bill Cahan

2023 is the year where i am making a lot of bold choices and immediately regretting them.anxiety is at peak, and my past good deeds are hopefully saving me from getting into a real danger, but i am not aure for how long.

1. (technically a 2022 choice/blunder but impacted in2023 ) : we go for a yearly trip to a religious place in dec last- jan 1st week. i booked a flight instead of trains which we usually take, and are cheaper but take 16 extra hours. result? flight got cancelled, wr booked another more expensive flight for the next day, i got extremely sick and being stuck on a totally strange place on the 2nd day of 2023 was a nightmarish experience for mom ( the airport was 400km away from the village we go and its a totally new city for us)

2. resigned from my job on the pretext that they will be eventually asking us to work from head office(which is in a far city). they are yet to mandate it, and are rather opening a new office in my own city , so i would have to probably report from my city's office if i had stayed. super regrets, as that company gave very less work and lots of perks. this was the first job in which i was able to disconnect from work to understand real world and care for my people.

3. when i quitted the above job, i had no offer from any company after applying to 200+ job openings. one large MNC, with which i interviewed in last November 22 had given me an offer back then which i had rejected due to being a low offer , and having shitty popularity and policies ( they are known for being a toxic, mind numbing workplace and have a 3 month notice period) . but due to panice caused by work-from-head-office rumour, i asked them to give me offer again. the did and now i regret joining them and their shitty policies

4. latest in line : i have been fantasizing a trekk/hiking trip but neither do i have any siblings to go on with, nor my friends got time or interest in it.
i saw a few pages on Instagram, they take groups of people to mountains and offroad places via buses so booked a seat for me. a freaking solo trip! lots of exciting happy thoughts when i gave them my money, but as i approach the date of departure , i am freaking the fuck out.

they are not communicating with me . i don't know what to pack, whom to rely upon , whether they will have single traveller like me or if they will have couples and i will be left out to rot and struggle on my own, will it he safe or not,... to many questions and they aren't satisfying me with any of their answers.

i know my parents are in guilt about me resigning from my jobas they didn't wanted me to work from head office and they are shit scared too, but still allowing. however, i am even more double shit scared

i hope this doesn't turn into my last worst decision.

Can't decide if I should join this nice internship or let myself enjoy this summer and rest a bit, as I burned out a bit this semester with studying and freelancing.

Why is it so difficult to decide..

The internship is at cool place with nice tech and I feel like its a nice opportunity to grab, but I feel like I need the rest too.

And I have to decide tomorrow. I guess I'm terrible at decision-making sometimes Ffs..

!tech !dev

9 months in 2023 and its getting worse everyday.
This year is not my year. its just a bad dream which i want it to end so much :(

lets go from latest to last

sept 8(today) : was moonlighting with a good friend , who said he will be giving me work for 6 months. he fired me after just 1 month. reason : "we won't be needing your services bro" . actual reason: I made a logical argument over a small thing that triggered his OCD and hurt his ego

sept( few days ago) : the only other group of 4 friends that i had got angry at me because i refused to tell them why i was hurt with 1 of them and called him irresponsible . yes, this is as stupid as it sounds.

Sept (few days ago) : mom was driving our new car and got it bumped by another car on red light. she is a newbie , wasn't able to peddle on time (or idk what happened), but another guy bumped into our car. She got scared and ran away !?! again as stupid as it sounds.
fortunately, it costed us not much as it was on the fibre body, but mom's confidence got broken and i might have been very harsh at some discussions.

August 5-31 : Whole month went into going to the hospitals , and coughing/fever/blisters

August 4 : One stupid friend made a trip plan. 3 other friends rejected it . i could not come up with a reason, so he forced me into going. on trip day i got fever but he still forced me to come. during trip my health got worse and the friend was busy enjoying his trip. i had to come home by taking an emergency cab and that drained my whole month's saving. plus i got sick even more

july18- aug3 : this month again went into coughing and recovery as on july 18 i went to my cousin's engagement in another state and their food didn't agree with me

may-june-july : these months went into distress and anger as we bought our first new car and our neighbours were making car parking a nightmare for us. we involved police and this asshole lawyer friend of mine, but no significant action is taken as of this writing

april : the only happy month for me : I went to a solo trip all by myself , and had a great time. the people i met there were nice

march : switched job . went from WFH to hybrid WFO . can't say if this was a great or a stupid decision.

feb : went into coughing and recovery

jan24-28 : took a trip with mom to different state because company wanted me to switch states in order to continue working. it turned out to be a worst trip as mom got all vicious and angry on that state and decided that we won't be working from that city and i should resign. i also caught some cough that later turned into full blown sickness

jan3-jan 24 : again went into coughing and recovery

dec 27 2022 - jan 3 2022 : religious trip to a different state. was a very nice and happy trip till the very end , where our flight got cancelled and we were stuck in a stranger city. mom panicked but i handled the situation somewhat. at the end of it i caught some cough that turned into full sickness and mom had the worst trip of her life

!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

I’m working 2 jobs at the moment, putting 12+ hours/day, been doing for about 2 months and I’m already burned out;
I’m working for a big e-commerce agency which is about to get bigger, doing mostly outdated Frontend work (Magento) with no sign of raises/promotions/ real growth, since all clients are basically enterprise and only want “ol’ reliable” over innovative.
A lot of smart people, lot of knowledge, pay is fair.

The second job I’m doing (part-time) is for a smaller agency in the same sector, pay is a bit higher, closer time zone and an opportunity to work with newer technologies.

I need to make a decision on one of these two companies since I can’t possibly keep working all these hours.
Is there anything else I need to consider before making a decision?

As a Frontend developer I’m getting a bit tired of working with Magento and its outdated tools, but at the same time seems difficult to switch to something different since I haven’t really worked with anything else, I feel a little bit lost

Guys, I need some advice.

A couple of weeks ago I finished my internship as a sys admin in this medium sized consulting company. When my "contract" was about to expire they offered me a real job doing the same thing I've been doing for the past few months, but I turned it down.

The reason why I did it was that I wasn't really happy with the job. I mean, the people were... fine, the management team was... fine, the actual work I needed to do was... fine. I think you get the idea. The problem was that I never really enjoyed it all that much, and even though I didn't hate it, I wasn't really happy with it, so I turned the offer down.

After giving it more thought and listening to what some of my friends and family members had to say, I started thinking that maybe it was a bad idea to do so. Many people have said to me that I'm making a mistake, that I shouldn't leave a job before I have a new one, and that I should take the offer, work there for a little while and then look for something else.

I always answer by saying that the job market in this field is much more simple, and that it's much easier to find a new job than in any other, but yet again, I'm not sure if I'm making a big mistake with this decision.

Thoughts?

PS: I'm 21, this would be my first job ever

some ppl seem to take too much pride in making everything configurable, tbh sometimes it just seems they're too lazy to make a decision

why not just ship the compiler with an empty text file and let the user "configure" the system it with code :/

Question for those who have programming for several years :

Does it sometimes feel like the logic in your mind is reflected by the career path you have chosen?

Meaning, for me, when it comes to decision making, or when trying to understand an idea, I usually black out when a variable in my mind does not make sence.

Sometimes it feels like programming logic has taken over how I think.

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)

TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days

So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.

I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)

So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).

So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap

"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."

Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add

"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"

....Okay....shots fired. So i respond

"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"

"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"

"With one wfh day?"

"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"

"Oh... I hear that...what day?"

"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"

".............................I'll think about it"

"There's nothing to consider"

*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."

So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "

Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"

What kind of Godfather comment is that?

Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."

.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:"

TLDR: Decision making is hard...

Get up at 7am, weather looks crappy but need go to the Drs today in NYC.

Original plan was to spend the morning in the park catching up on my reading list. Don't really want to goto the park now but lunch is still good? (Appt at 4pm, was only one left)

Walk into train station, pay for ticket. Get email from Drs saying he's sick...

Oh good... Except I already paid for the ticket.

Decide it's not worth it since weather is crap.

Walk out the station and... it's sunny... Fck...

Now what.... I can either go home and code or go shopping locally and eat out.

Currently decisions these and well shopping and eating out are also hard decisions...

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.

characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)

tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL

story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.

at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.

i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.

on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!

All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume

I posted a rant a while back about a contract I was working that was making me particularly unhappy.

I didn't notice at the time but my studies had taken a turn for the worse, my concentration had begun to wane and I started struggling to finish work.

I was miserable and the client had figured and pulled me up on it, I turned the working relationship around and the client was happy.

That was two weeks ago, Monday I was called into a room with the managers, manager straight to the point "contract is being cut short" (I was contracted to the end of the year but was seriously considering handing my notice in that day anyway).

They made the decision for me, awesome!

Also I was given the two weeks notice as paid but asked not to come to the office again and had to hand in all my equipment that day.

Could I have been that much of an arsehole to deal with that they thought it would be better for all concerned that I have no further dealing with any of them?

Talking to teammates it does appear that I was getting special treatment from management, I think if it is me I need to address this before moving on to the next contract so I don't get myself in the same predicament.

Although two weeks paid leave was a quite nice bonus 👍

Client: $importantThing is a go live feature now.
Me: Okay, but it would considerably postpone the release date.
Client: Oh well, then maybe after release. However, do $lessImportantThing for go live, no matter how long it takes.

Cybergoattechie ETH, USDC Recovery Firm.

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- Am a junior dev in an awesome team & exciting project after my apprenticeship and while having just started my part time studies
- Have restructure in company so I land in an other value stream
- Get laid off by new value stream 6 months later (now) because they have a serious budget cut
- Take time to come to terms with situation. I could finally work more on my side projects or focus a bit more on my studies. Hey actually I will have 5 months time to look for something while being paid by the company and they help me brush up my CV. Pretty neat!
- Now my former boss wants me back because of my experience in the project, but only as a production support and not as dev (because budget and they're bleeding with tickets)

Not sure if I should take the offer as it feels safe to have an income and the team is cool. However, it feels a bit like a degradation as prod support sucks in that project and I'd like to code (which wouldn't be possible then).
And as this is still my first company I'm working in, it would make sense to look for something else...

Grrr need to sleep about it... Decision-making isn't exactly my strength.

I have to restart my computer in order to go do bed (i want to have it run at night) but that would kill the upload that I have. Fuck.

Make your code available for your team members, please.

So we're working on this robotics project using ROS, a framework that enables multiple nodes in a network exchange their functionality among each other through tcp connections. Each node can be implemented and executed on your own machine, and tested with dummy inputs, but in collaboration they make a robot do fancy stuff.

The knowledgebase needs data from the image processing unit, providing this data to others with semantic context to high level planning, which uses this semantic data for decision making and calling the robot manipulation node with meaningful input, to navigate the robot's components in the environment. We use a dedicated machine, which pulls the corresponding repositories and is always kept configured correctly, to run each node, such that everybody has access to each other's work when needed.

So far so good. We tried to convince the manipulation guy (let's call him John) to run his code on our central machine, not a week, but since the first day, 5 months ago. Our cluster classification has been unavailable for 2 months, but my collegue fixed that. We still can't run the whole project without John's computer. If his machine blows up we're fucked.

Each milestone feels like a big-bang-test, fixing issues in interfaces last-minute. We see the whole demo just moments before our supervisors arrive at the door.

I just hope he doesn't get hit by a truck.

Don' you just love it when your project leader's superior (who is not involved in development or know a thing about the dev process whatsoever) barges in and asks you to port a project originally targeted for Oculus (and so, very graphiclly heavy) to Android in less than an hour? Obviously when it's not done on time, has performance issues or randomly crashes on a different API it's the dev's fault, not the shitty decision making behind the managers. (btw the company doesnt even have android devices for us devs to test on, we HAVE to borrow them from other colleagues). FML!!!!

It's pussy-assed mass hysteria at its best. Social media and the overall deprecation of quality life for the human race is what's caused this. Fear takes its toll in many ways, and this is an incredibly forceful way of engineering a "Big Brother" effect on the World to increase the sale of products and pharmaceuticals based on predictive statistics that nailed down our habits and decision making process as a whole.

Sad shit, since history proves that this will eventually lead to a World War and we're way too far lost in opinion to comprehend the true consequences that will follow.

Having said that, it ain't gonna happen for a while, but this is the igintion that will cause Stephen Hawking's theory where we went from having 1000 years left on Earth ecologically to what is now approximately 100 years left socialogically.

But, at least you get to "work remotely" while jacking off to Facebook all day.

Go team.

!tech

I have this bad habit of never taking decisions without discussing. For risky, highly impactful decisions, ig this is a good approach, but when you are trying to be a host, or taking some very basic decisions like ordering food, or booking a time slot, i would ask opinion of all the parties involved.

I sometimes cross the line of being considerate to being bothering, irritating and unreliable with my debating nature.

I Don't know why but i for every situation i feel having a second opinion is necessary and good.For eg, Once i was my sister and our flight got cancelled due to bad weather.
I had to choose : either take the next available flight booked by the same airlines for free, which was around 26 hours later, or book the next flight from another airlines which was in 2 hours but costed twice. we were in a different state, and my middle-class/opportunity deprived brain was seeing a path for both choices, but i thought of consulting sis and she lost her mind. she got scared, she started regretting all our choices, the airway travels , everything.

if i had just taken the decision of going with the 2 hour late flight, i would hav saved myself from so much drama.

How to fucking man up in a decision making situation?

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

Little poll:
I am building a cooperative website for something that I care. I don't want anything to be more expensive than free, but I still have to pay for the servers. I don't intend to make gains with it.
What is better: a single add on the front page, not intrusive, or a Wikipedia-like campain every year to get the money to pay the servers?

I am opposed to any kind of publicity in my case: for me, internet was created and has to be keept with the spirit of sharing. I give money to wikipedia when I can, I support projects on kickstarters, etc. Adds are the oposite: they don't mean to share, but to sell, hence completely destroying the spirit of internet. But I also need to know that my site may not be visited by people with my point of view: olders wouldn't pay as easily as youngers, and my project targets a very large group of people.

Please help me making a decision, I think I will have a lot of different opinions!

#justAthought
I was recently playing max payne 2 on my pc when this colleague of mine comes up and boasts "You playing max payne now?? I have completed this game so many times, even in the hard mode. Which mode are you playing in" (I was playing easy -.- )

But then it struck me. how cool it would have been, if we had a chance to take a decision at some point of our life , to continue the next phase in easy medium or hard mode. The harder the mode, the bigger the prize, but its not that you are suffering by the consequences of taking easy mode.

Like take college for example. Instead of companies deciding the quality of a candidate based on popularity of their college, they would take based on the mode of education they took for various subjects.
- The education mode system would be something like this: at the end of 6 month an exam will happen as usual
- the easy mode of exam will have just the lighter , more basic syllabus and lenient checking .
- the medium mode will have slightly more research based questions from the a more standard version of the previous syllabus and unbiased checking .

- the hard mode will have deep knowledge requirement professional questions and strict checking.

- students willing to dedicate heavy time to their choice of subject will then have better opportunities at big companies, making a fair ground for all.

- student more focused on non academic/ specific topics could take easy mode for most of the subjects, and focus on the career of their choice. They will still have a backup to apply for jobs requiring knowledge of certain subjects , but for lower wages( since they took the easy mode for those subjects they would be learning the required knowledge in the company, working as proxys/junior devs)

what do you think?

Ok devs, need your help a little bit. Planning on buying a laptop. I'm confused between these two:
1) System76 Serval WAS
2) MacBook pro

Which one should I get and why? Need your opinion. Also, open to any other suggestions.

New office stories during the emotional turmoil...

Story 1: The creepy fuck

So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.

Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.

I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.

The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!

👀

Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.

Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.

Fuck this guy.

Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect

So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.

The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.

But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.

Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..

To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.

He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.

That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.

I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.

I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.

The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol

Never again he'll school anyone.

I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.

Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.

Decision making for getting married.

Am a developer I write Python,php and java. .. I joined a telecoms company in my country which is not doing well as opposed to the other 2 telecoms. One reason is that its a government entity And always keep making bad decision which no one take responsible of. .. always good at making bad decision

My previous boss (who just left) conrned me to support a Chinese Software called mobile money full of bugs. And does not do wat they sad it could do in the FRS . . Doccumentation is mess. There a language barier with the support team. .. then there a guy who seem to have temper and looks overworked by Chinese.

I love writing code and learning new stuff
And progressing in my career
But I cant do that if am answering a call every fu*king sec. We are not appreciated as a team by both the business and CTIO even tho we are only the only two engineers in the Dept. .. its sickens me

I dont no what to do now.that my imediate boss is gone to another company . . What thing to do

Windows 10 , I just want a flipping built in command line executable to log off another (local) user. I'm not a server, I don't have active directory, I don't want to switch to log in as that user first, i want to just kill their inactive local session because cisco freaking vpn doesn't allow you to connect when a other user is logged in. I can kill the session from admin task manager, I just want to be in the commandline. If your gonna let software check the number of logged in users, let the freaking administration modify the number of logged in users with a cli.

Idk if I could turn it off an on again. On a server I would just issue "query sessions" or "query users" followed by "logoff ##". Why not let me do the same damn thing on my home computer sk I don't have to restart MY SESSION just to close MY WIFE'S session. You stupid fraking company that cannot provide consistent command line programs across various systems. SCREW YOU MICROSOFT AND YOUR UTTER ASANINE DECISION MAKING REGARDING WHAT FEATURES TO INCLUDE IN WHAT BUILDS.

i am having a feeling that getting into software branch of it industry might be a wrong decision. in my college years, i got to explore different domains in tech :

1. software development : frontend tech , backed tech, mobile tech : somethings i and a million other people know

2. os and internal softwares : os, compilers, processor coding , chip manufacturing etc : don't know what this industry is known but we devs rarely go that deep in the hole

3. the network industry : computer networks , topologies, packets, data transfers etc. again not sure what this industry is but 4g/5g brands/ cisco seems to making a lot of money with this

4. cloud computing, devops, data etc : i guess some backend devs explore this domain too.

5. ai/ml data sciences/web3 : the new fad

6. biotech :?? don't know anything about this at all

7. graphics/management/qa : the other associated sisters of software dev. they are seeing a similar recession

8... ans so on.

i chose the 1st one in my undergrad as my career and now regretting this i am thinking of doing masters to fix my mistake and take a job in some other industry that is still blooming and has a future for sustaining a recession for atleast 30 years.

so any suggestions/experiences?

The decision making freedom of my current job. But with a team of tech people rather than just my stupid self managing all tech. And with a competent boss who isn't also the CEO and HR person for the company

@dfox curious about the decision making process behind what happens when you +1 something you've already -1'd and vice versa. Currently it jumps up two points instead of going to 0 and then giving you the opportunity to vote again if you wanted.

Is this likely to change? If not, why this way?

The whole windows server + ms sql server ordeal is the biggest fucking joke I've ever seen in my time being a dev.
The ms sql dashboard uses a hidden user to access files and stuffs, so I spent 1 hour trying to make the dashboard's explorer to find the database dump file, only to find out that the file need to be owned by the hidden user. So
I spent about 1 hour trying to set the correct owner of the dump file, but to no avail, the explorer still couldn't pick it up. Then I spent another hour to set the correct owner for the containing folder. Finally, a 6 years old answer on SO point out that I should just put the fucking .bak file in their default folder, and voilà, the fucking thing works like a charm.

I can't get why Microsoft has to go out of their way making permission management on their os so fucking convoluted. The fucking usernames are a fucking mess, you have to go through a bunch of form to change just the owner of a file (please don't start me up with that running some command on powershell bullshit, I would rather deal with bad GUI than a badly designed CLI)

If I were to being positive though, Microsoft is actually one of a few tech companies having a good technical decision of moving their shits over Linux.

Is a company bad if it puts constant pressure on developers to quickly deliver bits and pieces of functionality the client desires with little attention to quality? The focus is then on pleasing the client at the most shallow level by providing a stream of quick fixes, only to be met with an equal amount of bug reports, even after the full testing stack by the testing team.

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

Been making minor refactors to code base. Ran into something that resembles and behaves like a brainfart. Accepts arguments, uses them to query DB then completely disregards result and builds own result yielding dubious output.
Dumb as I am, went to investigate the story behind it. Maybe some weird business rules involved.
Git gave commit. 100+ files changed. Nice one.
Went to original story and there it was, clearly stated, like a true moronic decision: "Squash all feature commits to a single commit". No specs, no description, no explanation... Nothing.
Well... FUCK YOU TO!

There's a type of shopaholism in big open source projects, in that decision making developers tend to search google and just add any javascript framework they find interesting, to the code base!

What ai model would I use to propagate a series of survival factors and decision making scenarios that if the optimal order of activities are pursued would lead survival and even prosperity and the worst set of possibilities would lead to death where the environment and sensations being experienced would always lead to specific pitfalls but wherein some of these pathways would lead to later reward and where the obstacles like predators could be overcome by simple combinations of objects which would be a crude mimicry of the invention ?

Neural nets don’t see to fit this given my understanding but there is a training aspect I’m looking for where the creature being simulated dies, develops fear responses, feels pain, avoids pain, remembers things, develops behaviors related to characteristics in creatures, has unborn motivations that weight decisions, and learns to prioritize.

I had created a massive dataset of objects including memories and aspects of semantic memory and episodic memory colored by emotion inspired by past conflict and reward with the idea that a running average would affect behavior and decide on various behaviors all the way down to perceptual differences

Any thoughts again ? Or will wolf try to steal these too ?

My company is contracted by a pretty big one. Having worked with them for about two years now with good insight into what's going on here I'm crying fucking blood over the 110% crazy decisions (and greatly expensive) caused by incompetent people with decision making positions. Feeling enlightened about why so many IT projects fail...

Design in Motion: Real-Time Rendering's Impact on Architecture

Architecture, a discipline that once relied heavily on blueprints, models, and lengthy render times, has undergone a revolutionary transformation in recent years. The advent of real-time rendering technology has fundamentally altered the way architects visualize, present, and interact with their designs. This paradigm shift has not only enhanced the creative process but has also empowered architects to make more informed decisions and create immersive experiences for clients and stakeholders.

Real-time rendering, a technological marvel that harnesses the power of high-performance graphics hardware and advanced software algorithms, allows architects to generate photorealistic visualizations of their designs in a matter of milliseconds. Gone are the days of waiting hours or even days for a single rendering to complete. This acceleration in rendering time has not only expedited the design process but has also encouraged architects to explore multiple design iterations rapidly.

One of the most significant impacts of real-time rendering on architecture is the ability to visualize a design in various lighting conditions and environmental settings. Architects can now instantly switch between daytime and nighttime lighting scenarios, experiment with different materials, and observe how their designs respond to different seasons or weather conditions. This level of dynamic visualization offers insights into how a building's appearance and functionality evolve throughout the day, contributing to more holistic and thoughtful design solutions.

Moreover, real-time rendering has transformed client presentations. Architectural concepts can now be communicated with unprecedented clarity and realism. Clients can virtually walk through spaces, observing intricate details, exploring different angles, and even experiencing the play of light and shadow in real-time. This immersive experience fosters a deeper understanding of the design intent, enabling clients to provide more targeted feedback and make informed decisions.

The impact of real-time rendering on collaboration within architectural teams cannot be overstated. Traditionally, architects and designers would need to wait for a rendering to complete before discussing design changes or improvements. With real-time rendering, team members can make adjustments on the fly, observing the immediate effects of their decisions. This seamless collaboration not only enhances efficiency but also encourages interdisciplinary collaboration as architects, engineers, and other stakeholders can work together in real-time to refine designs.

The integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) into the architectural workflow is another transformative aspect of real-time rendering. Architects can now create VR environments that allow clients to step inside their designs and explore every nook and cranny. This not only enhances client engagement but also enables architects to identify potential design flaws or spatial issues that might not be apparent in 2D drawings. AR, on the other hand, overlays digital information onto the physical world, facilitating on-site decision-making and construction supervision.

Real-time rendering's impact extends beyond the design phase. It has proven to be a valuable tool for public engagement and community involvement in architectural projects. By creating virtual walkthroughs of proposed structures, architects can offer the public an opportunity to experience the design before construction begins. This transparency fosters a sense of ownership and allows for constructive feedback, contributing to the development of designs that resonate with the community's needs and aspirations.

The environmental implications of real-time rendering are also noteworthy. The ability to visualize designs in various environmental contexts contributes to more sustainable architecture. Architects can assess how natural light interacts with interior spaces, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing the need for artificial lighting during the day.

In conclusion, real-time rendering has ushered in a new era of architectural design, propelling the industry into a realm of dynamic visualization, immersive experiences, and enhanced collaboration. The ability to witness designs in motion, explore different lighting conditions, and interact with virtual environments has redefined how architects approach their craft. From facilitating client presentations to fostering sustainable design solutions, real-time rendering's impact on architecture is profound and multifaceted. As the technology continues to evolve, architects have an unprecedented opportunity to push the boundaries of creativity, efficiency, and sustainability in the built environment.

I've been studying a bit about business analytics and intelligence to diversify a bit from dev.

After a lot of looking around I've found it's all just glorified jargon which basically enables your decision to have backing of facts and logic. It sounds as if it's a great coverup tool but don't know if it actually helped decision-making.
Why does researching the market/competition need to have a thousand breakdowns/categories/focus areas.

I feel like an interpretation of business analytics is a very simple and intuitive solution but there is just too much random and wasteful metrics attached to it.

I believe it's just my nascent knowledge and experience speaking, but I never felt the same way about software development, financials, etc

Management that understands and respects the true virus like nature of technical debt. Considers the implications of bolting on more features. Gives me a place at the table in decision making regarding these matters.

Don't settle for any less.

so i've been working with a ux/graphic designer on a pretty large project that will likely have many services attached to it, it's been in "active" development for about a year now. something that concerns me however is how uncertain i feel about what i'm doing, constant questions like "am i doing this right", "is this secure", and many like them plague my mind while i'm coding and it's really discouraging. when i was just learning i didn't really take any heed from these questions, intact i never even really thought about them so why am i now? i feel kid if i'm able to just work and have fun i will be so much more productive and happy. my partner has been learning front end and has been doing great me i'm working on front and back end. i have been making most of the decision in regards to our stack but i feel like i'm making them arbitrarily and to attribute to this fact, i have switched things up several times, we went from react to an mvc framework and now i'm considering going back to react. i just can't seem to keep on track with my decisions, if any of you have experienced this before i would really like some advice on how i can be productive and again and not fall into this never-ending abyss of doubt.

Hey,

So, a startup wants me to join them, it is a product based company. They want me to setup their SAAS product on the server which is purely built using open-source software with some pretty small tweaks in the code
They need it done in a few days

I just wonder that's how a big product based company is built

Please help me in making the decision, I am really so confused

Thanks

I just made this up but it seems true

There are only two ways 2 people can disagree about making a decision

One is if a person has more (or less) knowledge about the subject

The other is they both have sufficient information about the factors of the decision, but one person simply values a different set of principles than the other person

Have a good day

Can you recommend a design pattern for dealing with workflows?

I am wondering how to represent a decision tree while also making it easy to maintain and each step should be unit-testable on its own.

I want to avoid a big if-else-block, but I am also unsure what design pattern to apply here.

Basically, there a bunch of yes-no-question (though some conditions may be more complex) that can be nested very deeply, and depending on a certain set of requirements we want to display different actions.

(The workflow is fixed, there is only 1 at at time yet it may change a lot over the next iterations until we figure out what our userbase wants.)

I want to ask for your opinion guys, because I don't know if I am right or wrong.

So, some days ago, my brother sent me some code to check out for an automation that he does for testing purposes, since he's a QA (I am a programmer). He should be able to send XML data to a server and depending on the process that he tests, the data is different every time. I saw a strange thing, he hardcodes the XML tags and concatenates them with data which I find stupid. So I proposed him to use a template to generate XML data, because I think it's more flexible and easier, making data and presentation separate. That way if in the future he wants to start using JSON he could do it in no time. I made the code in a separate file which he imports and uses it's functions (they are two so no need for classes) and uses them to load the template and render it as he passes the data as a hash table. He insists that concatenating data and XML tags is easier and simpler and I can't wrap my mind how could that be true. I gave him an example in which the data structure for a process is changed and he have to open the file and change the XML tags or the structure and he still says that's simpler.

What is the right decision in this situation. Keep in mind that I simplified the process a lot and it actually involves sending the data and reporting the results, but they are not important here since I am talking only about generating data.

So I was given a project. It was all Android. I never worked on Android. So it's been almost 4 weeks and 2 weeks I took to understand Android concepts, debug to see the relevant classes for the requirement. Then I wanted to create a prototype as I still couldn't understand how will everything work. With little support I could get things done but still some things are missing and I am stressed about this project.
I have been working alone on it with little support from people around me.
Tomorrow if I am still not capable of making a design they might take decision ro switch my project or maybe something else.

It's a big MNC I'm working with, really think that this is not a good impression and they might think of firing me.

Although firing will give me severance but still.

What do you think? did I take a lot of time to build my solution when I didn't know anything about Android and struggled to find the people who knew the codebase? Or am I just a slow and bad developer?