*deep breath*

Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.

*deep breath*

Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)

In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.

There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.

Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.

It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.

However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

If you're stuck....take a break away from the keyboard. Go outside and take a couple of deep breaths. Talk to someone about something not work related. Then get back in and look at the problem with fresh eyes.

Probably isn't a righteous rant... But there's a new guy who shakes his leg... All day... Makes my screen wobble... All day... Trying to think about about my code... But thoughts being shaken to the floor... All. Goddamn. Day.
*sigh*

IF YOU HARD CODE URLS INTO YOUR CODE I WILL HARD CODE MY FIST INTO YOUR FACE

Same as when I go gym..
Deep breaths to get calm,
focus mind on clarity & stillness
then visualize, map & draw out exactly what I'm going to do and how I'm gonna go about it.
Finally, execute.

Definitely having one of those weeks where bugs/tasks are coming in faster than I can get through them. Just when you think the day can't get much worse, you remember it is only Tuesday. Deep breaths lol

Just spent three and a half hours reconfiguring security cameras and troubleshooting over and over why the fuck internal and external weren’t reachable...

I failed to realize the DDNS was handing out the IP of 127.0.0.1 and 3.0.0.0 because nothing fucking stated that up until I found a small text link to the camera’s DDNS registration page... logged in with the customers info and low and behold the mother fucker was handing stupid shit out.

I hate that I overlook the simplest shit when I’m stressed and in a rush...

I need to learn to take deep breaths, but fuck that... I want to blow shit up.

Work is still going great, but I'm killing myself with general anxiety about other things...

Covid, laptop is gone for now, phone is acting up, I don't have any backup device, I'm running out of money, need to fix my teeth soon enough, health-wise I'm pre-diabetic and almost obese, (not look-wise, rather weight-wise) as well I will need to check for hormones because I'm growing body hair more than I should and still am losing head hair more than I should, and I should quit smoking.

... but I still love the work I do, so what does life and gods have against me? :|

I have been taking deep breaths more often to just not lose my shit these days. Like, unless I end up in a great situation next, this all is so unfair.

That moment when you realize you've basically been having a protracted anxiety attack for two months. Should uh...build character or something, right?

I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.

Cool, I thought at first.

Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.

The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.

Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.

So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...

For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.

I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.

So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.

Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..

THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.

Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.

Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.

This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.

" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.

Deep breaths.