I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

The CEO asks God:
"God, how much time do you need to create the earth?"
God: "uh, 10 billion years I think"
CEO: " You have only 7 days. Well 6, the last one is to fix everything gone wrong after deploying"

And here we are

The scariest thing in programming is when something works when it shouldn't

Contrary to most people I really love to receive email related to jobs when I'm in holiday. I keep important alerts on.

It's like:
email: ***urgent, server down***
me (sipping mojito by the pool): fuck them. let's them deal with that
email: ***requirements all wrong, must develop the feature again***
me (enjoying a dinner): oh, I told them 100 times!, fuck all of them, work for me now, stupid moron.
email: I destroyed by mistake the db with an update..."
me (dancing like crazy): ahahaha I told you that support guys should not have access to production db, fuckfuck you, fix it yourself!!!

and so on..... I don't know, it just boost my pleasure during holiday.

When trying to enter the bios....

I hired a new developer after careful screening and interviewing many candidates.

First thing he's asking first day on the job
- I have already booked august month for holiday, is that a problem?
- I need to come 2 hours before anyone else in the morning and leave 2 hours before, everyday because I have things to do at home.
- I've seen that espn.com sport news are blocked by the firewall, why is that?
- I've installed bitTorrent on my PC but it's very slow downloading movies

I hope he's good.

Pushing code to production be like...

A Developer is desperate: his java application servers are unresponsive, thousand of dead zombie threads are sucking all cpus, memory is leaking everywhere, garbage collector has gone crazy, the cluster sessions are fucked....

The Developer goes to the closest bridge, ties a stone to his neck and gets ready to jump.

Suddenly a bearded old man with a fiery look runs toward him, yelling:
- stop stop!!!! Your application is not scaling and misconfigured, your servers are melting, cpu usage is not sustainable anymore, but don't despair

The Developer, puzzled, looks at him:
-I've never seen you...how do you know...
- Hey, man, I'm the Devil. I know everything. All your problems are solved. I'll give you magic functions. They are called Lambda.
You'll never have to worry about your servers, scalability, security, configuration and shit.

The Developer seems astonished but relieved:
- Ok, sounds great! let's try it - suddenly suspicion creeps in - hmmmm but you are the Devil....so...you want something back, don't you?
(the Devil nods lightly with a diabolic smile)
- ...and...you want my soul, I guess...
- your soul??? come on!!! - the Devil burst in a laugh - we are in 2019. I don't care about your soul. I want your ass.
- What!???!!!?
- yes, I want to fuck your ass

The Developer, evaluates quickly the situation.
Few moments of pain or slight discomfort (?) in exchange for magic lambda. It could be worth. He accepts.

After a while of rough anal fucking, the devil asks
- Hey, how old are you anyway?
- 45, why?
- Oh jeeez...45!!!??? and you still believe in the devil?

Somebody asked me my API doc.
I don't have any API at all.

I will lie, and I'll write a swagger specification in few hours and I'll send them.

They will try to read it and understand, and after maybe a week, when they will ask for testing and endpoint I'll pretend to be on holiday for 2 weeks.

3-4 weeks gone already, I checked they should be on holiday by then. Only then, I'll answer with a fake endpoint with fake data.

I'll get another 2 weeks if I'm lucky.
When they discover about fake data, I'll say there is a bug.

In total if I play well, I have 2/2.5 months to implement some kind of API server with some more or less true implementation.

Thanks to Swagger. Swag

Make love, not meetings

HR manager: we just realized we underpaid you a lot in the last 4 years, for all the job you are doing. You'll get 30% pay rise from now on.

Outer Me: thanks, great!
Inner Me: ....shit...

I got the raise, I looked for another job and found it in 4 months. 60% pay raise, better role.

I'm recruiting a new dev to my team, and that just happened.

Exactly 10 years ago, my first job interview for a position as java developer:
Tech guy, asking me lot of deep questions about last java improvements, upgrades of newest web frameworks etc.
I answer very well.
He seems satisfied. He is about to leave, and just on the door, he turns and he asks this "just-one-more-question" in Lieutenant Columbo style:
"ehy do you know something about COBOL"?
Me: "well, ....yeees" (thinking: it's a programming language, only thing I know, plus I want the job)
He: "...and would you mind...." (some vague gestures)
Me: "...hmm...not at all..."

I got the job. All the project was about a huge legacy COBOL program. Almost no java.

I soon discovered that nobody inside the company wanted actually to deal with that project either....

Sometimes during interview you try to sell yourself, but it's actually the other way around, they are trying to sell something to you...

top categories of people screwing my job:
- consultant
- fake positive thinking attitude

We just hired a fake positive thinking consultant

naked developer day:
Today I'll work from home, sitting completely naked in front of my mac. Only keyboard, mac and me.

It's a huge saving in clothes and energy to clean them

Somebody told me this:

You see this graph?
ColdFusion is the best language ever.

There are almost no questions whatsoever on stackoverflow: that means nobody has no fucking problems using it.

Description of a Bug in JIRA:
Hi guys, there is "another" bug :-))))))!!!! :-((( with the customer list:
- The list of Customers (**which one? we have 4 fucking lists **) is sorted by Name, not by Birthday date (**wait, it's a sortable table, with a sortable name, city ,zip column, it's not sorted by birthday because the birthday column was not even required **)
- If I click on the details I see some data missing (**which data? which customer? there are thousands of them and most work**)
- In addition the arrow on the right is too small, can you make it a little bigger (**excuse me**)?
- I also need to export everything in excel.

Categorised as: Bug

Moron. You are part of a League of Morons...

How to comply with GDPR on any website and web application:
- download the law and store it in some folder
- if you have money, pay a lawyer and a security consultant to write something about GDPR. Download reports and papers and store it in some folder
- Don't touch your code, nor your database nor your infrastructure. If you don't have anything encrypted, leave it like that.
- Write somewhere a popup that says: "we are fully compliant with GDPR". If you have still money left you can also buy such a popup.
- DONE.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

Oh I forgot.
Once I got promoted with more responsibility and my pay raised, but since I just passed some tax threshold for few $ my net income was more or less 1 hundred $ lower than before the promotion...

Going live on Friday afternoon.
- no way, too many critical bugs! - I said
- we will - the Key account manager said.

Friday is here, still many critical bugs, I was right, it's impossible.

The Key account manager just dropped all functionalities with critical bugs and tricked the customer into thinking it's ok.
So we go live.

He was right, we can.
Oh yeah.

Maybe it's old and well known, but somebody asked, so here it goes:

A shepherd is quietly grazing his sheep on the fresh village pastures.

Suddenly a shiny new car stops by. A cool guy, very well dressed hops out and asks him: "Good man, If I guess exactly how many sheep you have, can I win one?"

The shepherd, puzzled, accepts.

The cool guy, opens his laptop, download a satellite picture of the area, run a NASA algorithm for image recognition and in few seconds answers "you have 1342 sheep"

"Wooow" says the shepherd "you won, take one"

The cool guy is about to live when the shepherd approaches him:

"Ehi, Young man, I bet all my flock against your car that I can guess what is your job"

The cool guy, (he likes to bet after all) accepts.

"You are a consultant" says the shepherd.
"WTF! how did you even..."

"Well, easy" says the shepherd "you came out of nowhere, well dressed and smart looking, you answered a question nobody asked you, you told me something I already knew, you want to be payed for that and in addition, you don't understand shit about my business."

"Now", adds quietly the shepherd "please, give me back my dog"

(for @LOLjustCoding)

software languages are like people's minds: all crazy, but all in different ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was a nice guy, skilled, reasonable, a lot of knowledge.
Until he said "I'm going to assign a girl to your project, BUT don't worry, she is very good"

I was about to jump, but handshakes and further jokes went on and I wasn't able to speak up.
Plus he is the CEO assigned by the investors to be our new software provider.

Puking.

Daily scrum
Today, the Scrumpy Master was not here, so I leaded the daily scrum meeting,
rephrasing the 3 standards questions a little bit: the results where amazing.
Here my questions in case somebody want to use them:
- What the fuck did you do on Friday?
- What the fuck do you think you are doing today?
- What is your fucking problem?

We managed to keep the meeting very short and after the meeting everybody was sooooo concentrated I couldn't believe it.

Beeep Beeeeeep 7:00 o'clock. Shit. I was dreaming. Must wake up and go to work.
Scrum master will be there too.

ssh your.server.ip, welcome message:

#Ooops! your files have been encrypted.
#Don't waste your time trying to decrypt them.
#Nobody can.

#We would gladly offer you a way of recovering all
#your files safely, but sadly we lost the decryption
#password.

#Hackers too are not perfect, have a nice day.
#PS. you can still send money to support us if you want at this
#web page: fuckyou.onion.
#Your personal key: m0r0nm0t3fukk3r

(I'll code this one day and install it on somebody machine, it's one of my top dreams)

Reinstalling Android Studio.
It takes a while.
So you take a rest, exercise a little. Sure, it will installed when you'll come back ready to throw yourself into deep work, with fresh energy.

You come back.
There is a pop up: Do you want to send usage data to google ? Nothing installed yet.

Only Yes/No option. Where is the "Fuck you" option?

Planning.
- Sales people: we will deploy and install 100 customers by the end of the month.
Meaning: 100 it's impossibile, we want actually do 50, but we set a high target so people will sweat their ass off. But we don't tell them the truth.

- Tech people: no way, we will deploy and install no more than 25!
Meaning: we could do 100 but we would die. We will guarantee 25, but since we are good we will optimise the workflow and maybe we will make it to 50. But we don't want to create expectations.

Big misunderstanding arise if these two language are used in the same meeting.

At least if I'm in the meeting as technical people

My little pleasure of today.

I asked a question on Stack Overflow.
It was closed with reason: "off-topic" "tip-of-the-iceberg" question.
I followed the link to the explanation of why it was closed.

There was a discussion in metaSO, about closing or not those kind of questions.
It seems somebody "won" the discussion arguing that was the right thing to do....

I DOWNVOTED HIM.

now I feel much better.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

Numbers:
- Facebook Monthly Active Users = 2.4 Billions
- Facebook Fake Users, not included in MAU = 3.4 Billions (FB declared recently disabling that much)
Total: 2.4+3.4=5.8 Billions

Worldwide internet users: 4.3 Billions

Maybe a little function like this could help?

function createFBAccount() {

if (numberOfAccounts++ > peopleOnEarth) {
print "You are not human"
exit
}
...
}

when you are in a manual editing frenzy and you press F1, "HELP" by mistake instead of F2, "edit"

And the fukken Excel stop the universe for precious seconds to give you stupid help.

I want to remove fukken F-uck 1 key

I was about to write a rant on saturday, but I thought: the company and the morons hired by the ceo and investors make me rant, so the company should pay that, during my working time.

At my current rate, this 10 minutes monday rant plus some rant reading and commenting, it's about 10$.
Let's the morons pay that.

Fucking hate when business people says this to me:
- You have no time to do this, we will find somebody else to do it. (EXCUSE ME? how do you know I have no time? If have no time I WILL TELL YOU)
- Your team is too busy, we will outsource that (IF THAT it's a priority, we WILL DO THAT, fuck you, I'll tell you if we need to outsource or not)
- Requirements are too complex to do now. We will think about it and we will tell you, maybe it's just enough to add a column to db (WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS too complex? I didn't even see anything we can call requirement, nor speak with relevant people, so how do you fucking know they are complex if you don't know shit about dev and our platform)

Conclusion
It's true, I have no time, because I don't fucking understand what do you want, so I'm running all day and night doing useless things.

half day gone try to find or remember the password of some SSL/key/encrypt/crt/shit/whatever.

Blaming myself for hours, how could I not save the password somewhere?

#Enter Password:
(I pressed enter, no password).
it works.

I love IT security

Never had full time mentors, just some great examples from great people:

Some years ago, I was new on the job. They sent me to see a colleague for the "transfer of knowledge" as he was leaving and I had to take over his projects.

He greeted me with a big smile and said:
"Oh, look, I just spilled very accidentally a cup of coffee on my pc so I've lost all information. Only thing I remember is that you have a call with this project today at 14 o'clock. I'll be gone by then but don't worry, just say we are late with delivery and it will be fine. I hope you all the best with your new job!"

I'll always remember him. I learned the value of improvisation, the utility of a cup of coffee and how to take things easy.

I always dream of doing what I learned from him sooner or later.

1. take a web application working in somebody computer since 4 years with tons of features.
2. Believe that the application is the future and solve brilliantly a general market need.
3. multiply income of current only customer by 10: you are going to be rich.
3. start to install 2, 3 customers.
4. discover the application is shit. Doesn't solve well the problem. Functionalities are different for each customer
5. discover that customers are willing to pay 1/10th of the original customer
6. quickly reingeneer the application to a multitenant cloud application, because with 3 customers and different versions you are already in deep shit
7. keep giving away the application for free to flagship customers. With a lot of customisation developed for free.
8. reach 200 customers in 5 years and still no break even, but lot of debts
9. resort to financial tricks to keep the company going

Luckily money are not mine. They could be recovered.
Unluckily the time spent was mine. It couldn't be recovered
Hope that the application will finally crash so that I can move on to the next thing: retirement in a mental asylum

Our code base is shit.
To improve, we went through different coaching style: Freudian Psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, gestalt

- Freudian Psychoanalysis: After several years refactoring and discussing our technical debt we can say that we really understand our code in deep. But it's still shit

- Behavioural psychology: after some months of work, we built a lot of testing. Now the code is still shit, but we don't get dirty anymore

- Gestalt: after few weeks sessions, the code is still shit. But we don't care anymore, we accept it and we are happy

(note. it's an adapted psychology joke)

every time I need to deploy an iPhone app on the fucking AppleStore: WTF

My best skill is problem is:
*** problem solving ***
Really, at least in all the teams I've been working until now, I'm always surprised by myself. How fast I am in spotting the problem root and find or suggest a solution. Even on things I have almost no knowledge.

My worst skill is:
*** problem solving ***
Being so effective make me everybody's slave.
Everybody always rely on me for any kind of weird shit. If I try to "outsource" the problem, after one day it will bounce back on me and I solve it in no time.

So I've no time for anything else that solving other people's problems.
Constant interruptions and context switching.
And worst, my bosses don't understand why I don't finish my tasks. And I cannot blame my team.

I spent a month trying to understand how to split our application and setup a pdf server to manage 10'000> pdf documents generation at the same time.

Today during our monthly meeting, our dear Key Account Manager, said he's not selling pdf generation to customers since one year at least, and he's not planning to sell it in the future.

Nobody knew about that apparently. We had also some demo guys showing actually the functionality to potential customers.

Also nobody believe me when I say we should start a project to monitor used functionalities in our application.

Just wasted one month of my fucking extra-time. Now I'm late with a lot of other tasks, apparently more urgent that the potential scalability issue of a functionality we don't use.

Key Account Manager rules.
Key Asshole Manager.

I think we should hire a Key fucking-COMMUNICATION Manager

How will it be called an AI software with (unavoidable) bugs in it? AS? Artificial Stupidity?

- I buy product X online.
- AFTER buying it, I'm flooded with ads about the same product X.
- Why are they wasting money in this way - I think - I won't buy it again soon!

Suddenly a crazy idea strikes me:
The company running the ads, is able in this way to tie the number of ads impressions to me and to my purchase.
In some *superficial* statistics, I will be a guy who has seen thousand of ads AND bought a product. The kind of superficial statistics you show to CEO's

I'm the proof that the marketing company is running ads very well and deserve a good share.

More useless ads they send me the better for the marketing company, as it will justify higher expenses.

I think I also helped implementing this system on some website, unconsciously.

It's just that I have a perverse mind, or did I find how to be rich?

I proposed agile training to my company.
I choose a well known coach around here, with good references.

First 3 days were great. After a month he came back for another session and check progress.

This time, he literally fell asleep during the workshop. Several times. He would ask questions, sit down and quietly fall asleep while waiting for our answers.

We were astonished and embarrassed.

He apparently had a very hard working period and could not cope with traveling and working so much. He apologized some day afterwards and didn't charge us for the day.

He never came back. The team didn't take it very well and my reputation was compromised, as well as trust in the methodology I think.

I kept saying that everybody can have a bad day, but it was probably just to defend myself and my fucking stupid idea of changing the world.

A real fucking shame. Still I can't believe when I remember this.

Working 18 hours per day was tough, at the beginning coffee helped a lot. However I started loosing friends and the little free time I had, I spent it drinking, lonely in anonymous pubs, trying to socialise.
Workload increased and stress started to affect me, so I began smoking weed to relax.
To recover and work with renewed energy coffee was not enough anymore, I started with pills, amphetamines, coke, crack. After the biggest deployments I would disappear for days in an opium den.

Work, it's a gateway drug.

Jeez maybe it's just me, not a very smart user, but after at least 6 years with iPhone5, just before changing it, I discovered how to raise the volume without logging in the phone first:

I press the home button, Siri show up, and THEN the fucking raise/lower audio buttons are working.

6 years typing the fucking pin just to raise the volume.
6 fucking years missing notifications and calls just because I forgot the fucking volume on the lower tone. Almost lost a girlfriend for that.

CEO, your Backend Server is a powerful machine.
It can output millions of pages and serves millions of users.
But it has one defect:
It needs a Developer.

CEO, your Web Application is powerful.
It downloads faster than light and carries more images than your son Instagram account.
But it has one defect:
It needs a Developer.

CEO, a Developer is very useful.
He can fix things on the fly and he can develop killer features.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

(from "General Your Tank Is A Powerful Vehicle" Bertold Brecht)

Fuck, really FUCK the fucking MySQLWorkbench on Mac.
Useless piece of shit.
I fucking touched some fucking buttons and now I can't have my view back with query editor, output results, and schema view.

A fucking hour wasted restarting this shit of a tool touching things, nothing. All to execute a fucking stupid query.
AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH FUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKK
I NEED to work, not to understand how your stupid GUI works, designed by a cripple mind with poor IQ and developed by retarded

My mom is a basic user that needs to use only basic apps to chat and speak with family, post photos and play one or two games.

She is always ranting about how difficult is to do simple things. And she is mostly right.

Like, where are my fucking photos gone?
Why is facebook/whasapp/whatever different today, where are the fucking buttons gone?
what the fuck happened (when while clicking something a update windows popup and you click something else). Why the buttons are so small (when you want to close a fucking ad windows with a little invisible fucking "x" somewhere and you click the ad instead)?
I don't want no fucking cookies.
Why after windows update my fucking game doesn't work anymore. Why I can't hear anything through the fucking skype?

The fact that she knows I'm one of the moron who builds kind of not-usable and buggy fucking things, doesn't help.

Relationship between ranting and productivity.

When productivity increases, ranting increases as you are dealing with a lot of shit. So ranting is actually beneficial to high productivity.

When productivity decreases below zero because you have a lot of fucking problems, your ranting also increases sharply.

The only peace zone is with moderate, positive or negative, productivity and low ranting, i.e when you are not doing much

I'm a developer, member of the A-Team. Actually I'm the leader of the A-Team.

We are incredibly skilled. Our problem solving capabilities is amazing, almost 100 times more effective than the rest of people. We produce code 10 times faster and better than anybody else. We have THE knowledge.

We can save the company in case of emergency.

For that reason, it's of paramount importance to nurture and protect the A-Team.

- When there is a bug, A-Team will not correct it. Because, if A-Team is busy, and bad shit happens, the company could be destroyed and we couldn't help

- When there is some important features to develop with a deadline, A-Team will not participate: A-Team must stay alert and ready in case of emergency

- If huge catastrophe happens and long hours, night and weekend are needed to fix it, A-Team will not risk burning the A-Team because it's the only high skilled team we have. The company cannot afford to have an A-Team member exhausted, underpaid, unhappy leaving or sleepy. Therefore, the company will sacrifice other less important people.

A-Team is company biggest asset and must be protected in any kind of situations.
The company should also pay training for them in order to increase their skills and make them unreplaceable.

These are my conditions. I'm the leader of the A-Team. You can't afford to loose me.

The mixed feeling when you manage to give orders without giving orders:

- feeling of omnipotence: you worked behind the scenes and you got what you wanted. Nobody knows, but what the hell you are the Puppet Master, God.

- sadness and loneliness: they will never learn. Somebody else claims to have given the orders, nobody knows about you. God is alone after all. And you'll be killed one day.

I was waiting all week for a meeting with the business strategist, to get a minimal understanding of what is happening in her fucking little confused mind.

At 15 o'clock she says, sorry, I have an headache, I must leave no meeting.

And I answer:

Lucky you! by chance I just powdered my cock with Aspirine and Iboprufene, so you can choose and take it through oral or rectal administration...

I think I'm reaching now 40 hours in 3 days coding a function for a nasty grouping report.

Now the report is ready.
Testing with real data I'm 3/4 units off.

Now start at least one full week of monster counting-debugging-fixing on hundred of data.

If somebody get close to me in these days, I'll cut their throat drink their blood and eat their heart still beating, like Aztecs.

I'll have no time to cook or buy anything else to eat anyway, so it will be for survival.

Newbie Agile Team: "Hi Scrum Coach, we studied and implemented the Scrum methodology, but we are late as before and our software is buggy and shitty as ever, how is that?"

Agile Coach: "Scrum Methodology is easy to learn, but difficult to master!"

Newbie Agile Team (chorus): "Oh coach, Fuck yourself daily, with your coffe thermos, standing up and once per week retrospectively. If you'll come at the next review meeting, we will gangbang your ass in front of the stakeholders"

A rant a day
Keeps the shrink away

Hi devRanters, hi you all.

I really appreciate all of you that are patiently reading, humorously or not so humorously commenting and wise or not wise giving advice to my semi-serious rants.

It's a great stress relief for me in this moment to know somebody it's out there listening to my stupid problems.

And probably will also improve the life of people around me.

All day long meeting with business consultant about company future, software architecture, technical debt, refactoring, resources, projects.

Conclusion from top consultant, ex country manager of a weeeell known tech company:
Who cares about "code" anyway? (disgusted smile)

CVE-2019-3568
Description: A buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack allowed remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number.

NSO group even sell a spyware application based on that vulnerability to governments.

Listen!!!!! I'm going to the toilet with my phone!!! Listen!!!

Web developers know the feelings.

just read this, wanted to share it:

Jesus at Last Supper:
(breaks bread and gives it to them) Take, this is my body.
(pours wine) Drink, this is my body.
(opens a jar of mayo)...

Judas: I'm gonna stop you right there

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

hmmm more rants about Linux than about Windows?

Actually analysing better, most of "rants" about Linux are actually expressions of love.

I can't find however any expression of love for Windows.

So the question remains open

You motherbugger, you god damn son of a bug!

When...
- you start the day with good intentions.
- you want to fix some long-due issue
- you think: I'll google it and I'll solve it. What can it be? I just want to track correctly my subdomains with all-mighty Google Analytics

and the first answer you find is:
"Unfortunately, Google Analytics has a few hoops to jump ...blablabla More unfortunately, the Google Analytics documentation is unclear ...blabla"
and 20 more pages of blog.

Fuck.
Let's skip to the next good intention before the day turns bad

haiku:

An old code.
A bug leaps in.
Rant!

wait,
if there are 3.4 Billions FaceBook fake users, that means than there are also at least 3.4 Billions fake email accounts around. Jeez.

And the spam traffic estimates are at 260Billions email per day or 260B/3.4B=76 emails sent by each fake email accounts per day. Much less as probably fake email accounts are more.

So, only 76 spam emails sent per account per day. I think there is still room for a big improvement

$git commit -m "fix fucking bug again"
$git push

fatal: Right now you can only push 1 commit every 2 rants (every 1 rant for gitRant++ members) because we want to make sure everyone's commit are pushed in a relaxed state of mind! 2 rants to go until you can push another commit.

When yo wake up in the morning and you read:

"Upcoming updates to the AWS Lambda....in rare cases, package updates may introduce compatibility issues."
("rare cases", yeah sure. skip everything)
"...You have the following options: 1. Take no actions, 2.blabla 3.blabla..."

Close the blog.
Communicate to the board that due to lack of resources, randoms bugs could happen in the next weeks and that the quality of a 500K$ project is at random risk.

Rant.

Well, my first project was to replicate something I saw somewhere: connect a pen to a potentiometer and to the serial port of an Apple II in such a way that you could replicate the movement of the pen on screen and also draw.

Apple II . Mouse, touch screens, tablet, etc didn't exist.
It worked.

However, a part from feeling old, I feel also stupid now, because I didn't understand at all the potentiality of such a tool nor what was going to happen in few years.

I could have invented a mouse. Or the concept of GUI. It was just in front of me.

Instead, I think I just draw some tits an some dick.

So I'm here.
Wondering, what is there now in front of my eyes, that I don't see?

Trying to setup a fucking google tag manager to get the fucking google analytics working.

Few years ago it was a 10 minutes work. Now I'm already at 4 hours. Fucking sick

WHY I say why I have two fucking equals accounts, FUCKING THE SAME.
And one is working the other one doesn't give a shit about my analytics.

Ehi, Tag manager, I just set up a Tag called "YourMother" related with its trigger called "Fuck" using same extra variable called "anal"

Can you just show it in my anal-ytics, fucking please?

counting things and columns matching.
Two easy and stupid things that make you loose it if you can't get it right

I don't know if SSL saved the leak of the shitty useless information that our application and customers send over the network. I really don't care and I don't know.

What I know, oh yeah, is that every time there is some trouble with SSL my day is fucked up

the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly meeting where everybody absolutely agree on absolutely fucking everything and everybody shows only positive things.

After that, you go back to work and it's the opposite.

Way of wasting time:
generating csv and importing in Open Office Calc, mysteriously what should be ",-," shows as "-0".

I thought some strange fucking time function was responsible of generating a "0" after my "-", until I discovered that for some fucking reason, Open Office Calc decides to add the fucking "0" by itself.

And they say that computer do what they are told to. I just said to import a fucking "-", it's called "Minus". do you fucking understand Calc?

Back to something useful.

double-clicking bugs in web application.
They keep happening and generate double actions.

Instead of fixing the bugs, I created a script that check periodically for double actions and delete them from db.
I also gave db access to first level support and the query to delete double actions.

So I can be free on weekends and avoid the stress of fighting for resources

I get frustrated about the shitty work I'm forced to do to meet useless deadlines or follow meaningless ever changing consultant ideas.

I write a rant.

People in devrant suggest me best practices, solutions, tools, even technical steps.

I write this meta-devrant.

Devrant refuse to add more than 1 rant every 2 hours.
Fuck.

Biggest load of bullshit ever heard from a new consultant in the company?

I don't know maybe it's me. I'm sure that at booking.com they have hundred of GUI/UX/UI experts, product owners, A/B testing and whatever.

So, please, can you explain to me in a professional and scientific why, why the fuck, when I search for an hotel in a place for a date, by default, they show me UNAVAILABLE properties?

Like, "hey sorry, there was this great hotel, right in the center and very cheap, but you missed it!! hahahaha, you poor moron"

And every time I have to ACTIVATE the fucking filter myself "only show available properties".

Excuse me? Who want to see in first position the hotels that are NOT available?

Are there some users out there who wants that? If I were hired at booking.com as Product Owner or UX/UI expert, I think the first thing I'll propose is to quit the fucking filter whatsoever or at least to enable it by design.

So why is that? you want to show off? slap me in the face, with your hard cock-list of hotels you have anyway, but not for me?

“Everything fails all the time!”
Werner Vogels
CTO @Amazon.com

"Werner Vogels, fuck you, everywhere, all the time!"
Deviloper
Ranter @devRant

Siri, remind me to write a new rant in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

So I can keep my stress down and increase my productivity, and maybe become a devRant++ member.

Am I addicted?

why on earth somebody thought that MySQL on MacOS must be restarted automatically every time you kill it like a fucking zombie?

An why the fuck every time I restart the Mac, I must kill the fucking zombie with a kill -9 in the head 2 or 3 times before being able to access it again?

Little calculation:
you have probably around 20 days holiday per year.
After 60 year old everything is more or less a gift, so I wouldn't count on it.

Let's say you are going to work 30 years. That is 600 days to do whatever you want.
It's less than 2 years.

Shit.

Try to count how many days left of freedom.

Shit.

Suddenly all the things I have to work on today have lost all priority

when your application works everywhere, in every situation, for every user, EXCEPT on the fucking device and user of the new Board Member....

...fuck fuck fuck.

(specially because we have a task dedicated specially to test and target CEO and old board members devices)

WHEN:
...when the analyst decides whether a feature is too complex to implement or not.

So you don't get the requirements because he thinks it's too complex.

So you develop something that has nothing to do with requirements. Actually much more complex.

And after that, one week before deployment, the customer actually show you and the analyst that what you did is fucking useless.
It was much easier, or at least completely different.

favorite
- big living room, well lighted, with view, better if in a foreign country and unknown city.
Why? well, I work fast so I can go out and explore.

most productive for coding and concentration
- airplane
Why? well, nobody can fucking call me nor write me emails + nothing else to do

Worst place
- the office
Why? wtf

When somebody speaks about "rewriting everything from scratch" I always mention some famous articles claiming: "don't do it!" "big mistake".

Truth is that when somebody says "rewrite everything from scratch" he doesn't mean "everything". He just means "rewrite the 2-3 things that we found useful after 10 years of developing useless features nobody cares about"

So then, yes, rewrite, please

1. Brain feels like in motion without idle time. It's a very pleasurable feeling
2. Create things from scratch by myself
3. solving problems

Not all coding is like this, though.

reading most of group rant about "love of coding".
It looks to me as most of people aim at a creative job, like being an artist, maybe a painter like Picasso o Van Gogh.
But they likely are up to an house painter job.

Which is probably not a good example as I'm watching now at the painter in my living room.
So quiet. Spreading the paint very carefully. and quiet. No bosses to scream at him. Satisfaction of a job well done.

And the fucking bill he'll get from me.

I'm responsible of the smooth operations of the platform, i.e. I'm responsible if something doesn't work. As I'm the technical leader, cofounder and original developer.

However I have no control on installations scheduling, on feedback from customers, on new features planning, on installations tasks performed by the team. No resources whatsoever.

And everybody NEEDS me to perform even small tasks. I would delegate and automate if only I had the time to explain and develop scripts.

But I have zero time. So basically everybody is counting on me working 15 hours per day to get things done.
And one person is also claiming to be "in charge of operations".
He is actually only in charge of me.

I cannot exit from this vicious circle.
I'm like the house doormat.

The action of a DEVELOPER is to make his computer a SLAVE.!

Holy shit. He was not obeying my rules

We go to see a customer for a small project, probably 1/2 month dev and few thousand $, basically a small member page for a small local club.
"We want something exactly like this" he says. He opens the browser, logs in Linkedin, I wait.
"Something like this" he repeats.
I finally understand.
Well - I say- Login page and profile picture upload, yes we can do it...

After one year working part time (10%) as new consultant in the company, the consultant calls the technical director in the evening and asks: "hey, how much do you think it will cost to rewrite a SaaS platform somewhat similar to ours from scratch in outsourcing and scaling from the actual 500 customers to 500 thousands? I need to know by tomorrow morning, as we have a pitch with investors. Do you think it's ok to ask for 500K$? Actually, I can only ask for 500K$."

I started to write an API for our application and asked everybody to use it.
Everybody liked the idea, but nobody liked the API.

So now we have api/v1, api/dev1, api/dev2, api/dev3 to do the same fucking operations.

When I complained about them not respecting the guidelines, dev1,2,3 told me it's my fault because I'm the director.

I thought for a while about how to get rid of these apis and I finally agreed with their view.

I removed developer 1,2 and 3 and finally now there is only api/v1

[dying] I came here with a simple dream...a dream of killing all humans. And this is how it must end? Who's the real seven billion ton robot monster here? Not I... Not I...

-- Bender Rodriguez --
(Futurama)

Our Bus Factor is 0.1:
if a Bus, somebody, or something breaks or slightly touch one of my balls, the whole company is screwed.

good thing about working from home all weekend is that on Monday at work you don't have that shitty feeling "it's fucking Monday".

Plus, you meet some humans after 2 days in the cave