These are the questions distracting me while debugging

• Good night’s sleep (8-9 hours)
• Clearly defined requirements.
• A fun challenge to solve.
• An idea of how to begin.
• Music! Something fast paced and/or harsh. I find soft tunes, good lyrics, etc. are usually very distracting.
• Deadlines help, too, even if they make me stressed out and work too much.
• No political BS / hateful and intolerant political comments from my coworkers within the past day or two, as being called a horrible, racist nazi by association absolutely kills my desire to do any work for them. Going two days without something like this happening is exceedingly rare.
• Being left alone, *especially* in the morning before work! The more distractions, the harder it is focus, even if i have peace and quiet later on.

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

after weeks of living on my own the inevitable occurred.

I forgot to eat.

it's so distracting to eat. When I'm focused on something I just want to get it done. but by the time I'm done it's way past eating time.

I just made this devrant chrome extension that notifies you when a new rant is posted. Just because having the site open isn't distracting enough.

@dfox will I get in trouble for using your logo for this?

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

Manager: we require people to work in the office but we'll give you a space to get as comfy as you want.

Me: *walk into the open space office, set my mechanical keyboard, plug in my noise cancelling headphones, start coding and mumbling every now and then*

Manager: keyboard is distracting others and we don't allow headphones as we want to be able to speak to you when we feel like it.

➡️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

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

I found out that not many people know Floating for YouTube extension

I personally use it to watch confs when i am doing easy stuff

Help me stay up to date ( it's distracting so i turn it off when i have to concentrate)

Hope it helps someone!

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

I want to work on personal projects but this keeps distracting me :/

While getting a pro in Kotlin, I started using

when(condition) {
true -> doOneThing()
false -> {
xyz = whatEver()
blaBla()
}
}

instead of simple if-else.
It looks nice but also distracting.

What is your opinion on that?
I guess most will be like:

Y'know, I'm an audiophile. I want perfect sound, and that's why I want high quality headphones and audio files. I dislike speakers because the sound changes from room to room quite a lot, while it doesn't with headphones, and that would also be distracting when I'm coding. Anyway, that's not what I'm complaining about.

I really don't get it when I download music that has been given out to download for free by the author or recording label, it sometimes comes as a WAV or FLAC. I have enough space on my phone/SD card anyway so gimme lol. Sometimes, I like a song so much, I buy it but often, I never get a WAV or FLAC or anything similar to that. Only MP3 320kbps, WHICH SIMPLY ISN'T ENOUGH FOR MY AUDIOPHILE NEEDS SINCE I CAN CLEARLY HEAR THE FUCKING FREQUENCY CUTOFFS. AAC 320kbps would sound way better (WITH LESS FUCKING FILESIZE, MIND YOU) and its compatibility is also good enough to distribute it as such, but that's something that, again, only fucking free downloads sometimes use. IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE! GIVE US PROPER FILES IF WE PAY FOR YOUR GODDAMN MUSIC!

No, you cannot ask us to move our tech meeting elsewhere because we're being "loud", for the same reason we don't ask you to leave the area because your non-work-related chatter is distracting us from our said meeting. It's the only video conferencing system in the joint, and it's not our fault you and your people sit nearby. How dare you go past us and complain to our boss as if we're nothing to you - just because you were recently promoted, don't act like you were never in the trenches with the rest of us. It's like you have no respect for us now that you've gone a step up the ladder. The next time you or your team members try to fuck with us like that over petty shit like this, we're going to bring the hammer down on your asses and burn every last vestige of self-worth you have by making sure you never get a moment's peace. It's bad enough you and your team suck each other off during our bi-weekly department meeting by patting yourselves on the back for doing what's supposed to be your fucking jobs - don't you dare try to drag us down to make yourselves look like fucking saints. That is where I cross the goddamn line.

Issues I didn't know I would face when trying to study from my parents' place: They're not talking to me and disturbing me, it's the fucking cat snoring so loudly that is distracting me 😅

What kind of music do you guys listen too when you're coding? I need recommendations!

I can't do anything with English lyrics (other languages are fine. As long as I don't understand the lyrics, it's not distracting), so I usually stick to instrumental like animals as leaders, polyphia, Chon, etc or German metal: Rammstein, oomph, wbtbwb, etc

Whatcha guys got?

So I saw this argument between two intellectual titans on Quora about C vs C++. It was pretty amusing lol.

First Guy: “C programmers are the Amish! They’re afraid of change. C++ is a better C because it repairs it insufficiencies like classes and namespaces.”

Second guy: “C is fairly consistent, while C++ is inconsistent in many places. It performs so many allocations without you even knowing it. It’s complexity is very distracting !”

I’m already irritated by all the unwanted stimulus. I don’t need search engines, websites or whatever that fuck showing me stuff I did not ask for. It’s really distracting and makes it hard to focus on one thing. I’m trying to adjust to a lifestyle like this but it’s bloody difficult in this day and age.

My side project is distracting me from my corporate, gotta pay the bills somehow and meet these damn deadlines, project! 😫😫

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

Material Design on the web was not a good experience in my personal opinion. I see these spaces around the boxes that are too huge. The faded underlined input boxes are confusing, too. I'd rather prefer seeing a border all around the input box or something of similar representation than an underline with a distracting animation. Many also fail at placing the buttons with a transparent background on the right spot. I'd still prefer Semantic UI or something clean on my upcoming projects. To me, Material Design is really good for mobile interfaces though.

Woke up early, took my mom out for breakfast. It has been more than an hour, we have talked for about 15 minutes the rest of the time she has been on her phone. Was giving smartphones to boomers a mistake? Any boomer devs here that have fallen to the same addiction?

These old people and their damn mobile devices! Get off my lawn!

So.. pets for your avatars.. but I don't see the alternative of having a baby crawling around your feet available for choosing instead of dogs and cats.. crawling around, biting cables, smashing my keyboard steeling, buying adorable and distracting her dad from working. because that's what my home environment looks like.. maybe I don't have enough ++'s
;-)

Today tragedy has struck, I forgot my ear phones

I couldn't get into the zone, had issues with bugs and had to listen to people breathe and make mouth noises in the train.

I had to resort to playing songs in my head which didn't draw out any distracting noises

Shit guys, I cannot even begin to tell you about how tired I am at seeing gifs at every single.fucking frontend article. I cannot enter a single Medium/Dev.to without it being plastered in the most random fucking gifs you have ever seen.

Its bad enough that your average Medium/Dev.to is as shallow as the little puddle you spill on the floor after watering your cactus. With the added gifs, it just sucks so bad. I mean, who's fucking idea was it to plaster reading material with distracting content anyway? I wanna hunt them down and shove something right up their arses.

Back in uni when I started dabbing into frontend, my feeble brain thought it was quite refreshing after peering over java docs every day. Nowadays though, I cannot even manage to read these mostly shitty arse articles without wishing I was dead.

Also, I wonder if this is also the case for the java, .net, python, rust community?

Lecture videos should not have background music.

Please, if you are making a teaching video, do not do this. It is very distracting.

I download YouTube videos just to watch them on a clean user interface without distracting advertisements and suggested videos.

I don't know how many of you here will understand/feel what I feel but here goes nothing

I'm the kind of person who's very calm and like sitting and talking to a friend over using a mobile phone or something. I mean, it's not like I don't use mobile phones at all but yeah.
At this point, I think my smartphone is just a waste of time. Whenever I'm bored or feel lazy, the first thing I do is unlock my phone and randomly see something online. Even though I have nothing important. I feel like it's almost cutting me off from the real world. Maybe in that time, instead of using the mobile for nothing, I could go talk to someone, go for a walk, exercise, think, etc. I even see group of friends sitting in a circle, but no one's talking. Only using their phones.
And let alone socializing, I think you miss a lot of "me" time as well (oh I like meditation and shit haha).

I'm thinking of switching to a non-smartphone. But still we are developers/engineers/designers, and for us to stay away from technology is not easy when we're the ones making it. I love what I do but at the same time I also want feel life.

Stackoverflow's Hot Network Questions is so distracting when I'm viewing a programming post.

When you see your calendar isn't filled with useless huddles and stand-up meets, which have no purpose except distracting and disrupting your flow and focus.

That's how! 😡

We're so defensive about listening to music while [insert concentration-intensive task here]. Instrumentals, piano, EDM, what have you. Deep down, we know it's distracting us. It's just so hard for us to admit that. 😂😂😂

My old mechanical keyboard broke, so I had to buy a new one. I'm Brazilian, so the local market for mech keyboards is either limited or very fancy (fancy as gaming keyboards).

So I got this amazing Logitech G610, which unfortunately is not sold with blue switches here, only brown ones. Very solidly built, well made, good extra keys and whatnot.

BUT OH MY, who ever thinks those LED effects are good for normal usage after 5 minutes of playing with them??? VERY distracting! <o>

Distracting myself from something I should be working on. Then continuing to code. But I bout that pc a few years ago. It also compl—

Wait, what was the topic again?

An open office wouldn't be so bad if the same 3 people would actually sit the fuck down once in a while and do some actual work. Distracting as hell. It's gotten so bad that I've started writing logs of how many times they get up during the day.

// the most egregious offender
// down: 9:00
// up: 9:05
// down: 9:15
// up: 9:20
// down: 9:23
// up: 9:32
// down: 9:45
// up: 9:58
// down: 10:05
// this pattern continues the entire day

And what are they doing during these exoduses?

- Answering their personal cell phone from stay at home spouses
- Throwing trash away even though they have trash bins right NEXT to their desks.
- Pacing back and forth
- Checking the thermostat
- Checking the contents of the fridge over and over
- Being an absolute asshole!

After I took some time off from work, I decided to accept the offer for maintenance of two projects. Those are from two old clients, so I think I will not stress too much, since I know what to expect most of the time.

The issue is, sometimes I have a hard time to keep concentration. In the past, I could work for 3h straight, totally focused, would pause for 20min for stretch, and then come back to work. Now I can only focus for 30min or 1h, and after a pause, it's hard to concentrate again.

There is a lot going on in my life right now, and I know the worry is probably distracting me. I'm trying to listen instrumental music, drinking coffee... But that's not enough. Somebody has any tip?

Usually my problem is that my colleagues are too distracting.
I just put on headphones and play black metal or hypergrind.
The first is relaxing, the latter overloads my brain to release me of other distraction. It helps me to escape and keep only those things in mind that I actually need.

*1 hr after meeting*

*boss calls*
Boss: how are you doing with the task we talked about on the meeting?

Me: Oh I'm doing that other thing we talked about. I'll finish both in about an hour.

Boss: great!

... then starts going on about their lives. I wanted to be nice to them, so I paid attention to what's going on in their lives while I program menial tasks.

*1 hour later*
Boss: so have you finished? It's been an hour.

I would've finished, IF YOU HADN'T BEEN DISTRACTING ME THE WHOLE TIME

Every morning I spend time to choose inappropriate socks and it's for distracting people at work

Headphones, because working while your partner burn and scream in the hell of the bugs they caused is distracting

Worst: being forced back into the loud distracting office, to add on to the badness the covid restrictions were not taken very seriously

Best: getting a new full time remote job and an awesome company with some awesome team mates

Bonus is I now work from home fully but can still hang out with my great former coworkers

I want to keep working on my other project, but work and my other project keeps distracting me....

I am just so tired these days and find it extremely hard to work at all, let alone on the tasks I'm supposed to work on. I spend a lot of time distracting myself compulsively instead, even off work.

I have a vacation planned soon, but I do need to finish an important project before that (which I have been procrastinating on for the last 2 weeks).

These days I often feel like quitting tech altogether or at least taking an extended break.

Use Xamarin, they said. It will be easy, they said. You will only need to write your UI once, they said. NOPE
Documentation is shit, I've been sitting here for the past hour and a half figuring out how to add an icon to a button in their shiny XAML thing for which they have NO DOCUMENTATION. THEY WANT YOU TO HOE IT OVER C# BUT THEY ONLY GIVE EXAMPLES IN C#. And now I'm trying to figure out where I can download the iOS UIBarButton icons, because you can't use native icons and fuck apple too, they don't want to give em to you.
What a hellhole.
All while my client is constantly spamming me in all ways, distracting me, marking issues as "supercritical" (which makes an alarm ring on my phone and is only meant for emergencies) and otherwise distracting the living daylight out of asking for screens of the UI.

AND I STILL PREFER IT OVER ANDROID STUDIO. Don't even get me started on that one.

Kinda annoyed at NDA's right now

Can't discuss what I'm working on with old classmates for another opinion. And my co-workers are self-taught on this job as they needed so everything I'm doing seems like magic to them

So they're probably not going to spark that inspiration I need right now

And I can't reach out to the R&D department full of programers with this cause they're heavily behind so we're told no distracting them

Guys, check the Decreased Productivity app from chrome store. It helped me to browse Devrant in my work. It removes all the images and colors. You can still see images if you hover over them.

Not like I want to stay in Devrant all day, but it's less distracting

when all you want to do is work on your bash script but your wrist pain keeps distracting you...

Having other people pitch you to hiring managers, raise the hype, and profess faith in your abilities is kind of nerve-wracking. But I found a tutorial to teach me how to write a compiler and it’s not in a language I know, so that’s fun and distracting. Been up since 4am. Is now 12:30am. Should probably sleep.

I work in an office building which are blocks of cubicle farms. Each cubicle farm has about 50 seats. The cubicle farm I work in

1) People don’t step out to take personal calls. They talk on their phone for a good 30 minutes loudly and multiple people do this at the same time sometimes.

2) people chit chat and make noise and have more conversations than do actual work and it is noisy as fuck. People who do not have work go around chatting up people and it is loud and again noisy and distracting

3) people take calls via Skype or whatever and they’re loud too most of the time.

When I walk into work it feels like a fucking market and I think am gonna lose my mind soon. I just cannot concentrate at all.

Before anyone recommends noise cancelling headphones or anything, I really can’t because I have to constantly help out people and am being asked questions frequently and noise cancelling headphones don’t really do much for voices.

I’m pissed as fuck and really upset I can’t work because of these shitheads. I’m not sure who do I give the D to.

once I have to code in a public train station’s restroom just because I have no place to sit and floor is not comfortable enough because people keep walking by distracting me,
So I cover the lid, pull my laptop out, use my phones hotspot connect to remote server to fix the problem.
The smell is not good.

Do any of you have a fidget spinner or other fidget gadget? They seem to be pretty popular right now esp the fidget spinners. If you have one does it actually help you, or does it actually become more distracting? I'm fine myself fidgeting with paperclips and was looking at a fidget gadget.

I failed at university, spent too long there without ever graduating. I learned a lot through self-study, though. The only company I worked at was an arrangement with a friend whose company needed people, so I stepped in, but eventually I deserted the job after the company went out of money and I went two months straight working without getting paid. Now I feel apprehensive of putting that job experience in my resume because I didn't come out of it in good terms with the company. I have many unfinished projects but keep them private on GitHub because I feel like the code is too bad to show off. How do I even get a job, now? Should I just quit the industry altogether? Aaaaaaaaaaaaa

Right now I'm just self-studying some things I had wanted to do since college (namely computer graphics and trying to build a game engine) but never actually got to study formally because I kept failing at the prerequisite courses because I always kept distracting myself from my studies and just not putting enough effort. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to your advice and your judgment alike. I feel somewhat confident that I can actually do a good job, but I also don't feel confident enough to apply for jobs since I always feel like my skills are lacking. I know about impostor syndrome, but at the core of it is the matter: is this impostor's syndrome, or am I in fact *actually* consistently bad and incompetent? Rationally speaking I tend to feel like the latter, yet I know the only thing I can do is to try and be better. I guess.

Anyway, completely unstructured thing, just me venting off my frustration and desperation in a place where at least people will read it and possibly offer some advice. Thank you for reading this far.

The display power savings feature on Intel GPU drivers is retarded. It reduces backlight brightness when you're viewing dark content and pumps it back up when you have something white on the screen. This is the complete opposite of what you need for keeping the image viewable with minimum backlight brightness.

The dark parts of the dark image can be kept the same brightness by reducing the backlight, but the white text you're reading will actually be darker, so you need to manually set the display brighter. And then you need to reduce brightness when you switch to a white window because now that's too bright. And as a bonus, the backlight brightness will keep adjusting when you change windows, which is super distracting.

Bodily urges are so distracting :( I always need to go to the bathroom as soon as I sit down comfortably.. or I get hungry...

I've seen some posts on remote work. I believe all companies should permanently implement remote work if they cannot arrange a proper office.
I have been working for a company where programmers and project managers work in the same room, and sometimes I was trying to understand some problem in code when managers were screaming next to me at other developers or on the phone, because they couldn't hear themselves.
This happend so often that I would literally go home burned out.
Also there were people coming in the room to talk to the managers or just passing next to my screen every couple of minutes which was extremely distracting.
I bought a pair of over ear noise cancelling headphones and on top of that used ear plugs, but eventually I developed a very strange stress condition over the course of a year. Also listening to music while trying to focus for 8 hours a day while at work is very tiresome.
Also couldn't quit because it was my first job.

Worst disturbance? This person who sits behind my back. I've gotten used to them not minding their own business and snooping into mine but to counter that they've taken to distracting me and others all the time.
Sample this incident from just a few moments ago (inspiring the rant).

Me: *debugging while listening to some ambient music channel
Them: *rushes to my desk, putting a hand behind my back
Me: *politely takes off headphones asking, What?
Them: *after peeking at my screen, nvm, I'll tell you later, I have a meeting to go to.

Fucking hell, idiot! It already takes me hours of pushing myself to come to work at this good for nothing place and then actually get to working. Just flush your head in the toilet so you don't take a dump on me with your shitty restlessness.

Working on production issue,
Kind of nervous checking logs and so on...
Ops manager and PO who were looking over my shoulder this whole time start shooting the breeze.

I know what they were trying to do. They are trying to create a relaxed environment.

But the issue is that the talk is very distracting. If you want to shoot the breeze please go somewhere else.

Anyway just did that, asked them to leave. They weren't happy about it. But I really needed the silence.

I find it hopeless to achieve anything with applications aimed at non-devs, such as PowerPoint. How the hell can it be so difficult to use the same theme in one presentation as in another? If it had been code, I would just have copied the XML, XAML, include, link, script or whatever code in whatever language on whatever platform from the old project and pasted it into my new project. But with "user-friendly" apps I have no control of how anything actually works. I give up, my presentation will be unthemed. Maybe it's for the better anyway, less distracting graphics.

Atlassian! How am I supposed to "focus" on anything when Jira keeps distracting me with uncalled-for popups saying "Focus on building...etc."

I hate the new Teams. It's showing a distracting red icon in the activity bar when someone's sent a chat. Then, when clicking the chat icon in Teams you'd expect it to take me there so I could reset the chat and make it stop showing that irritating red notification in the activity bar. But NO, nothing happens when clicking the chat icon. Useless UX to say the least! This is one of the main reasons why I never use Teams for chatting, and I only open the application for meetings and then immediately shut it down. How come Microsoft, that's been around for so fucking long, still haven't learnt to design consistent, user-friendly and distraction-free applications? I think the answer is: They don't give a shit.

Sooo I was wondering what you guys listen to while coding?
I mostly listen to instrumentals, feel like anything that has words can sometimes be distracting.
Was thinking of listening to audio books though lol. don't know how it'll go XD.
What do you think?

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

Working on a web API project in C#, our frontend is another company, the body gets to them but they claim that the json is incorrectly formatted... I'm sure that it isn't but whatever...
I keep digging around to see what can be done, a "helpful" colleague offers to help, only to start asking about everything from scratch and after frustrating and distracting me like... 10 fold, I leave him to play as he wants, then hard reset and move on...
fire postman and focus on the logs... nothing! database... nothing!
couple of minutes later, I look at that far small laptop screen to find out that he has drenched my code with break points and the IDE is blinking its tabs off over there on the screen I rarely look at!

Tell me again why do we work in open spaces?!!

I get anxious when I try to learn new things.

I'm not even sure how to describe it. Low self esteem? Low confidence? I dunno.

It feels like stage freight, but there's no audience or stage, it's just me and my computer.

No one really ever watches me, or judges me or anything.

I guess I'm a bit self emasculating because I don't really have a reason for feeling ashamed for trying out something in private.

But I feel that the fear, the stress is very distracting and it's limiting my progress.

Now, there's this project I'm rewriting in my company that I'm taking pride in and think that it has the potential to actually increase profits.

The stack is way better, it's visually better, the load times are better, the product is easier to access and try out, bla bla bla.

I guess I never felt truly proud of anything I've ever done in any company, most of what I did felt like grunt work.

But this one is actually a very well designed improvement.

So I'm hoping that this will be the excuse for not needing to prove myself anymore so that my mindset will be something like:

so what if I abandon another side project?
so what if I publish a game that looks like shit?

I may fail at newer projects, but I did win at that project I did in my company, and it wasn't a victory just because I say so, but also because my coworkers and bosses do too.

I don't know what else could help at this point.

Anyone else thinking that a multiple monitor environment can be rather distracting than productive?

!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore

I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing

I used to hate email and to consider it a chore but after adopting "inbox zero", switching from web based shit to a proper client and automating the management of the many automatic notifications I get everyday I'm starting to think which when well managed email is still one of the best asynchronous communication tools, far better than sluggish and distracting chats like Teams or Slack which have their place but I think which currently they're pretty overrated.

Usually when listening to music I have on my main Spotify playlist (using headphones), after a good 7-8h sleep followed by a good breakfast.
It's usually better when:
- there's no one around to interrupt me,
- I know what I'm going to do and
- no distracting noise.

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

Whenever I find answers after Googling for a long time, I open those links and immediately loose my concentration. I just let those answers pages hang out in my browser while I go do something fun and distracting...

Anyone not a fan of Material Design especially the ripple effect? If not a fan, please tell me why. If yes, please tell me why, too.

For me, I feel like there's too much animation going on and I agree to someone that said it's cognitively distracting and it kinda breaks my train of thought. Any thoughts you can share?

I'm so tired when I got up. Didn't sleep much last night. Working on a Sunday night till 2AM because I did not work the week on the project I was given.
This is not happening for the first time, I sleep late around 3AM to do my work, as day is too noisy and distracting. Attend some meetings during the day and get lazy in the evenings. Work during nights and then the next day I'm all tired for daily stand up.
How do you people tackle this schedule? I need serious advices.

Does anybody here have any casual affinity towards reading scientific papers? During my time at the university I was exposed to read papers and found them quite exciting as they were actually informational. Articles from magazines or online ressources about yet another "groundbreaking" new tech feel hollow. And theres to much noise from hyping, evangelists and other distracting elements.

I still say there is nothing like music for distracting me. Sure, it often helps me focus, without a doubt... Who here hasn't found themselves in the groove, then without warning, one of those songs comes on that pulls you out of the zone, bouncing your feet along with the beat, barely keeping from singing out loud?

I'm always a bit lost at sprint planning, and the tasks are not written very descriptively in Jira, in a way that doesn't help me "restore the context" of what needs to be implemented. I'm always kinda lost in this shit and now I gotta go embarrass myself and ask people what were we supposed to do again, after a couple hours wondering and distracting myself as a "coping mechanism" for my frustration with this.

I hate being this anxious. My tasks are late and I don't want to keep working into the night this year.

I have been using Linux for a while and I get update notification about 3 times per week. I find it annoying. As soon as I plan to get some work done, I get a large notification popup saying "Hey, it's time to install le updates". I find it distracting; especially so because I use my laptop about 3 times per week; so basically EVERY TIME when I'm about to use it, it says "HEY you know what? Time for UPDATES".

Updates on Windows are annoying too; but at least they do not appear as often. I find this unacceptable and I do not know how anyone could think that distracting people from work so often is "ok". This is bad.

working with Mapbox and so far everything works except displaying custom svg pointers for single points while clustering the multiples.
the documentation is only semi useful.
and my work-at-home coworker keeps meowing at me like that guy who wants to talk about TV shows whenever I'm working
I want a nap!

I’m trying to work but the stock market is so fucking distracting right now with all the volatility!

What do you guys thing about manjaro?
Gonna use it to separate my work stuff(Linux) from the distracting stuff (windows & gaming).

I really should be working on my assignment, since it's a really basic 'build a website' thing, but... I'm so burned out on this course already, augh...
Plus there's the WHS assignment distracting me from the actual IT work. At least the 'talking to clients' assessment is relevant, even if it's annoying.

My team just spent all afternoon again their wfh setups.... They all use multiple monitors and laptops...

I never picked up on the idea though.., multiple screens always felt distracting...

At work I have to multitask on way too many projects and to make it worse there is a lot of red tape and I have to waste a lot of time surfing buggy documentation websites, switching VPNs and praying for CI/CD to work rather than writing code in the fucking editor and for me repetitive tasks and context switching are productivity killers since they prevent me to enter in a state of flow and I keep daydreaming or distracting myself.