Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

Trying to learn some golang after a break.

Made http / https transparent proxy for personal project.

Mind: You need to add configuration file with domains you allow traffic and block everything else using list of regex.

Me: Ok I can do it, 4 hours later ok done

Mind: Why not make it differently by making list of url you can block and test this shit on fucking ads and stop using adblock that downloads content.

Me: ok that will be handy I can watch websites faster and drop traffic I don’t want to.

Funny fact, it works I broke analytics, logging, quantum shit fucks and even youtube plays ok.

Go is awesome for networking stuff lol.

There’s nothing like opening a legacy system you didn’t build and has for some reason lasted the turn of the century, only to add a new feature without breaking anything.....

Would have been nice if I had written that JS function before saving the other file 🙄

There’s nothing like building in production 💩

Ticket: This API param doesn’t work.
Ticket Size: 1 story point / extra small baby fries

Found the issue almost immediately: some fucked up date math. Or at least backwards as hell. I don’t know. I don’t care.

There’s no spec for it, and writing it is a bitch. None of the API test helpers are designed for end-to-end tests. Why? I don’t care. They’re stupid. They all just break. And the API does weird shit like fucking redirects to an HTML page. Which is… i don’t know. They mix up API and embedded sessions a bunch, so who knows if this is right or broken as fuck.

I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
It’s just mountains of fucking garbage. Every time I dig into anything, anywhere in this codebase, or, let’s be honest: the entire goddamn company, it’s just more fucking garbage. The code is garbage. The specs are garbage. The people are garbage. The woke crap they love so much is garbage. The industry is garbage. The macs we’re required to use are garbage. The strongly-encouraged editor is garbage. The new hires are garbage. The legendary devs are garbage. The VPN is garbage — still haven’t gotten it to fucking work outside of fucking Safari, which is also garbage. The meetings are garbage. The “culture” is garbage. The “raises” are garbage. The thirty-step dance ceremony for each ticket is garbage. The literal fucking garbage at the office is the best part of the entire goddamn landfill.

And yeah, over half of the code that’s been giving me problems on this ticket was written by the same dev: The legendary golden garbage boy himself.

Just.
Fucking hell.

I’m going back to looking for work again. I can’t do this anymore.

How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?

My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.

He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.

I want him to learn JavaScript.

He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.

Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?

He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.

What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.

Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

I come from a front facing retail background. And I start my first developer job on Monday. It is also fully remote. They said I can take mental breaks whenever And unlimited pto as long as I use it wisely and don’t abuse the hell out of it. It’s a small company of like 75 people. They don’t want us working past business hours unless it’s urgent and something breaks.

Im like “uh what? You’re not going to yell at me for taking a 5 minute break after a homeless meth head screams at me and waives a wooden sword at me trying to hit me?”

It just feel like this is a grown up job. Like a professional job. I feel like I have work ptsd from being mistreated in the work place for 8 years. It doesn’t feel real. Does anyone else feel like this?

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

I’m pissed.
I had previously ranted about being assigned to a very messy project. I spent 3-4 months alone adding features and CLEANING things up.

Recently, there had been talks about a new major development phase on this project. But things lingered and the day before I’m to go on vacation, I get the news that this new phase starts in 2 days. Since I’m going to be on break they’re putting other guys on the project who don’t know anything about it.

Fast forward two weeks later.
I’m back from vacation.

I find out one of the guys has strong opinions about doing things certains ways… but unfortunately they are "ways" of unnecessary complexity, abstraction and verbosity.
After just a couple of weeks I’m already lost in the complexity of his code, which supports features of VERY LOW complexity. Fuck, has he ever heard of KISS? Has anybody heard of it where I work?

Now I have to spend my mental energy trying to make sense of this pile of crap rather than actually spending it getting things done.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

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 🙄🙄

That strange moment an entire PHP project no longer throws any errors, warnings or notices and you don’t know if you should believe it or not.

It’s been a long day trawling the logs file by file, action by action, surely I’ve missed something or it’s just waiting to break like hell when I commit the changes.

I quit my job… it got so exhausting, it had become all about last minute work and ETAs. The more I worked the sicker I felt. It started directly impacting my physical health which ended up affecting mentally too. I feel good that I got out of something very toxic but at the same time not working kinda makes me sad when I look at others working. I have consciously taken a break to clear my mind but it affects me that I don’t know what next.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Dear Swift, we have to break up. I’ve found a new language to love. Oh don’t act so surprised, you know our relationship was on shaky ground. You never let me have any fun. You’re always telling me what to do and how to do it and I’ve had enough. You treat me like a child, and I’m moving on.

Things were good in the beginning, and you may have impressed me with your automatic reference counting, but my new language can do that too, and so much more, and does it faster than you could ever imagine. You see unlike you, my new language doesn’t boss me around. It *trusts* me, Swift. That’s the one thing you never could understand. I need to be trusted; and know that I can trust in you.

Well I can’t. Not anymore, Swift. It’s over. My new language just treats me better than you ever could. I’m sorry it came to this but I deserve better than you Swift. We’ve both known this for a long time.

I wish you the best, but you probably shouldn’t call.

I’m with Rust now.

After I picked up cooking, I dialed in a classic Russian pancakes recipe of my grandma (the babushka) and made it sugar-free. I cook those pancakes for my wife every Saturday, and she says they taste heavenly.

So, here’s the recipe of kiki’s pancakes:
- 8 eggs, 150g of 82% butter, 300g of flour, baking powder, 800ml of 3.2% fat milk. If you have a blender, it’ll make things easier
- let them sit and make all of them the same temperature
- take 8 eggs, add milk, stir
- liquify the butter in the microwave, add, stir
- sift the flour in while stirring continuously
- let it sit for 30 minutes
- take a pan, add little butter or sunflower seed oil, make it scary hot
- after you pour, flip the pancake when its top gets dry

to flip them easily, spread pastry wide when pouring, overlapping frying pan edges. Then, use those edges (now bone dry) to flip the pancake. After you’re done, those edges (now almost black) will break away, leaving a perfect pancake. This works especially well if you don’t have a good non-stick frying pan.

enjoy!

Employer: Hey, we are moving an API update live tomorrow morning that could affect our apps. Can you regression test the apps to make sure they all work?

Me: The API team is pushing code overtop of live endpoints that can break them?

Employer: Yes, we need the updates to work with a new product we are developing.

Me: And nobody thought about versioning these endpoints so we guarantee uptime on all existing services using them now?

Employer: We looked at that but it cost extra and required us to use the cloud solution so we don’t use versioning.

Me: Okkk… I also take it that the API’s don’t have integration tests written?

Employer: What are integration tests? Are unit tests the same thing?

Me: No, so when do I need to regression test all 7 production apps?

Employer: The API’s are moving to production at 4am and we need it signed off by 7am.

Me: I only have 3 hours to regression test 7 production apps at 4am? Each app, if I just skim over them, would take me 2 hours each. I will do my best but that’s a very short time to ensure complete functionality.

Employer: Don’t you have unit tests?

Note to self: never EVER buy iPhone again. “It won’t stutter after a year”, they’ve said.
Right now my 6s is just one big overheating piece of mess. Right now I have to charge it 3 times a day. Resprings randomly. Very often discharges 2% per minute. All the time lacks memory. iCloud picture syncing SUCKS. The Lightning cable is the worst excuse for buying overpriced cables which will break after a half of year. The only plus is a camera, how easy it is to update the iOS, included earbuds, iMesssage (but I use WhatsApp nonetheless) and battery widget.

And that’s it.

If someone says ever again that “iOS is the best operating system, it doesn’t have any issues whatsoever”, I would say “stop doping”, because I don’t see why it’s so great. Just while typing this rant my battery decreased from 25% to 15%

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

In flutter , there’s something called TextButton.icon. Which render a button look like this :

(👍🏼 Like Button)

But there’s this tiny twat decided to use countless of nested column in a nested row and containers just to create a fucking button! This particular class contains 1438 lines of code! Most of the code are redundant and nested fucking shit.

I want to punch this guy so hard but I do not intend to start a ww3 with china.

That means I have no choice but refactor it as I implement a feature requested by the product team, every components break. It is like a land mine field here. One changes , the entire application crash.

So there are useless mother fucking Sherlock fucking holmes kept telling me that “don’t worry about refactoring now , just complete the task.” , like seriously “how in the name of mother fucking god of all arseholes can I complete my task when I can’t change even one component?”

These people are fucking genius. Their intelligence resurrected Einstein and made him die the second time.

I run update without where on mysql console on production database Today.

CLASSIC

Just because I needed to fix database after bug fix on the backend of the application.
I thought I wrote good sql statement after executing it on my local machine and then everything got bad.

Luckily it was only one column with some cached statistics data and I checked that it was not important data before I actually started fixing stuff but still ...
Almost got hard attack afterwards.
Made a script to fix this column and it took me only 15 minutes but still...

Bug was caused in part I got no unit tests and application grow after 3 years of development from simple one for one customer and volumes of documents around 50k to over 40 customers and volumes over 2mil per month, don’t know how many pages each, just in one year after we completed all needed features.

I have daily backups and logs of every api operation but still.
I think this got to far for one backend developer.

I got scared that I will loose money cause I am contractor and the only backend developer working on it.
I am so tired of this right now I think I need a break from work.

Responsibility is killing me so hard right now.
It will take a week to get back to normal.

First time back to work today after a month long break. It was soul crushing. I don’t know if I’m permanently burnt out or just seriously disenfranchised with the corporate world but I would have thought after a holiday I would be energised and ready to go. It turns out after coming back to work I feel exactly the fucking same! Tired, exhausted, discontent, irritable and most importantly BORED. I am bored spending 8+ hours a day at a computer chair responding to emails and teams messages! Has anyone felt like this before? Did you ever overcome it? I’m worried as I’m getting older I’m losing my love more and more for programming whilst simultaneously hating the concept of work more and more.

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

Honestly I don’t remember any particular one cause every interview is such a traumatic experience.
People on interviews are almost all the same, they just try to prove their superiority over you and break you.

I totally understand why, it’s because they think they understand what IT is about and in fact they understand shit, that’s why also most of computer systems are shit, cause of shitty people doing it who don’t understand how computer work, they can just copy paste stuff and do beautiful talks about how cool they are and how awesome their company is.

At the end ( at the edge ) it doesn’t matter if you know tech stack or not, if you have gazillion years of experience or you just started. It only matters if you can solve problems and how good and fast you can do it.

But well do your reverse tree in 15 minutes. I’d rather be talking about philosophy during the interview.

!dev

DISCLAIMER: don’t read before going to sleep!

~23.15 power cut, street wide. Solved by switching back plong.

23.48 : I heard multiple times a loud sound, like if someone is trying to break a window or so. So, get out of room, go to hall, light is on there. Continue, ready with phone to call 112. Reaches living, kitchen. Finds grandfather that’s fixing something.

EDIT: 00:19 The water installation started one again I felt scared....

Awesome start of the vacation lol

Maybe I should just go to sleep.

To be honest, I was really scared after that power cut that this was a real thing. Fortunately it wasn’t... That once again proves the developer life, working at night, can be hard.

Future01

Click, click, click, click.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

I’m tired of living on popularity driven planet among animals, where number of clicks on likes, subscriptions and links are worth more than iq, education and experience.

Let’s face it - AI is showing us traffic driven recommendations that sucks. If you’re hooked up to social network and can’t disconnect from it you’re half way to matrix. You probably also disagree with me cause you’re serotonin junkie. You can’t stop like you can’t stop eating for a day. Bubble have you in your hands and whatever you do you probably won’t wake up. To be honest most of us won’t. It’s already to late.

I’m waiting for meta so they can put you in virtual world where you can have what you want and at the same time own nothing. They will put you in some small empty space and give you something to eat how many times you want so you can feel safe and click, tap, swipe, scroll more so they can own this planet.

You will be living only to deliver corporate metadata and you will be happy, cause they will make you happy with giving you emotions that you want to feel at exact moment.
If you get out, you won’t be able to interact cause you won’t know how to behave, you will become wild animal.

By going out you will break the law, cause outside world will be long gone. To move to bar or visit family you will travel with autonomous vehicle that have screens instead of windows.

Eventually you stop going to bar cause it’s unhealthy, you stop going outside cause there’s deadly virus and you can die.

They will take you last thing later with birth control so you can have baby whenever you want and with who you want as long as both parties agree by signing baby nft contract, you don’t have to take care of your baby and be pregnant cause it will be robotized, you will see your baby in meta. You will think you feel it using robot hands.
You will never meet your baby in person.
That’s how matrix will start. We’re half way.

You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.

And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.

He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.

He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him

He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.

You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.

I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.

I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.

The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .

He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.

You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.

I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .

Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.

I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”

I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.

You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.

I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

Risk is part of my everyday life.

I take the risk everyday when opening IDE and changing line of code that can either break database or crash other systems that are depending on one I am developing. ( not instantly but in some time in the future )

So....

Many years ago I was updating some application server production code while being drunk.
Everything went fine except me waking up in the morning and didn’t remember how I did it.

... what I learned from my developers life except that heavy drinking and updating servers is not the best idea ?

First, don’t give a fuck, do your job and ask questions even if the person in front of you said that understood everything and you think you understood all of shit.
Second, if you think you know what to do think twice.
Third, having any backup, any tests and any documentation is always better then having nothing.

And the most important.
The most risky in every business are people around you, so always have good people around and there would be no risk at all or you won’t even think about it.

✌🏽 ❤️

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

Wtf is wrong with AWS CDK? I add one EC2 instance and it deletes all my queues and api resources, then fails to create my EC2, does some fucking rollback then attempts and fails at some fucking rollback clean up.
So it nuked my entire fucking stack because why?
Because FUCKING WHY JEFF. WHY IS YOUR ROCKET SHAPED LIKE A PENIS AND WHY IS YOUR SHITTY FUCKING DEPLOYMENT SYSTEM FUCKING WITH ME LIKE THIS.
I can’t do this anymore. I’ve been doing this for months now. I really don’t know whether to laugh or have a mental break down.

Complete Disaster Kunt. That’s what I’m calling this shit from now on. I just don’t get how it can fuck itself up so much

I got back from my small 3 day vacation Sunday and I also decided to just take a break and relax before I hop back into my lil project I’m working on but it makes me feel like shit for taking so long to get back to it. Like I know I need breaks but I feel like I’m not good if I take breaks like this Idk don’t get me wrong I fuckin love programming more than anything but i just don’t want to force myself to work on something even if I do love it.

Person from a company I am contractor for tried to fuck me up and put me to the project with high money penalties without my will and behind my back.

I don’t understand those people.
You run a project do everything for them except delivering invoice to client and they try to fuck you anyway behind your or their client back.
You literally fight with people to give them money.

This all happened after me keeping their client project for almost 4 years.

Bell rings again to leave them this year after end of contract and don’t look back but I’m sad I need to leave nice client and application I was making for 4 years straight. I am oldest person in project probably only one that understands business behind it from ground up.

There was big rotation in project and knowing the company they will put some junior on my place that will break everything.

Well I still have some time to think ( maybe even couple of months) about what to do next besides taking some time off during this summer.

I am afraid that I rejected so many interesting offers during those 4 years nobody wants me and I got rusty with my stack I am no longer competitive.

I was unable to make anything during weekend and on Monday again cause of this shit.

Fucking people.

Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.

I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.

It would not receive non manual software updates

It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.

Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol

Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.

The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.

Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol

floating point numbers are workarounds for infinite problems people didn’t find solution yet

if you eat a cake there is no cake, same if you grab a piece of cake, there is no 3/4 cake left there is something else yet to simplify the meaning of the world so we can communicate cause we’re all dumb fucks who can’t remember more than 20000 words we named different things as same things but in less amount, floating point numbers were a biggest step towards modern world we even don’t remember it

we use infinity everyday yet we don’t know infinite, we only partially know concept of null

you say piece of cake but piece is not measurement - piece is infinite subjective amount of something
everything that is subjective is infinite, like you say a sentence it have infinite number of meanings, you publish a photo or draw a paining there are infinite number of interpretations

you can say there is no cake but isn’t it ? you just said cake so your mind want to materialize something you already know and since you know the cake word there is a cake cause it’s infinite once created

if you think really hard and try to get that feeling, the taste of your last delicious cake you can almost feel it on your tongue cause you’re connected to every cake taste you ate

someone created cake and once people know what cake is it’s infinite in that collection, but what if no one created cake or everyone that remember how cake looks like died, everything what’s cake made of extinct ? does it exist or is it null ? that’s determinism and entropy problem we don’t understand, we don’t understand past and future cause we don’t understand infinity and null, we just replaced it with time

there is no time and you can have a couple of minutes break are best explanations of how null and infinite works in a concept of time

so if you want to change the world, find another thing that explains infinity and null and you will push our civilization forward, you don’t need to know any physics or math, you just need to observe the world and spot patterns

I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).

T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).

Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).

In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.

I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.

Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.

I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.

I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.

Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…

So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?

Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes

Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)

So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?

To the slackers on this team - fuck you all.

I know you don’t work during the day. I’m either getting another job or moving into management, and god help you if either happens. Your current manager has been watching you like a hawk, but he’s scared of attrition. But if his manager pushes him on it he’ll PIP you all. He hates you too.

If I get a new job - our manager’s manager will know, our manager will get pressure to PIP you, and you’ll endure months of hell while every stakeholder with deadlines realizes they can tighten the screws on you and if you don’t respond well you’ll be seen as even bigger fuckups.

If I move into management - PIPs incoming. You’ve made my life hell. But I’m going to make sure you’re stuck in this hell with me for as long as possible. That transfer you wanted? Fuck no, you will maintain this legacy system under increasingly unreasonable deadlines until you quit. Should’ve done your work back when there was still time. And until you quit, it will be torture. I plan on asking for constant status updates that are sure to break your flow. And when you quit - better leave us off those references.

Fuck you. The rest of the team is working overtime because of your shitty personality. I know you like this job - get ready to lose it and watch everyone who’s been chomping at the bit to make your life miserable take swings at you.