Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

Rest in Peace my friend he was my room mates for 2 years in univ and he decides to drop out to take care of his father parkinsons. He is not as lucky as his parents, He was gone missing for 16 hours after the tsunamis struck in Donggala, Sulawesi. and just found dead apparently because drowning and head blunt trauma. reports from her family, the last time they seen their son is before he gone to find his father's medicine (it's not easy since the hospital and drug store are not effective because the big earthquake). A big condolescence for his family. for all the victim in Sulawesi stay safe ! and we hope you all the best!

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

I'm the only programmer in the company. Sometimes it's exhausting doing everything. I'm currently working on 3 iOS apps, a web app, building out the APIs and managing the databases at the same time.

Full fucking stack. Every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Oh yes, I very much like you, Mr. 1337-DevPro-Ultra-Haxxor. Thank you for using a boilerplate from github, that is bloated like some random female pr0nstar after an orgy. Oh and it is also very funky of you, that the setup scripts and tasks only work on Apple OSX, because using a simple gulpfile with 3 npm dependencies and 5 lines of code would not be trendy enough.

Some JS "devs" should be punished by drowning in their own feces aka a mix of bower, yarn, npm, brew and the crusty stuff that is left behind after running it.

I work at a school and am involved in building the new website. Specifically as an ex Web developer myself I am acting as intermediary between the leadership team and the company we have hired to build the site. The company has a "the customer is always right" approach and will do what they are asked for so my main role is stopping the school from making stupid requests.

For example yesterday they complained that the site looked different on mobile compared to desktop. Then they complained that the (long paragraph) welcome message appeared below the menu and quick links on mobile instead of above them (forcing users to scroll down to get to navigation controls). After many more complaints and mind boggling suggestions, and my attempts to explain responsive design and reducing cognitive load, I left the meeting with a headache and an urge to spend the next three hours drowning Lara Croft.

The most difficult part of any developers role: not throwing the keyboard at the client every time they say something stupid.

I recently ranted so much about languages but here it goes

JS we need to talk. BECAUSE YOU GOT FAT AND UGLY STUPID BITCH! Dumb piece of bloatware. What even is your problem? Depending on a library for strpad and then blow up like Steve jobs ego. Bastardized fuckfest. I used to like you bro and then you screw me over!
It's like you fuck my wife while I try to fix your car. Why can't you even be usefully on your own anymore? I'd be richer than bill gates if I get a dollar for every damn framework people pull from their asses. Are you writing this fuck while shitting so you can compare colors of your outcome?

Normalize the fucking base, don't add to the bukkakke! bitch is drowning already. Why is everyone jerking of to react and angular? When have YOU written something in vanilla the last time? Why even bother? Remove the core and hardcore every damn framework into the browsers. Guess that saves you 200kb. Oh wait I forgot that's about unminified jQuery.

Now I need to load about 2GB of dependencies, some creating code that puts code in my code to load code out of my code which was generated out of something that remotely resembles JS so every browser is able to execute my fancy shit. But hey, it's fast. And of course there are the fanboys. You are worse than apple fags. You sample your own jizz with your friends in a wine glass. there was a Time it was bad practice to mix logic and view. Now you made it mandatory. "Browser does the rendering" ofc you imbecile pile of fuck don't show me a damn preloader for 1 picture and 20 lines of text. Who fucked your brain so hard?

So react seems to be the cool kid now, then I tell someone I know angular it's like showing up in a pikachu onsie to a formal dinner with the queen.

I used to love you girl. I loved how we could dirty things together. Now you are like a pig. Please loose weight bby the sight of you disgusts me nowadays

When your rubber ducks keep drowning in the code you show them after a few minutes....

We have a long time developer that was fired last week. The customer decided that they did not want to be part of the new Microsoft Azure pattern. They didn't like being tied to a vendor that they had little control over; they were stuck in Windows monoliths for the last 20 years. They requested that we switch over to some open source tech with scalable patterns.

He got on the phone and told them that they were wrong to do it. "You are buying into a more expensive maintenance pattern!" "Microsoft gives the best pattern for sustaining a product!" "You need to follow their roadmap for long term success!" What a fanboy.

Now all of his work including his legacy stuff is dumped on me. I get to furiously build a solution based on scalable node containers for Kubernetes and some parts live in AWS Lambda. The customer is super happy with it so far and it deepened their resolve to avoid anything in the "Microsoft shop" pattern. But wow I'm drowning in work.

Who's got time to be an imposter. 🤷‍♂️

I am out of my depth 90% of the time, always diving into areas that are foreign to me, you just need to enjoy the buzz of knowing you are coming out the other side more knowledgeable then you did going in.

But if you do get overwhelmed with this condition, step back, take a breather, and use that moment to think things through at the big picture level before moving forward again, sometimes the right solution is hard to think off when you're to focused and drowning your way through a bad one.

Having some thoughts as I sit here, trapped in the house by equal parts coronavirus and a layer of smoke drowning out the sun. The smoke is a bit of an annual thing; every year, some irresponsible jerk will go out and put their convenience and enjoyment over everyone else's quality of life.

It's a bit different this year since coronavirus has given people cabin fever. Those same people who lose their minds after weeks of isolation and suffering the indignity of wearing a mask headed out into the wilderness for recreation in record numbers.

The result is record wildfires.

Where I'm at, it's mostly coming from the eastern part of our state. The area is typified by being on the mountain range's dry side, more rural, less densely populated. Towns have burned, people lost their homes, millions of acres of land will likely burn before it's over. It happens every year; people pack up, head out into the wilderness, and cause devastation due to a simple lack of common sense or regard for the consequences of their actions.

On the west side, we see the fallout in the form of days without sunlight and abysmal air quality. We also see it in cost; we will unquestionably and without hesitation contribute to eastern recovery efforts. The western half of the state will cover almost all of the damage in both taxes and recovery aid. Our local ethos demands it.

The mountains form a kind of natural barrier, both cultural and environmental. The fact that few people cross the mountains by choice is symbolic of that divide. Those who enjoy greenery and lakes and thriving vibrant nature prefer the west, as we have them in abundance. People who have a strong appreciation for distance between themselves and other humans prefer the east, as it affords them cheaper land and few urban environments.

Here's to hoping people learn from this in 2021.

You can measure how hard something is to figure out in how many tabs you had open when you got it

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

Amazing how one can easily browse the web nowadays...
A popup to allow notifications, that shitty cookie information, a subscription box and a fucking video that automatically starts playing while drowning my mobile internet.
Maybe I'll write another rant about the actual topic I looked up...

Want to be likeable or get your way through people?

No need to sell ice cream, just validate those insecure souls.

Wide majority does not want their fragile bubble to be broken even if they are suffocating within.

All they seek is validation. That's fucking it. That's the secret.

If someone asks you for some opinion or support, most of the time they are just want to hear how great their mediocre thought process is.

Someone's lack of ability accept criticism and grow is the sole reason they are stuck in quicksand situation and only drowning further.

An unethical social skill but this will take you a long way and also help you stay sane from the insecure narcissistic scums by avoiding toxic interaction.

JUST VALIDATE THEM.

Not exactly a co-worker, but one of the devs from the client's team spent a few months working in our office next to us. He would always take a nap at lunch time and snore loudly, and eat an apple afterwards and it seemed to be impossible for him to chew with his mouth closed.

Whenever he had a cold and his nose got blocked he would still force himself to breathe through his nose, so it sounded something like a mix of darth vader and someone drowning.

He also lacked any notion of personal space, and would always sneak behind us to ask questions and then put his laptop right on top of our keyboards or in front of our screens and start talking while we still had headphones on.

I panic like I'm fucking drowning when going through git merge conflicts via command line

It feels like I'm drowning deeper and deeper into dark web.

I hate it when book publishers of tech books don't have their own DRM-free formats. I then have to go on Amazon and see that the Kindle version is only 10% cheaper than paper. Then I factor in the fact that they probably fucked up the formatting on the ebook. So, I end up just buying the paper one and my office continues to resemble a mad scientist's library.

Think my brain is drowning in my nasty thoughts.

I wasn't sure whether boobstrap or bootstrap for seconds.

One moment you're drowning in side projects, next you're bored out of your mind.

Giving WordPress support is like drowning kittens.

Oh so you have a merge conflict this weekend? The only time of the week I try not to think of ripping your nob off, tying a noose around your neck with it and drowning you in a well full of piranhas? Right, right...

How about you take that dick that you've been trying to locate since you were 5 and practice choking on it every day till you die just so you have enough experience to suck demon dongs in hell for eterniity! I seriously hope you die of cancer you fucking wankstain!

How about you go home and keep disappointing that whore of a wife of yours, you know that stinking pile of shit that you stick your dick in every two weeks?

Got my first task today while still being under training (large worldwide corporation - OMS department) and I'm practically drowning! Oh you wonderful devs give me strength!

This is gonna be a long one....
A lesson I learnt the hard way - never go out of your way to help friends with their coding. I helped her always, sat with her on the phone and explained and taught and solved her problems for hourssss while delaying my own work, while losing my sleep, even during pregnancy, I helped somehow as much as was possible even when I was drowning in my own work, even when I’m was not okay myself. But, once in a while I am too full, I also have work, now I also have an infant to take care of as well, and yeah sometimes I CAN be too busy to help!!!!! I have my own life too!! At these times she says “oh you don’t help me anymore”. It’s so annoying seriously What the fuckkkkk and after this shit happened a few times, I expressed my annoyance and she says, oh it was a joke. But then repeated it. And I still feel bad in refusing to help when asked. But lesson learnt that I won’t put myself behind, I’ll help only when I have nothing else to do.

There's a sea of stuff that I need to learn and I'm drowning in it.

It had been too long that I had a nightmare that I wished I never had. I had one this early morning.

I was in a foreign metropolitan city with public transport trains, skyscrapers and everything. I had no phone, no cash, no card. I could have asked help from the people I see on the street but in the dream I missed that notion. I was fine for first few hours (dream time) walking along just by myself and gradually the panic mood sunk in. I was alone with no help right in the middle of broad day light among people at a busy city.

Now that I have written it down, it doesn't sound that scary at all. There was no ghost nor paranormal activity involved, no accident, no scary height, no fire, no drowning, nothing really scary at all.

I was totally scared shitless in that dream though.

Get through college without drowning in debt 😊🔫

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

for the first time in my life I'm in a mentoring position and it is fucking exhausting. we have two interns now, and idk what the hell is the boy's deal. can't seem to do simple tasks, doesn't google anything, stares the ceiling if we're not monitoring.
the girl idk yet. she seems more active and engaged at least, but i have a lot of teaching to do and i don't really have the time for that. i hope that one can at least float by herself, cause I'm pretty sure the other one is drowning

This technical interview went horribly awful... I cant believe what they asked me.... And it was all on english. Interviewed by german and indian guy. I got SO stressed the fuck out just from this 35 min technical interview. I drowned in stress. If this is the reality of engineering world im not sure if i can handle all this stress....

If i work a job i would literally just go to office and come back home like a literal zombie. Emotionless soulless purposeless zombie. Emptiness. Void. Numb. As i work in the office i would put a fake smile face as if im so happy working while from inside drowning in stress and decomposing out of depression... The amount of money i earn wouldnt even be spent because id have no energy or will to go out and spend it. It's meaningless....

I'm still studying computer science/programming, I still have one year to do in order to graduate (Master). I am in a work study program so I'm working for a company half of the time, and I'm studying the other half. It is important to mention that I am the only web developer of the company

When I arrived in the company 9 months ago, I was given a Vue project which had been developed by a trainee a few weeks before my arrival and I was asked to correct a few things, it was mostly about css. Then, I was ask to add a few functionalities, nothing really hard to code, and we were supposed to test the solution in a staging environment, and if everything was ok, deploy it to prod.

However, the more I did what I was asked, the more functionalities I had to implement, until I reached a point where I had to modify the API, create new routes, etc. I'm not complaining about that, that's my job and I like it. But the solution was supposed to be ready when I arrived, it was also supposed to be tested and deployed.

The problem is, the person emitting these demands (let's call him guy X) is not from the IT service, it's a future user of the website in the admin side. The demands kept going and going and going because, according to him, the solution was not in a good enough state to be deployed, it missed too many (un)necessary features. It kept going for a few months.

The best is yet to come though : guy X was obviously a superior, and HIS superior started putting pressure on me through mails, saying the app was already supposed to be in production and he was implying that I wasn't working fast enough. Luckily, my IT supervisor was aware of what was going on and knew I obviously wasn't to blame.

In the end, the solution was eagerly deployed in production, didn't go through the staging environment and was opened to the users. Now, guy X receives complaints because none of what I did was tested (it was by me, but I wasn't going to test every single little thing because I didn't have time). Some users couldn't connect or use this or that feature and I am literally drowning in mails, all from guy X, asking me to correct things because users are blocked and it's time consuming for him to do some of the things the website was doing manually.

We are here now just because things have been done in a rush, I'm still working on it and trying to fix prod problems and it's pissing me off because we HAVE a staging environment that was supposed to prevent me from working against the clock.

On a final note, what's funny is that the code I'm modifying, the pre-existing one needs to be refactored because bits and pieces are repeated sometimes 5 times where it should have been externalized and imported from another file. But I don't know when and if I will ever be able to do that.

I could have given more context but it's 4am and I'm kinda tired, sorry if I'm not clear or anything. That's my first rant

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

...another (probably about fourth) completely futile attempt at making MASM compiling pipeline work...

...what the fuck... seriously, i've spent together about two weeks of time trying to make a fucking default hello world compile... ml64 problems, then rc.exe problems, apparently i was missing some dumb CommonService.dll which not only doesn't exist anywhere on my computer, but it doesn't even seem to exist at all in this fucking dimension. After several hours I had the bright idea of "fuck MS rc, let's just grab any other random resource compiler that I can find, and see if that one works".

Funnily enough, it does. Except Visual MASM can't run it from it's build process because it fucks up the commandline call, so I need to run it manually, and then when I run the build from V-MASM, the rc call still fails, but then it checks for the resulting .res file and finds it, so it happily continues with success...

...and now fuckin... what even is it? *goes to check*
oh yeah, now linker is shitting itself:
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'user32.lib'

And I'm just completely defeated, just searching system-wide for the lib intending to copy it into the linker folder because fuck this fucking bullshit, I've had enough of drowning in MS BuildTools versions and installations and uninstallations and fixes and modifys and repairs and all that FUCKING BULLSHIT.

HOW. THE. FUCK. is this in any way usable for anyone. I suspect nobody ever actually tried to build an assembler project in the last 30 years, so nobody noticed it DOESN'T. FUCKING. WORK.

THIS.
THIS is why I hate anything that's not a proper IDE where I install ONE thing, and do everything in that ONE IDE and let IT figure out all this linuxy-soft-coupled bullshit of twentyfuckingthousand fucking useless commandline apps threwn around the whole fucking system where I'm fucking supposed to know where the fuck what is and which version and GO FUCK YOURSELF.

GIMME. FUCKIN. ONE: IDE. WHICH. WILL. INSTALL. ALL. THAT. IT. NEEDS. TO. BE. FUCKING. ABLE. TO. FUCKING. WORK. AND. COMPILE. SHIT!!!

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Kraken rum is my favorite productivity hack.

So here's how the story goes.

I was in my academic writing class the other day and we were learning about APA formatting for our argumentative essays. We have a blackboard, whiteboard, projector connected to a pc and even a lovely projector screen to present with in the classroom.

I sit at the front right of the room. Closest to the window(it's behind me as all the desks face inwards)

Professor walks up to front of class and says we are going to learn how to format our typed essays properly.

Awesome, I thought. Pulled out my XPS laptop and fired it up. As I was making a new Word document, I hear scratching. I look up and the professor is writing with CHALK on the BLACKBOARD. I was astonished. Making matters worse, she started from the far left of the board from which the glare from the window was the greatest. I could not see anything. And from that point on I knew this class was going to be abysmal.

What was so depressing was my professor never once touched the projector. Scraping and erasing. Over and over. Couldn't see if it was a period or a comma after the first initial.

My eyes were never so dry from squinting, rolling my eyes and face-palming over and over. After an hour and 15 minute class, I was not far away from drowning my XPS in my tears.

"If you’re presented with a situation – a man is drowning – and you could either choose to save the man or shoot the scene, what kind of film would you use? " - Photographers’ proverb

!dev

1. It's one of those few times in life that listening to Lq's Numb doesn't make me feel less anxious. Or Somewhere I Belong. Either way, anxiety levels are on all time high.

2. I have completely lost appetite. Usually at this point in time I'd go to doctor and ask for Xanax or something similar, to chill for a few days. But covid. I ain't going to any clinic, plus, ain't nobody got time for that.

3. On top of everything, I am also PMSing. The lack of energy, times n. (n>10)

4. Struggling to get out of bed for hours is now a reality.

5. I'm glad ("glad" is exaggeration tho) this will pass in a few weeks. I am hanging on to that hope and experience tells me it will pass. But my feelings are like "nah, we doomed. Let's just run away. Or just sleep until it all passes or we die of starvation."

6. My brain must work for the next few days. If I have to push it by drowning it in sugar, I will. But I'm also obese rn. Well, I guess it's "Hello diabetes!".

7. My hands and feet are cold. Like, freezing cold. Meanwhile, the rest of me is sweating. This sucks. Ngl.

8. I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. Like, those last stabby stabs moments in a battle where you know you're gonna fall down soon. I know this feeling of doom and gloom is PMS related, but it's there. I have no solution for that aside from nicotine and sugar.

9. I can't even cry. Which is sad.
... Do you see what's happening there? That's the loop I'm in.

The Coding Apocalypse: A Dev's Rant

June 14, 2024

Okay, gather ’round, fellow code warriors, because it’s time for a good ol' developer rant. If you're reading this, chances are you’ve already faced the dragon that is modern software development, and you’re somehow still using "Agile" as a life preserver while the ship is sinking. So let's dive into the chaos that our world has become.

Here’s the thing: We’re living in a paradox where every other day there's a shiny new framework promising to be the “ultimate solution” while ignoring that it's just recoil from the last big mess. I mean, can we talk about JavaScript for a second? I’m pretty sure if you stand still long enough, a new JavaScript framework will spontaneously generate from the void. Do we really need another one?

And don’t get me started on Sprint Planning. It’s like playing Tetris with stones while blindfolded, hoping that all the blocks land perfectly. Spoiler: They don’t. The product manager’s eyes glaze over as they nod approvingly to your estimates, secretly extending deadlines in their minds. The 'flexible' deadlines then become rigid, unattainable goals, and who gets the heat? The devs, of course.

Also, can we address the insanity of microservices? Sure, splitting a monolith into microservices sounds fun—until you’re drowning in API calls and Docker containers. Debugging a distributed system is like trying to untangle a pair of headphones made of spaghetti.

Oh, and if one more person asks if we’re "leveraging AI" and "blockchain technology" for our simple CRUD app, I might lose it. Sometimes, folks, the wheel doesn’t need reinventing. It just needs a little grease.

Finally, remote work. Blessing and curse. Sure, I enjoy the freedom of working in my PJs, but the endless Zoom calls are killing my soul. Breakout rooms? More like breakdown rooms. The Slack notifications? Let’s just say my sound settings have a hair trigger on mute these days.

So here’s to us, the devs. The ones who stare into the abyss of JIRA tickets and laugh in the face of mounting tech debt. May your coffee be strong, your code refactored, and your deployments ever in your favor.

End rant. Back to the trenches. 🚀💻

Okay, THAT was trippy.

Soo.. I slowly srart feeling uncomfortable. It's that feeling when you want to move your body to make it go away. Stretch an arm, move a leg or smth... Alright, no biggie - let's move something. But then my focus is overwhelmed by darkness. Hmm... I must be asleep. There's some soothing humming noise in the background. And that feeling's still there. Aaaahh, the numbness is now going away - I must've moved smth! Good job! Drowning back into sleep now. It's ssooo ssweet...
*outage*

*notions of awareness*
huh? What's that? Oh, right, I need to move again. That humming sound is so relaxing.. I'll move smth to change that status quo. There, much better now. Let's keep the eyes closed and drift back to sleep. It's so dark though...
*outage*

*notions of awareness*
ahh, that feeling again. Come on, I've moved like 4 times already. Well alright, alright, it's better to move that open my eyes or roll over.
Wait...
I can't roll over.
I can't even move my hands. Fuck, must be that sleep paralysis kicking in again. No biggie, it'll wear off if I stay aware long enoug........
*outage*

*...?...*
...nough. What? Did I nod off? That's weird. Meeh, nvm. Why is it so dark though... Okay, let's try to open the eyes. *attempts going on for ~a minute*. No luck. That humming sound, so soothing...
I feel some clothing on my - must be the blanket. So warm.. Nice.I'm feeling - prolly the paralysis is wearing off! Good. A few more minutes and I'll be free to roll over

let's try the eyes once again. Hhhrhrhhh! Nope, not working. Wait, what's that? I turned my body! But somehow...Weirdly. Too easy. There, I did it again! Why is it so easy and I am still feeling paralysed...? Wtf is going on...?

That humming. What IS it..?

Wait! My eyes opened! It's pitch dark in here. Why...? Usually there's at least *some* light in the room. Am I still asleep? Naah, that's not it.. I'm turning my body again. Why did I do that? Wtf is happening?

That humming sound is getting louder and louder, taking all of my attention now.
What is it I'm feeling with my feet? It's hard. And cold.

Wait... AM I STANDING??? What the fuck?!?

Why am i standing??? And that sound - that's... That's... A vent fan in my bathroom!!! Am I standing asleep in my bathroom...? In the middle of the night...? Facing the mirror...? With the lights off....?

WHAT THE FUCK DID JUST HAPPEN?!?!?
HOW THE FUCK DID I GET THERE?!?!?
How long have I been here...?

I HAVE QUESTIONS!!

Fuck it, I'm tired. Time to go to bed. It'll be one mindfuck of a storry tomorrow though...

Ugh, don't even get me started on the state of modern communication! It's like we're living in a world where everyone's attention span has been replaced by a goldfish. I mean, seriously, have you noticed how people can't seem to put down their phones for more than two seconds? It's like we're all addicted to this constant stream of mindless information, and it's driving me insane!

And don't even get me started on social media. It's a breeding ground for narcissism and superficiality. Everyone's so busy curating their perfect online personas that they've completely lost touch with reality. Likes, shares, and comments have become the currency of self-worth, and it's just pathetic.

And don't get me started on influencers. What exactly are they influencing, anyway? A generation of kids who think the height of success is being Insta-famous for doing absolutely nothing? It's a joke! We're valuing the wrong things in society, and it's messing with our priorities.

And let's talk about the sheer amount of misinformation out there. It's like we're drowning in a sea of fake news and alternative facts. Critical thinking seems to be a rare commodity these days, and people are just swallowing whatever narrative fits their preconceived notions. It's infuriating!

Oh, and let's not forget the endless stream of notifications. I miss the days when you could go for a walk without being bombarded by a constant barrage of beeps and vibrations. Can't we just have some peace and quiet for once?

I swear, if I have to endure another conversation where someone is more interested in their phone than what I'm saying, I'm going to lose it. We're losing touch with the real, meaningful connections that make life worthwhile, all in the name of technological progress. It's time for a reality check, people!

As I settled into my armchair with a steaming cup of tea, I thought back to the time I almost lost my heart—and a small fortune—to a smooth-talking scam artist. It all began innocently enough when I joined a dating site after my children encouraged me to put myself out there again. That’s when I met David. With his charming smile and heartfelt messages, he made me feel seen and cherished. We talked for hours about everything—from our favorite books to our dreams of traveling the world. I felt like a teenager again, butterflies in my stomach as we planned our future together.

But soon, the conversation took a troubling turn. David claimed he was stuck overseas due to a sudden medical emergency and needed money to pay for treatment. My heart ached for him, and against my better judgment, I sent him several wire transfers, believing I was helping the love of my life. Weeks passed, and suddenly, the sweet messages turned into silence. It dawned on me that I had been scammed. Just as I was drowning in despair, I heard about a group called Specter Lynx. I reached out, sharing my story with them. They sprang into action, tracking down David’s digital trail and uncovering the web of deceit. With their help, I was able to recover a significant portion of my lost funds. Now, I not only have my money back, but I also have a newfound appreciation for caution—and the strength of community. I often share my story, reminding others that love online can be a double-edged sword, but with a little vigilance, you can find your way back.

Please help me! I'm drowning.

So on top of having way too many hats at work and starting my master’s studies in a few weeks, I just had an idea for a game that’s too good to not start working on. I am drowning myself in shit to do. Again.

At work, when I try to find the best place to implement some code, I read the current code to get why it's here, and if I'm at the right place to do my stuff.

Sometimes the previous dude writes a shitty code because, well, Drupal 8 and he didn't have much choices to make his stuff work.

But some other times just reading the code feels like double checking if I did all my vaccinations. When these moments occure, I activate the annotate mode in PHPStorm so I can see who wrote this piece of dumb shit code, so I can insult him in my head while doing my stuff.

Sorry pal, I'm not paid enough to write a WORKING code for you at your place, but at least you'd know that if you were drowning, I'd share my point of view about this planet's overcrowding. Fucker.

Drowning my sadness and loneliness on Netflix

>where is the code that is in charge of that?
>that's the infrastructure dependencies job
>oh cool. So what if I want to do X Y Z?
>the infra doesn't do that
> well who is on charge of infra?
>oh that was {guy that left 2 weeks ago} and anyway that code existed for AGES

So now I'm drowning in foreign spaghetti because people didn't want to disturb the holy infra and just made workaround in the services themselves. Good thing I got my nylon overalls for maximum shit protection

Read a dev blog and do it on company time, you’re never going to catch up when you’re drowning in your own code. Take responsibility for your personal development, and take responsibility for setting your boundaries. If you do this you will benefit and so will the company. You are not helping by working after hours, you are simply establishing and reinforcing unrealistic expectations that will eventually result in failure.

I have always been a loner. I cherished being alone and referred my own time. But now it suddenly feels like I am drowning in loneliness, my feet can’t find traction and I’m swallowing gulps of dirty water. I hope I don’t drown.

Budget cuts are being made and my boss doesn't like me so goodbye I guess to my 90k salary. It might not sound like a lot to y'all but it is to me.

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.

I'm tired. I don't want to do these tests anymore. These vague test scenarios I have to decrypt on my own lest asking business shows signs of weakness. I'm slow to test and going way beyond the hours the client estimated and you folks just accepted. How can I finish this when I get pulled to meetings which I am not the decision maker but I'm supposed to be the technical one to help them decide. In between this testing I get emails to help check on issues I'm not even a part of. Production issues I can understand because those have a feel of critical and priority but if you pull me to that I lose time testing. I'm trying. But I'm truly very slow at this. I'm a slow tester for this set of test cases. I'm hating myself every minute as the hours inch to the deadline which is today. I want to sleep but I want to finish as well. Shitty days of drone work that could have been given to somebody else but I can't say no to because you guys accepted. Someone from management just see please, don't give this to me. But you can't see. You probably don't even understand. They asked, you caved because you can't see the list of tasks and level of detail that comes with each thing they ask. This testing is a ridiculous use of my time but I can't say that to the client. You could have. I want to. I truly want to say "Fuck these tests". I tried to push back. But the client of course reasoned back and it was understandable to ask. To do what's good and what's best. How can I say no to that?! I'm almost depleted. I'll just finish this somehow.

Whenever someone would like to look up something on my laptop I take a deep, dark pleasure in watching them first struggle to move the mouse with the broken track pad, then drowning in desperation after they realise it's a Linux system with i3-wm.
But alas, I am a generous God and help them with 3 lightning fast keystrokes to open my installed browser - which is eLinks.
That usually does them in 😬

Choosing music on Spotify

I've seen teletubbies drowning in a puddle on the road.

Vagrant, VMware and CentOS.

The perfect storm to drive me mad all day.
If anyone knows how to get the shared folders working in this fucking shitstorm of arse rain let me know I'm slowing drowning in this fucking river of shit.

Please, someone, anyone! How do I stop following someone on here? Drowning in irrelevant rants.

(0. First off, being a job I'd like — native software development that is — and not having to default to some boring backend job because "mUh WeB's EvRyThInG TodAy")
1. If the commute isn't too long I have no much problem working in office I think, but I want this to be clear: you let me work with the tools I want. Things like CI are understandably imposed, but let me choose whatever IDE/editor, Git client, etc.
Otherwise off to work from home where no one can check
2. Not having assholes colleagues (obnoxious, stupid, interrupting…)
3. A decent pay. Not high or minimum, just what I'm worth
4. Not drowning in meetings. I want to take part to them to clarify some things and understand what's going on, but I don't think I need more than 2 a day. Ah, and let me tell what's wrong if there's anything
5. Be basically respected. I don't want to be overvalued, that can be embarrassing, but I don't want my work to be completely ignored

Why, oh why, must every project succumb to the siren call of feature creep? We start with a simple, elegant design, but before long, we're drowning in a sea of unnecessary bells and whistles. Let's stick to the essentials, folks. Quality over quantity, simplicity over complexity. Less is more, remember?