!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Here is the equivalent of every single mid sized "php" project listed on freelancer now:

I'd like a custom designed electric car.
Budget: $750.

And in 1999:

I need a literal pile of dog poop.
Budget: $10,000

TL;DR: a good friend recently finished building an electric car from scratch with a team and I bought him a C++ devDuck as a congratulations gift!

one of my best friends recently presented at my colleges capstone rollout, and his teams project was to literally BUILD AN ELECTRIC CAR FROM SCRATCH. all the circuits and everything, designed from scratch, and nobody else on the team was very good at software, so he pretty much wrote the software himself. I just ordered him a C++ devDuck as a congratulations gift!

!dev && rant

I just saw this video about car insurance and how they're essentially legal fraud. As I'm looking to get a driver's license and get myself a secondhand car, I looked what the costs actually are for mandatory car insurance that gets people so worked up...

€400 per fucking year?! And many companies that get well into the €1000?!!!! No surprise that people get so worked up about it! The budget of my entire fucking car would be only around €2000!!!!

Guess I'll be looking into building an electric bike then.. money grabbing corporate motherfuckers! And what for.. only because the average driver is a clueless operator of a killing machine?! FUCK THIS SHIT!!! 🤬

Programming Languages are Like Cars:

Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.

FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.

FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.

FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.

COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.

BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.

PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.

C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).

ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.

ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.

Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.

liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.

PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.

FORTH: A go-cart.

LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.

APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.

If Apple made an electric car, they would make all the charging stations incompatible every two years.

Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.

Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.

Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.

Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.

As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.

All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.

Once my aunt asked me if I could fix her car electric lock, because I was studying IT stuff.

I thought "excuse me, what the fuck?"

I said "Sorry, never studied door stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Pushed code remotely and told a teammate to run it on the target hardware. He then told me he might of blown up $6000 worth of equipment. Then he says "Never mind everything works."

World record for biggest heart attack?

Can we all just set aside our differences for one day and agree that Elon Musk DID NOT invent the electric car?

Please, for sanity's sake!

I'm so happy to have an electric car in times like these, not only it saves me a whole lot on gas, I can keep using it without the need to visit public places to fill it.

Competent software engineers are in high demand in Belgium. If you are looking for a workplace that treats devs as demi-Gods, relocate now.

Perks available to you are:
- working from home 2-5 days/ week.
- English at the workplace because the northern & southern parts don't speak each other's languages
- terrible rush hour traffic jams allowing you to flexibly choose your schedule as long as there is enough overlap
- pension & hospital insurance
- a company car (electric or fuel)
- ability to get away with any lack of soft skills as long as you're technically strong
- a competitive salary (2-4k/mo), even with almost half of it being eaten by taxes
- limited competition, because there's a sore lack of competent developers

!rant
Apparently Tesla just sued the German Republic for retracting the bonus they payed some Tesla customers for buying an electric car, because the Model S was "too luxurious".

I can't even.... hahahaha

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.