Boss: I need you to start on this new project, how long will it take?

Me: well, hard to say with no specs whatsoever...

Boss: just your best guess

Me: 4 to 6 month I guess?

Boss: so 3 months it is. When can you start?

Me: no specs, sir...and I said 4 to 6

Boss: the specs are almost ready, I know you can simplify it

Me: ...

Boss: just start with the basic infrastructure already

(4 months later)

Boss: here you are the specs, they might change a little in behaviour and design, but all the main stuff is here

(Hands me a A3 with a total of 21 pictures in InDesign)

Me: o....Kay. what happens when I click here?

Boss: oh, we should still talk about the app workflow, I'll get you updated

(2 weeks and 16 total rewrites of the "specs" later)

Boss: you told me it was a 2 months job, why aren't you finished yet? We must deploy in 3 weeks!

Me: ...

HR Project update meeting.
Duration: 1h
Content:
1) recap of previous meeting
2) overview of what we will discuss in next meeting.

Boss: hey mech eng, we need a setup modification

Mech: no prob, boss, we can have it prototyped in 3 weeks, industrialized in 2 months

Boss: oh, right then, go on

---

Boss: hey, Soft Eng, we need a functional modification

Soft Eng: no prob boss, we can develop it in 4 hours, tested and documented in 2 hours and integrated and shipped to the client by tomorrow morning

Boss: what??? One day?? You just need to edit a couple of lines of code! I want it ready in ten minutes top!

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

One month ago. By email.

Boss: so, this client A has a problem with one of our devices and he believes that it's a bug in the software.

Me: all right then, what happens?

Boss: well, he says that the parameter P in the option menu does not changes the device's behaviour as it is supposed to. I'll forward you his mail. You will find attached an excell file with the results of his test performed with and without the parameter active.

Me: < read mail, read excell file > well, boss, his tests are performed in completely different conditions, how could he expect to infer a meaningful results from this?

Boss: damn, you are right. Send him a test plan and follow up.

Me: < send detailed test plan >

No answer in a week. Then...

Client: hi, there, I made this tests, I attached the excell with the results, can you check the software now?

Me: < read another bullshit filled excell file with none of the suggested test performed >
You know what? Just download the procedures you are using from the device and send them by mail, specifying the software version you are using so we can perform some tests here in the lab and get yo a solution asap.

No response. For a MONTH.

Super Boss: client A still has his problem, how could possibly be that it takes more than A FUCKING MONTH to solve his issue??

Me:...

C: hey mate, what's the best tool to open up this 31.1M rows x 106 cols CSV file?

M: Umh...Pandas DataFrame or R DataTable I guess?

C: all right, Excell will do, thanks!

M: erhm...yeah, anytime?

Hahahahahahahahahha I'm not going to do anymore of your "quick" projects that result in shit pay and drain me out. I got actual fulfilling projects I enjoy working on hahahahah not again "friend". The audacity of this guy to ask me to handle a big project alone while he sits on his ass and gets a 50% cut. He should have paid attention in school if he wanted to be a programmer. All he does is lie to clients that he can code yet runs to me to do all the work. Hahahah let's see how he gets out of this one. Not gonna help you today "friend".

* Calls themselves "Software Engineer"
* Doesn't know what a thread is.

I swear these coding boot camps are churning out code monkeys whose real skill is building shitty React apps.

I believe a CS degree is necessary if you want to work on something more than CRUD applications.

Nothing against devs without degrees, but at least make an effort because my head will explode next time I have to explain to someone what a thread is and why it's a very bad idea to run blocking code on the main thread.

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

I feel like a piece of shit because I don't want to help my "friend" who has been faking being a web developer for years. He now has a real project he must develop that actually requires writing code (It's a serious project that requires real Javascript skills) and he's basically fucked.

He usually would hop on the web and download a template, edit it and get paid. But then again I don't want to help him because he always comes to me and I do all the work and save his ass while he does nothing.

I'm in a rock and a hard place right now because I'm also a dev and I actually have a lot of work to do, unlike his lazy ass.

I'm convinced no one really understands OAuth2, probably not even the creators.

Every blog, articles and tutorial, you have people saying don't do this, don't do that. Basically, no one agrees on a single implementation.

Want to use passwords for auth in a first party system you fully own? Apparently, that's unsafe.
Hmmm, what about magic links for passwordless auth? Also not safe you say?
Okay, I believe Okta just wants people to use their services, nothing else.

Damn true.

!Rant

How do you deal with open space offices?

I find it quite difficult to focus, the constant chatting, the constant questions, phone ringing, surprise meeting, more question, arrays of interruptions and questions again. I believe I would be a lot more productive if left alone in the total, undiscontinued silence.

Have you found your escape, your zen, your inner focus? Please share, I need some ideas

ChatGPT sucks so much for coding tasks and it's laughable.
Like, it's come to a point where it's unusable for me. At all.
It's like a toddler, anything you tell it, it agrees. Then spits out non-existent functions.
The thing actually slows me down.
And yes, I've tried Claude AI and it's slightly better but in no way, shape or form did it improve my productivity.

Those who claim it made them n times faster were never working on complex tasks to begin with.

SO has now a totally different meaning

Any comments?

According to my LinkedIn, everyone is a Project Manager

Gitlab works great actually!

Sometimes it's better to burn a bridge so you don't even think about crossing it in the future.

See, I left a company some years ago because I didn't see my future in it and all management combined had a collective intelligence of a chicken.
However, I got a call from them a couple of months ago asking me if I could return. The salary was double and the working arrangement seemed fine. On paper. WFH. Flexibile hours...
Since I actually liked the project itself for its technical challenge, I accepted the return offer. What a bad idea that was.

Of course, the things that made me leave for the first time had only gotten worse. Bad leadership, idiot developers in team leader positions. Tech debt higher than Mount Everest. Bad infra that makes you want to off yourself every time you work on it. The whole circus.
Seriously, the "senior" team leader will happily merge code that includes assert(true == true), but hold up a well written MR because he has a personal vendetta with the developer.
Personally, I always check him whenever he starts being an ass. But the poor juniors are in hell. They're terrified.
Now I'm leaving again, but this time I've made sure I can't come back.

!rant
Looking for advice, serious advices.

I work in C.
Also, I work in Python.
I have worked for a couple of year in C++.
I have a fair knowledge of the Data Science workflow, and some experience in Machine Learning.
I have tinkered with some other languages (Java, Ruby, Go, JS among the others, nothing serious nor professional)

I'm the kind of person who needs constant problems to face in order to keep engaged, satisfied, happy. And I need to learn new stuff, or refining my knowledge constantly, or I stagnate. I believe that this is true for quite a share of people here.

I would like to spend some spare time (I seldom have) in a project. Personal projects are rarely good enough to improve one's cv, so I thought I could partecipate in some Open Source projects.

Does anyone here have some suggestion about some interesting and satisfying OSProject, or some general suggestion on the matter?

It would be so apreciated.

After more than one year, finally i am on vacation.
16 hours in, my Slack is on fire.

Can we please stop with the multiverse crap? Please, just stop.
I watched Deadpool & Wolverine yesterday and what a shitshow.
Logan was an excellent send-off to Wolverine. An excellent one.
It showed that Marvel can actually make good movies.
Why did Marvel have to ruin it?

The issue with multiverse plotlines is that nothing is ever serious, there are no stakes, nothing matters.
Anyone who dies can come back. Anything that happens can be reversed.
Just. Fucking. Stop.

One of my favourite franchises, Mortal Kombat, got ruined with MK1 multiverse story.
Played the game for about 30 minutes then deleted it. What a disappointment.

From now on, if a movie features multiverse or time travel crap, I ain't watching.

Just used a laptop without an SSD. I almost died.

Anyone else get a feeling that some tutorials are made for trolling purposes? Like, why write an article about the most basic stuff about a particular stack and call it a day? Why copy paste from the docs without adding any new information whatsoever?
Medium.com is the worst offender.

!dev
I'm a hobbyist photographer but lately I've been getting offers to work on major gigs. Apparently people have started liking my photography.
However, just like some programmers are hardliners when it comes to particular stacks, the camera world is riddled with brand loyalists that can't accept that anything other than their camera gear is better. You have Canon/Nikon users who can't wrap their minds around the fact that Sony is making better cameras for the price.
I ask a question about what lens people recommend and a flame war starts about why X camera is better than Y camera.
Guess what, it ultimately comes down to the skill of the photographer and not the camera. All I wanted was a lens recommendation for a particular style of shooting.
Thing is, all modern cameras are more than capable of doing their jobs.

If you are not satisfied with the framework you have used, try to see its source code. It will surely make you feel calmed.

Start them young!

Apple Music is the worst music service I've ever used.
By far the worst UI/UX ever.
It doesn't allow me to easily organize my music the way I want.
Search is sluggish.
The recommendation algorithm sucks.
Can't LIKE a song without it asking me to also sync my local music files to the cloud. Seriously, why the fuck can't I like/favorite a song and be done with it? Why does it need to sync with my local files?
This is a basic feature that works in literally on any other music platform.
The damn thing can't even play FLAC.

I know Spotify has its issues, but it actualls feels like a well engineered piece of software.
Apple Music seems like it was made by junior devs for a school science fair.

The only thing going for Apple Music is the sound quality, everything else is bullshit.

Writing 20k lines of code and finally during compilation more numbers of errors....Life ends here....

Some gamers: *Gaming sucks now*
Also, those gamers: *Plays only FPS games*

Like dude, there are so many genres with amazing games that you would have a new game to play every day if you wanted. But oh no, I only play COD and Fortnite and because they suck, every other game in existence must also suck.

Stop playing the same damn games then, maybe you will enjoy gaming once more.
Also, I feel like people complain about FPS games because they expect to win every single match, which is impossible. You will meet sweats and tryhards. That's the reality of any multiplayer game.

Learning institutions move so slow. Kotlin and Swift are nowhere to be found in this mobile applications course.

!dev
fuck call of duty and activision. I finally had time to play with my friends when suddenly I had to download a 56 GB update. Why the fuck does every update have to be big? Then after that monstrous update, if you want to play multiplayer, you still need an additional 22 GB for a multiplayer pack which you already have. This has to be the most clueless company out there. I should have uninstalled this game a long time ago.

I once thought writing huge lines of code makes it tough and messy, when i was learning Java.
Then I met with BrainFuck...
Name is trully justified.

We're all making dirty money!

It would really, really suck if we're alone in the universe. Like, I can't think of something that would suck more.
I hope aliens exist.

Jquery came from Javascript but it is like a boon for the burning fire in ass.

Car reviewers are the bane of my existence.
In one video, a dude reviews a 3rd gen Rav4 and says "don't expect Porsche like performance or luxury materials".
Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock.
Who would've thought? An affordable compact SUV doesn't have sports car performance. Mind = Blown.

Also, vague and subjective criticism such as "unimpressive steering" or "not fun to drive". Not fun how? Whatever the fuck that means.
Dudes want a budget car with a Bugatti engine, that handles like a Porsche but priced as a Honda.

Seriously, why the fuck do these reviewers regurgitate the same shit, over and over again.

A good review must take into account the price of the car. And at most, compare it to similarly priced cars.
Comparing a Corolla to a 911 is down right moronic.

I'll put it this way. Svelte is like Kotlin. It's modern, elegant and a pleasure to work with.
React is like Java. Old, bloated and a pain to work with.
Svelte makes React look like it was built by masochists.

I don't work on frontend often, mostly because I despise the frameworks.
Svelte is a breath of fresh air.
I just want to ship a product quickly and it doesn't get in the way.

Whoever worked on the speak-to-chat feature for Sony XM4 headphones deserves to have a bunch of angry orangutans pull on their nipples for 1 minute.

Why the fuck do they get activated out of the blue when I'm simply talking? It feels like I'm under the water.

And the damn feature can't be turned off permanently. You can go into the app to turn it off, but it'll get activated again. You can use the two finger gesture on the sensor to toggle it off but it will still come back. It never stays off.

These are amazing headphones, but this is my biggest pet peeve. Almost ruined them for me.

Just had a 4 hour session with an external company to get connections up ... messed around 99% of the time with STX and ETX stuff only. I'm done until monday.

What's your favourite Data analytics/ visualisation tool? and why ?

Interior Design Architect.

I *always* have ideas on how to use spaces.

Nothing says asshole like a guy who won't approve your MR even though the feature is working but they prefer implementing it using their preferred approach.
Different coding styles for different folks. What matters is that the approach used is efficient, working and tested. But oh no, you have to write the code exactly how they want it.
Good thing we're free to merge our own MR when the reviewer takes more than two days to merge it.

Let's just say that I hate configuration of any kind.
AWS IAM, Cloudfront... it all makes me want to end it all.
Why can't this stuff just work?

Postman freaking sucks now. It's bloated and can't easily do what's it's supposed to do without hassle. You have to login first, then it will inexplicably lose all your previous API requests.
I guess the company has forgotten who their base customers are.

DevRant Testing

Why the fuck would Google promote Jetpack Compose as a stable toolset when it doesn't even support a basic feature such as a scrollbar.
A. Fucking. Scrollbar.
LazyColumn can't even come close to being as powerful as Recyclerview.

Here's an idea, before launching something and touting it as something usable, and encouraging people to drop the old, battle tested tool for the new shiny one, how about you make sure the new doesn't lack features present in the old one?
Seems logical, right?

Methinks somebody was just looking for a promotion because, clearly, Jetpack Compose is a half-baked product.
Now, developers will have to suffer because project managers will read about the new framework and ask devs to use it, then wonder why the app is suffering.

Started to read about MS Azure.
Any recommendations?

Quora or Reddit?

Have you ever tried to re-build your college website?
Your experience??

What all are the benefits I could get if I host my PHP project in MS Azure Platform instead of hosting into any other.