Apparently Stackoverflow was down recently. I think I missed it, because I was busy reading homemade documentation and having multiple existential crisis over the performance of my code.
Mondays

- had an interview going well
- existential crisis kicks in
- fear of being found out to be a fraud and phoney kicks in

This is why I can't have nice things! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All I wanted to do was read up on cassandra and the first two paragraphs gave me existential crisis.

I'm having an existential crisis with this client.

We are spending millions of $s every year to make sure the product's performance is perfect. We are testing various scenarios, fine-tuning PLABs: the environment, application, middleware, infra,... And then we provide our recommendations to the client: "To handle load of XX parallel users focusing on YY, yy and Zy APIs, use <THIS> configuration".

And what the client does?
- take our recommendations and measure the wind speed outside
- if speed is <20m/s and milk hasn't gone bad yet, add 2x more instances of API X
- otherwise add 3xX, 1xY and give more CPUs to Z
- split the setup in half and deploy in 2 completely separate load-balanced prod environments.
- <do other "tweaking">

- bomb our team with questions "why do we have slow RTs?", "why did the env crash?", "why do we have all those errors?", "why has this been overlooked in PLABs?!?"

If you're improvising despite our recommendations, wtf are we doing here???

One day I will crack. Hopefully, not sometime soon.

“Yes! WE should do it like that”

I put up a PR.

“Why are YOU doing it like that?”

The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.

So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.

Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!

"Some of the best code is written in the early hours of the morning, mid-coffee binge. " ~ Abraham Lincoln

Always get into a slight existential crisis during this time of winter.

Is my job worth all the trouble? Should I sell my house? Break up with my love? Start using a different programming language?

Probably has something to do with the psychological effect of this arbitrary point where we consider a year to end, and begin a new one.

I have no idea yet. I think my job is the first one to go, the rest is probably salvageable.

Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.

A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.

My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.

Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!

I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?

But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.

I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.

And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.

It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?

It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?

By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.

I was in a good mood until I read this weeks dev-question. I'm now having an existential crisis. Why do I do this? What's the end goal here? I don't know what my biggest dev career dream is. Maybe I should get a dog and live in the mountains. I think, I need another moment...

I am surprised how little time does my brain take to go from

“As a dev, what am I doing for the betterment of the world?”

to

“But, what’s the meaning of life, though?”

So, I'm supposed to do a project in Haskell that is due next week. It's a group project and it's me and 2 colleagues. Unfortunatelly one of them had to drop college because of some personal problems. I feel bad for him.
The thing is, the other one has no clue what Haskell is. I mean, he has no clue how programming is. He doesn't even know what an array is, like, wtf.
Sure, I can do the work all by myself and take the credits for it. But he's a nice guy and has been asking me to teach him Haskell in my spare time. He even told me to tell the teacher I did the project all by myself.
I'm kind in the middle of an existencial crisis. What should I do?
Life sucks, dam.

My (junior) colleague gives me an existential crisis as he builds a fabric.js clone from scratch up in very little time.

Then he tells me he forgot his 4 digit bank pin he's be using for 7 years.

How many horsepower does your Corvette need to outrun your middle age existential crisis?

Is coffee overrated?

tl;dr fuck me, I'm stupid, I suck at my job and I wanna die but can't complain because I'm labeled ungrateful

I am -this- close... -this- close to strangling someone, or myself for that matter, over trying to finish this goddamned website that I regret taking on just because I needed the money.

You make me rework my website design three times and eventually end up micro-managing me and keep on making me make small changes that even I can't figure out, nor can anyone else for that fucking matter because you want it to be 'perfect'. God I'm so irritated right now let me fucking sleep. I want out so bad but fuck me sideways with my gaping asshole I need the fucking money.

I wanna quit this shit so bad, it's making me hate myself and throwing me into an existential crisis whether or not am I even a good designer / developer because I just can't satisfy this perfectionist asshole and need to greet him with a smile every fucking time to maintain good terms between our startups.

Why do we rant here? Why can’t companies allow a safe space for their employees to vent out their woes? Or does that just add tension/make the workplace heated coz managers or co-workers could be sensitive to criticism? Or we’re just too stressed and overwhelmed that our woes don’t make sense(and we know it) but we gotta let it out some times? Lol

Is it weird that I don't wanna live to be hundred, but I'd rather do everything I wanna do as soon as possible?

Sorry to ask something like this here, but my friends are dealing with their own shit and don't wanna bother them.

Happy Holidays, Everyone.

Wishing you all a fine holiday with closure and finality of this existential crisis we've called 2020. I will never forget this year. Cheers to the impending doom of this year which feels more like a goddamn era.

Eat. Drink. And be Merry.

2021 is coming!

Yours,
@bulletsponge

Me - Ooo I've got this idea ! This will fix this "No ones" problem in programming.

(Thinking this will change the programming for everyone)

Starts Coding......

Few minutes later ...Searching stackoverflow for silly syntax errors.

...Finds a 2 years old project from some guy, who already finished working on the idea and answering question as "This is a bullshit idea!, Never try to make something like this."

Me - (Suffering from existential crisis)

Finally, I finally got my dream job, but three weeks after starting, I will say I am going into depression.

First, I have to learn a new language (the lang is less than 7 years old) on the job. The language is so different from the paradigm I am used to-from OOP to functional programming, it has very little confusing documentation and a small but growing community.

Though I have been able to show some work, goddamit, it's taking me blood and sand to adjust and be productive.

My onboarding tasks are fixing bugs and implementing a feature, and it has been like walking in a dark tunnel.

I have to face my problem alone as all the devs in the team have swapped.

I rarely sleep, and I recently started to have an existential crisis!

Also, I work part-time on another project, and my output is so poor due to the fact that I am trying to adjust to the new job. Just this evening, I got a call from the manager who was passively aggressive, complaining and asking me to rethink (a passive way of saying "you are fired, if you do not...").

I am feeling anxious. It is taking so much time daily to adjust to the new job.

Will the depression pass?

You know what's worse than having to come up with a new password every time you create an account? Forgetting your password every time you try to log in!

I swear, it's like my brain has a selective memory when it comes to passwords. I can remember every lyric to a song from 10 years ago, but I can't remember the password I created yesterday.

And don't even get me started on password manager software. You would think that having all of your passwords stored in one place would make things easier, but nope. I've forgotten my password for my password manager so many times that I'm starting to think I need a password manager for my password manager.

But seriously, why do we even need passwords in the first place? Why isn’t there an easier one stone kills all solution to all these password authentication nonsense?

I could remember when it was all letters, then forced to use letters + numbers…

then later forced to include symbols…

and then forced to make it lengthier…

and then solve puzzles after getting it right…

and after all the stress now we are forced to find nemo from a set of images.

I thought the misery would end there but nope. Now some platform forces 2FA like dude seriously?

For God’s sake we built self driving cars already! Why can’t one just exist without a password? Why do we always end up in a password cycle?

And please don’t say shit about oauth because if your password master (i.e: google) fucks you in the ass then all your oauth accounts are gone for good!

I'm currently having an existential crisis about the meaning of passwords in our modern society. Shit is crazy when I ponder about it I get worried.

So talking about discovering Drone CI turned into existential crisis

what a way to start 2020

Apparently I am writing an lyrics for my next song which won't be ever made anytime soon.

"EXISTENCE"

P.S. And yes, I wrote it while developing in Visual Studio

How do you learn to write a backtracking algo without having an existential crisis? I feel like whenever I see a problem that could use backtracking, I’m like “Looks like a case for backtracking!” *writes seven functions to try to piece it apart, gets no closer to solution, dies inside*

OK I need some help. I need to make sure I’m not losing my mind.

We are using an ERP which is hosted by another company. We are supposed to be able to access the data via a REST API. This works fine using Insomnia or Postman, but when I attempt to hit the API from my web application, CORS blocks the localhost origin.

I contacted the company’s technical team to request that they change the CORS configuration to allow localhost. They keep running me around in circles telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because localhost isn’t a DNS resolvable name and I’m doing something wrong and they don’t need to change any configuration.

They insist that if anything would need white listed, it would be my IP, not localhost.

I sent them screenshots and stack overflow posts and documentation links, showing them exactly what headers need to be set and where the configuration needs to be set in the ERP. They tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

They tell me that if I can hit the API from Postman, I can hit it from my browser.

Am I losing my mind? Have I fundamentally misunderstood CORS all these years? I’m sure I’m right. But I’m starting to feel like I’m crazy.

Been a little inactive for a long time, but I could really use your advices fellow ranters.

I'm in my senior year of highschool and I got an extraordinary internship at a company (it's not possible to get a job in web dev in this country as a highschooler).
The pay is just a little pocket money, but projects are fun (web apps in js) and I can include this experience iny resume later on.

Basically the company wants me to go to uni/college. The teachers too. Oh, parents too.
I have been suffering in schools for my whole life, I really don't feel lile I could make myself go to school another 4 years.

And I also don't have the slightest idea of what I wanna do with my life, I have no goals currently and I'm afraid of that while I'm in this existential crisis state it is easier for people to tell me what's good for me.

Objectively this is a country of papers, so I guess it doesn't matter wheter it's web dev or the next super digital intelligence I do as a profession.

I also want to travel the world, but I need money for that Xd. If possible I'd love to move to another country, but still have no idea.

Thanks for reading through this depressing shit.

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

Setting up some CSS animations and ended up with the value "infinite ease" and now I am having an existential crisis.

Is it possible to have an "epistemological bug crisis"? Because i feel like everything I referred to as bugs in my early career weren't true bugs, they were just bad programming or architecture flaws. I feel like real "bugs" are weird issues with the language, compiler, module, etc... that should work one way but work another way. Anyone else had that experience?

This gives rise to the secondary question: who perpetuates the idea that bugs are just "anything wrong with the current codebase"?

How do you guys handle existential crisis? Asking for a very close friend

Why is there evil in the world?

"Because of free will 🤓🤓🤓"

---

🌌 Universe A (ours):

❌ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a new color

❌ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to grow wings and fly

❌ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to create a new planet

❌ today i can "use my free will", but if i use it for something God doesn't want me to, ill burn forever

---

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to commit evil

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to rape, kill, start wars

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to lie, deceive, suffer

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to get diseases

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to die of starvation

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to die of natural disasters

✅ today i can "use my free will", but I NEED TO suffer so i can build my character

---

What does this tell us about the creator of the existence?

By analyzing this, you can clearly see how:

The most HARMLESS things, are disabled for us to use with our "free will",

while the most HARMFUL things are allowed for us to use with our "free will"

What do YOU think:

What IF, An all-good, all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful GOD of the existence created a universe:

---

🌌 Universe B (imaginary):

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to imagine a new color

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to grow wings and fly

✅ today i can "use my free will", but it IS POSSIBLE to create a new planet

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to imagine doing evil

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to rape, kill, start wars

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to lie, deceive, suffer

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to get diseases

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to die of starvation

✅ today i can "use my free will", but its IMPOSSIBLE to die of natural disasters

✅ today i can "use my free will", but i do NOT NEED TO suffer and still build my character

✅ today i can "use my free will", but if i use it for something God doesn't want me to, i do NOT burn at all

---

Please tell me, non biased, rational objective answer, is Universe A or Universe B better?

Tell me why, and give a very Very good reason, why couldnt Universe B exist?

If God exists, why didn't God create Universe B? Why did he CHOOSE to create universe A?

"if God exists, he is either Not-All-Powerful, or Not-All-Good"
- Neil Degrasse Tyson

Im having a midlife existential crisis.

If God is real, WHO said he HAS TO be All-Good?

If God is NOT All-Good, would you believe in such God? Would you worship such God?

What if God is NOT All-Good? This would explain why Universe A was chosen over Universe B.

What do YOU think, why would an ALL-GOOD ALL-LOVING ALL-POWERFUL GOD CHOOSE TO CREATE UNIVERSE A, WITH PAIN, SUFFERING AND EVIL?

Not really a rant, but a question for all of you devs stuck in a really bad company. And I mean 'stuck', as in certain situations that don't allow you to switch jobs at the moment and you have to put up with your job.

What do you tell yourself everyday to go work on something even when your manager doesn't care, your project hits a dead end, the company that you work for is a shit show of a fucking circus, and your career seems bleak from every angle? Have you guys ever had an existential crisis as a dev?

Thursday: Realise the data you generated yesterday was useless.
Friday: Accidentally delete all of Thursday's work.
Saturday: Give up and contemplate ones existence...

Any of you guys that also faces existential crisis every sprint deadline? Not being able to fullfill PM's expectations is horrible.

I have no unique experience… I was trying to fix a bug and just looked it up on google and the exact answer showed up. This happens every time… every question I ever ask was asked before me…

Am I having an existential midlife crisis or is the post Computer Age just awful?

NodeJS and MongoDB. And tutorials.

Everywhere tutorials show simple example of console.log output of findOne. Good, that works... But when I try to extrapolate example to assign results to variable, it won't work. Inside that fetch anonymous function it works... But outside, simply undefined no matter what I try. Return doesn't return either...

Why it is so hard to make tutorials and examples that would be actually useful. I've spent hours with this already.

And on top of that it is really hard to find tutorials staying with minimum extra dependencies. Like most tutorials in this case throw mongoose in the soup. And I don't want that.

Sometimes makes me question why I try to learn these new things, when I have knowledge of other technologies that I could use faster and easier...

Am I the only one that feels like I'am not doing anything worthy at my current job ? I mean... I don't want to develop stupid apps for stupid people...

Damn! Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man with now over 142 billion USD!!

I wonder if he feels some kind of existential crisis everyday.

Successful artists or actors become weird after becoming rich af.

Looking at the commit logs of ry/deno gives me existential crisis, yet excited on the bitch side.