I'd like to extend my heartfelt fuck-you to the following persons:

- The recruiter who told me that at my age I wouldn't find a job anymore: FUCK YOU, I'll send you my 55 birthday's cake candles, you can put all of them in your ass, with light on.

- The Project Manager that after 5 rounds of interviews and technical tests told me I didn't have enough experience for his project: be fucked in an Agile way by all member of your team, standing up, every morning for 15 minutes, and every 2 weeks by all stakeholders.

- The unemployment officer who advised me to take low level jobs, cut my expenses and salary expectations: you can cut your cock and suck it, so you'll stop telling bullshit to people

- The moron that gave me a monster technical assignment on Big Data, which I delivered, and didn't gave me any feedback: shove all your BIG DATA in your ass and open it to external integrations

- the architect who told me I should open my horizons, because I didn't like React: put a reactive mix in your ass and close it, so your shit will explode in your mouth

- the countless recruiter who used my cv to increase their db, offering fake jobs: print all your db on paper and stuff your ass with that, you'll see how big you will be

To all of them, really really fuck you.

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Very specific and annoying situation here:

- Working on a machine learning project with other people
- I'm on Linux, they use Windows
- We code in python
- We generally use vscode for development, and its python extension

I implement some basic neural networks with tensorflow, and add a bunch of logging for it. I test it on my machine and it works fine.
But, my group mates report that "after a few seconds the entire client hangs".
Apparently it only happens on Windows?
We start debugging the hell out of the code I implemented, added 20 log messages and sat there for a solid hour.

Until I make one very odd realization: the issue doesn't happen when I run the script in my terminal, instead of vscode with the debugger. So I try different debug settings, using an external terminal instead of vscode's built in debug console seems to fix it too.
And I make another observation: In the debug console, some messages don't seem to appear at all, while the external terminal shows them just fine.

So, turns out, that printing an epsilon character: “ε” (U+03B5), causes the entire thing to hang up.

It's the year 2020 and somehow we still can't do unicode.
I'm so done, what on earth.

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

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.

Can someone please tell my boss / team that I am still in APPRENTICESHIP!!!

In the last few months I have been the only one who works for our second biggest client! On the paper an other guy is responsible but he does not know the project or the tech we use. But that's not all.

I also interviewed an external contractor (5x more salary),
introduced 8 more of them (technical and standards) [one of them in english, not my native language as you can see]
and I answered their question.
(Needless to say I get interrupted all the time)
Because of our unreliable infrastructure I get screamed at by the client and get calls after school from some coworker to talk him through fixing a bug.

Sorry for the long rant and all the english mistakes I made.
This had to get out!

PS Yes I have talked to my boss about it more than once, nothing changed

I jump on an existing scala project.

git pull && sbt compile test

Tests are failing.

Me: "Hey team, the tests are failing."

Team member: "That cannot be. They were passing for the the last run."

Me: "Did you run them locally?"

Team member: "No, on Jenkins. It was fine."

I check Jenkins.

Me: "What do you mean it's fine. The last successful deployment was on the end of May."

Team member: "The Pull Request checker always went through successfully."

I check how our Jenkins tasks are configured. It's true that the Pull Request Checker runs successfully yet due to a "minor misconfiguration" (aka "major fuckup") the Pull Request Checker only tests a tiny subset of the entire test suite.

Team members were were fine if their Pull Request got the "Success" notification on bitbucket's pull request page. And reviewers trusted that icon as well.

They never checked the master run of the Jenkins task. Where the tests were also failing for over a month.

I'm also highely confused how they did TDD. You know, writing a test first, making it green. (I hope they were just one specific test at a time assuming the others were green. The cynic in me assumes they outsourced running the tests to the Jenkins.)

Gnarf!

Team member having run the tests locally finally realizes: "The tests are broken. Gonna fix them."

Wow. Please, dear fellow developers: It does not kill you to run the entire test suite locally. Just do it. Treat the external test runners as a safety net. Yet always run the test suite locally first.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

Thanks to Devrant I've learned about rubber duck debugging. Never heard of it before! It reminds me of a story many moons ago when I worked for a certain multinational company as a business analyst. The company brought in some consultants who basically stole the work my team was already doing on a big project (a horrendous series of spreadsheets linked to data coming from the core systems) and sold it back to the company for an insane amount of money as their idea.

When they launched the new product, the team I was in was asked to test and review it. It took my colleague ten seconds to bring the whole thing to its knees and trigger a corrupt data export back into the core systems. Bearing in mind this external company somehow managed to charge tens of thousands of pounds. So what did my colleague do? Hack the system? Some kind of complicated sabotage? Nope. He typed "FISH" into one of the spreadsheet cells! Thus the FISH test was born.

That day I learned several things: it's easy to break things with a fish; the importance of validating your input; and the satisfaction of showing up the smug bastards who stole your ideas and work.

Great ... after management got our system destroyed by some external idiots, pledged to never do this again, they now hired externals again to do a whole project by themselves.

Last time we lost all but one senior dev (that would be me) ... this time they'll lose the last one as well. Don't care of this whole department goes tits up anymore, I'm out. If everything goes well, I'm signing a new contract in a few days, making me free in 3-4 months (yes, German labour laws have long periods when you quit ;) ).

Dear management, have fun managing a bunch of rookies with no contacts in the company.

Recruiter:

... the bank purchased a 3rd party tool and hired a 3rd party development team to add some features to the tool. That external team hired their own 3rd party team, and now there are 400+ bugs in the system. Would you like to work as a test-automation lead on this project?

Me: Fuuuucck no.

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

I got some work on a new project so I ran the 500, or so, unit tests and it took almost 3 minutes. Everything was mocked and no external dependencies so I got curious as to how on earth they could take so long.

I found some suspicious code doing a while loop over a date range incrementing by 1 day each time. It turned out the tests didn't initialise the start date which defaults to 01/01/0001, and there are 5 scenarios!

I got test execution down to a respectful 10s.

I had to create a c++ dungeon 2d game as University project.
The spec said "a terminal game made with char"
I and my team made a real game with anemies boss, and balanced stat in 15 days with Qt (we asked if can use external libraries)
We got 6/8 point for the project cuz we forgot to put protected/private the attribute of the player...

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.

This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.

It feels great to see your work helping people around you.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

If we had a devRant vote on the most annoying word of 2018, I'd vote for "token".
Token here, token there, token yourself in the rear!

Some project I'm currently working on has to fetch 4 different tokens for these syphillis-ridden external CUNTful APIs.
Your mother inhales dicks at the trainstation toilet for one token!

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

Got to know about OSMC/Kodi last week. Took out my Raspberry Pi. Setup OSMC over the weekend, did all the cable setup for 4 external hard drives and connected to TV via HDMI. After few configurations, I'm all setup. I'm astonished by all the features it provides. Fetching data from TMDb (I had actually created a javaFX app to do this for my local library just last month), remote control from Android as well Web Browser. Enabled UPnP and now I have my complete media center floating around my house network. It is one of the best open source project I have laid my eyes upon. Wish I could attach more pics.

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

Today I told to my Project Manager that after one year of taking care ( explaining thousands of lines of codes) to an external team ( another company) to migrate our application from a monolith to microservices + react, that the React UI they build looks like shit.

He replied "at least it works".

Now I must find the courage to tell him that it doesn't work correctly because instead of a simple *migration* the external team rewrote some algorithms used in a bank application and now the data are wrong.

advices ?

A few months ago, we asked an external company to create a simple project since we lack the developers now...

I've just looked into it and the first thing we found was Evil Rick (from Rick & Morty)

Holy shit firefox, 3 retarded problems in the last 24h and I haven't fixed any of them.
My project: an infinite scrolling website that loads data from an external API (CORS hehe). All Chromium browsers of course work perfectly fine. But firefox wants to be special...
(tested on 2 different devices)
(Terminology: CORS: a request to a resource that isn't on the current websites domain, like any external API)

1.
For the infinite scrolling to work new html elements have to be silently appended to the end of the page and removed from the beginning. Which works great in all browsers. BUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE SCROLLING DURING THE APPENDING & REMOVING FIREFOX TELEPORTS YOU RANDOMLY TO THE END OR START OF PAGE!
Guess I'll just debug it and see what's happening step by step. Oh how wrong I was. First, the problem can't be reproduced when debugging FUCK! But I notice something else very disturbing...

2.
The Inspector view (hierarchical display of all html elements on the page) ISN'T SHOWING THE TRUE STATE OF THE DOM! ELEMENTS THAT HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED AREN'T SHOWING UP AND ELEMENT THAT WERE JUST REMOVED ARE STILL VISIBLE! WTF????? You have to do some black magic fuckery just to get firefox to update the list of DOM elements. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEBUG MY WEBSITE ON FIREFOX IF IT'S SHOWING ME PLAIN WRONG DATA???!!!!

3.
During all of this I just randomly decided to open my website in private (incognito) mode in firefox. Huh what's that? Why isn't anything loading and error are thrown left and right? Let's just look at the console. AND IT'S A FUCKING CORS ERROR! FUCK ME! Also a small warning says some URLs have been "blocked because content blocking is enabled." Content Blocking? What is that? Well it appears to be a supper special supper privacy mode by firefox (turned on automatically in private mode), THAT BLOCKS ALL CORS REQUESTS, THAT MAY OR MAY NOT DO SOME TRACKING. AN API THAT 100% CORS COMPLIANT CAN'T BE USED IN FIREFOXs PRIVATE MODE! HOW IS THE END USER SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??? AND OF COURSE THE THROWN EXCEPTION JUST SAYS "NETWORK ERROR". HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THE USER THAT FIREFOX HAS A FEAUTRE THAT BREAKS THE VERY BASIS OF MY WEBSITE???

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL FIREFOX??????????????????

I actually managed to come up with fix for 1. that works like < 50% of the time -_-

I started off in a MNC company as a junior developer. I entered with candy glasses.
I didn't expect to win the lottery. Of getting abuse by superior.

I stayed for a year, at the project. Constantly being belittled by this team lead. It was awful i enter as a fresh grad. All the new tech were so new and scary at that point.

During my time there, i constantly think that developer is not my stuff.

Ultimately i reach the state of burnout. I reached out to the manager and broke down in his office.

I actually told the manager. "I hate coding"

I remember staying up to 4am just complete a piece of program. To be ready to be push to production the next day. My team lead just come screaming at me saying there is bug.

Upon receiving that message via skype. I broke, tears flow down my eyes.

After which i reach a state of burn out. I start to reach out to external parties for help to get me out of there.

Now i am recovered from the burn out. I am curious of the technology that were utilized in that project. I literally face palm. After understanding the technology it isn't so hard after all. I just didn't gear myself up with the tech.

I still do enjoy working on code.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

[Hardware geeks, microcontroller geeks, please come]

Yet another Hacktoberfest tshirt...

Gotcha? (I bet you know who I am)

Just kidding. Just a random project idea I am not sure if it is possible to make from scratch.

It is essentially a usb external storage
About 32gb

And has a lcd that shows available storage space

And some buttons to play snake. (Yup)

Is it possible?

What should I expect when creating from scratch? (Microcontroller, c language, interfaces, etc)

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

So I decided to switch over to Ubuntu to get used to it and have fun with it along with trying to use Vim just as a side thing for experience (I'm still studying anyways and its semester break).

So I setup Linux in an external disk, booted Ubuntu, setup everything and then loaded a side project coded in C++ and Allegro into Ubuntu.

A few hours of googling and trying to setup Allegro to be properly installed and understanding how to use GCC with Allegro, it finally found the library and one of the cpp files gave an error that is not "cannot find allegro.h". That's great!

Added all the other additional cpp files into the command and added all the includes and there goes the terminal lit up with errors ;_; I'm so tempted to ditch everything and go back to Visual Studios

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

Fed up with f@_#-$&@_ Microsoft bullshit, computer refused to install IIS without a reboot first. Rebooted, got bluescreen with some error like APC_Index mismatch since it was hooked up to an external monitor (this has happened before, but only when booting into Windows, not Ubuntu), god knows why now since it was hooked up to same monitor before reboot and worked just fine. All this because some stupid school related task requires Visual Studio and a web project-solution that takes ages to run/debug which I would rather build and devug through attaching remote debugger to the running IIS-process. Instead I get into a boot-loop when the screen is connected, and when I connect the screen after a normal boot it restarts itself. Why is it always like this? Most of the time is spent just to setup the environment or making Windows work. F#&#_ this and the assignment, goodnight.

While doing my undergrad, we had to submit a major project in last sem. We were grouped into teams. Spent whole semester doing nothing and near the deadline, a friend bought a project and i just changed the footer. On submission, we had the discussion with the external lecturer who viewed our project and he asked us to write down the number of tables we used in our project in separate paper each. A friend wrote 5 , I wrote 12, and the friend who has bought the project wrote 17. Turns out there were 11 tables. I said someone must have dropped a table.. And later made up saying i was doing the database and others were doing the rest of the project.
It was one of the lamest excuse we made to escape such uncomfortable situation.

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

Well I guess my first dev project will probably end up as my last (For good reason).

Not long after dippig my toe in the programming world by messing with Minecraft mods, I decided to take a gamemaking class at my high school which introduced me to gamemaker, straight away I was able to use my java knowledge to sort of become the go to person for help, so while everyone was following tutorials for a basic pac man clone I had started work on the final asignment which was to create a fundamentally playable game.

Taught myself how to use spritesheets, tilesets, external libraries and the like and decided, fuck it lets make an RPG based around looting dungeons, ended up decidng on the title 'Plunder', since then the project grew and grew in scope to the point it is now unrecognisable with my goals as of now compared to then.

Now that project has been placed on hold as the story and world just grew in scope to the point I litteraly do not have the knowledge or time to actually work on the game, so I've started converting that world into a book which is slowly motivating me to almost slice up the game and work on individual pieces.

But considering the drain and effort that has gone into this, pretty sure IF (And that's a big if) I ever do release this game that took basic concept 9 years ago, don't think I would ever be able to top that achievement.

Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.

(Just for shits and gigs I might try and did up some old projects related ot this and post them in the comments if anyone may be interested ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

One of the things that I like the most regarding Clojure(and most Lisps to be honest) is how "not for beginners" the ecosystem feels.
Don't get me wrong, setting up a project in lein with dependencies(both internal and external) is a cakewalk, installing lein or boot is a cakewalk. Setting environment consts and middleware etc etc is a cakewalk.
Its just that there are no blogs about convoluted and amateurish ways of doing things. Most presentations and articles are written by really experienced and talented individuals.

I dunno, its just a nice shift in community. Its nice to see people not fucking up Object Oriented programming in java or any of the other oop languages. Its nice not seeing people giving horrible advice regarding memory management in C or c++ and it is sure as shit nice to not see spaghetti php und js code.

And my productivity levels are off the charts man. Really liking this shit and I get to stay inside my JVM

!rant

For the past year I was more or less solely responsible for a project. With the beginning of the year 2020 that project is paused. I had vacation starting the 23.12.2019 so the project ended there for me. Since the 25. the project is alerting like 30 crashes a day. I didn't change a thing but the external consultant did. Now I sit here at home and drink relaxing tea while reading a book. It's nice to say that it is not my problem anymore :-)

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

Personal mini-project from a million years ago which I practically don't maintain anymore, broke. External APIs are being bitches.
Made a fix, but I'm too lazy to push. (I don't think anyone else is using it tbh)
Huehuehue.

(!rant) When starting out as a web developer, I did my first project for a external vendor for which I was paid in form of a lunch and some hope of more projects.
For the second project, I was paid one month of agreed upon amount for two months of work.

What's your story?

Best
typescript - I needed to learn it for a project and I like it, I know java and javascript and it is something in between of those two that makes writing enterprise web applications easier, it’s nice that you can debug it directly in chrome, it makes things easier

Worst
docker, Dockerfiles - devops tools - amount of shell commands inside them and mangled && to make everything running in one file layer makes those unreadable mess that you need to think twice to understand, there is no debugger for it, you do everything with try and see what happens, there is actually no real dev toolset for devops and that sucks, since you got builder images that makes things more mangled than before, it’s clearly missing some external officially approved scripting language or at least
FUNCTION and
WITH LAYER and indentation / parentheses syntax and they still trying to make it flat, why are you doing that ?
as a result next to Dockerfile cause you can’t import multiple ones you get bunch bash scripts with mangled syntax and other crap that is glued together to make a monster - and this runs most of current software on this planet

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

Other peoples' code... (in C++)
I am finding what some people consider good code is not as described. I found a class that provides strings. Great it gives me paths and stuff. I incorporated it in a new project.

segfaults

Hmmm, it must have an init function... It does, but not in the class. It has a friended init function:
friend init_function(). If this function is not created and called external to the class then the class will segfault...

okay...

I implement this. I use code from another project that implements this correctly. The friend class allows the private constructor to be called to create the main instance of the class. So its a fucking cryptic ass singleton. I look at this class. It uses a macro to decide what to function call in the class. The class already has function names for each call it needs to make. The class is literally a string lookup table. I vow to redo this shitty code, someday...

I start to wonder what other fragile code I will find. Not long later I keep getting errors on malloc. Like any malloc that is called results in a segfault. The malloc is not at fault though. I run valgrind and find a websocket library is returning an object a different size than the header file describes.

WTF...

Somebody has left an old ass highly modified definition of the websocket header in a location in that I include headers (partly my fault). I eliminate that from my include path. All is well, everything behaves. I will be making sure this fucking header is not used and it is going to die. Wasted a bunch of time.

Lessons learned: some code is just fucked and don't leave old ass shit you tried laying around.

I've been away a couple of months.

I finished uni. I got a job at a startup. My mental health improved. Current boss is nice, during december I was going towards another burnout due to huge task assignments. When I expressed this concern, he understood and reduced the sprint task number.
I hope I'll stay here as much as possible.

I've been living with my gf for over a year now. Pretty exciting, although intimacy is kinda fucked. We haven't had sex for over a while now.

I'll start hit the gym soon. I need some kind of workout or sport.

I hate my city at this point. Too big, public transport suck and going out for anything that's not a pub requires at least 30 minutes by car in the traffic. Parking is plain hell. Cabs are out of the question, too expensive. Yet I need to go out. Can't stay this much inside the house or around the neighborhood.

Since I'm working remotely I'm thinking to travel with my laptop. I need a better one and more money, but I'm starting to work on an external project. Still have to discuss my hourly rate but it won't be much given my limited experience.

I want to start studying again. Not for university or anything, just to keep myself in training, but I feel like I don't have time. Probably it's because I'm an unorganized person. Will figure this out.

So this was my answer to an unasked "how are you?".
Did I miss anything? How are y'all?

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

I started to learn programming to be liked by a girl and since then I periodically ask myself if this is really for me... And periodically, right as I start thinking it may not be for me, I find myself solving issues programming stuff, seeing parallelism between software development and anything and randomly toss out the classical: "you know, with and Arduino you could(...)" To people put of nowhere.

So yeah. Guess it's for me. I hate it but... Wait, I could automate my windows depending on the difference between internal and external temperature... Hmm... Later guys, got a project to deal with!

Well it's about my B.Tech project.
I had windows 7 and I had lots of imp data along with my project and I hadn't taken any backup of my project(not even report copy). So after successful completion of my project I thought let's play with OS and try other OS and that time I had rare awareness about data and OS too.

So I had copied my imp data(mainly friends party pics) into my friend's external HDD and I thought yeah I have clean chit now and literally I forgot about my project which was in C:/ drive.

So happily I had done experiments and enjoyed a lot and one day my my project partner asked about project copy and I had just given a smile.
RIP.
Happy Ending :D

From today, I'm gonna post infrequent-devLogs of the project i am currently doing, I have been thinking about it the past couple of months, and I am finally moving it into action!

I wish writing devLogs will make me to finish the project, at least a working prototype.

It is a C# block coding application that is made in 100% C# that generates human-readable C# code for C# begineers.

If you want to follow me along, make sure to subscribe to my rants by going to my Profile (cozyplanes) > More icon in top right > Subscribe

All devLogs posted directly via devRant API integration from CZedit, a simple edit program for geeks

=========================

devLog #0 - Block coding in C#

Done:
- Made the console output to redirect to textbox
- Ability to save output to external storage

WIP:
Compile C# code directly at runtime with Roslyn

Notes:
open-source??

The most excited I’ve been is probably now.

I’ve been working on a process that manages various prices, in a table that currently has 25k+ records, and viewing this through our ERP is extremely painful, no search no filter etc.

I’ve been given the task of creating an external application that we can use to manage these in an easier way.

This is my first “proper” project, it’s going to be difficult, I’m doing everything including all the planning etc, so I’ve spent some time today writing user stories etc.

But I’m looking forward to creating a useful app that not only saves me time, but could also be rolled out across the business

So Im taking over an project from an colleague. And it involves a lot of things from an external API. I cool with that, I enjoy working with APIs in general.

Let me explain it a bit more. I enjoy consuming APIs with frontend frameworks like reactjs and angularjs.

But my colleague had allready started some with consuming one of the endpoints.

He did it with ajax....for god sake. Are you serious?!?!?!!

Ajax calls??? Why ????

So I pointed out that we could use vuejs, we don't have to compile anything like with react or angular.

Things that we need to do are not that interesting nor big. Mostly getting items and maybe filter these items.

But he insisted on using Ajax because there wasn't that must time to use fancy frontend frameworks.

Okay so I’ve been brought in on a 12 month contract as an external replacement integration architect, alongside a large IT consulting firm. Turns out, they don’t need an integration architect. So I fill my time coming up with useful tools around the project that deal with all the missing parts in their MVP: like monitoring tools, data mocking tools, you get the idea. Essentially doodling.

Client has woken up to fact that they’ve overspent by X million, employing 30+‘developers’, 20+ ‘testers’, n+ ‘managers’ on a ‘low-code’ project … result: project shuts 4 months early.

Q: Essentially client wants remaining four months work done in two weeks. Is there a German word for laughing, crying, and banging the forehead on the desk at the same time?

Supplementary: how cross will client be when they realise project can indeed be done, and that consultancy have been emperor’s-new-clothing them for most of the last two years?

(Feel free to perform substitution on quoted terms at your leisure)

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

The day that I was told that external contractors were used for all new project work, and employees were only used for support and operations... 😡

Asking for a friend: Well actually a friend asked me (since "I'm good with computers", you know it ;)) and no real solution came to my mind, so I thought, why not ask the internet

Anyways. She's an artist and does a project (kind of a documentation) about the Egyptian revolution. She currently lives in Europe but still has her Egypian passport. As an Egyptian national, she fears, that she could be holden back for a while and have her laptop/external HD with all the photos/videos/interviews confiscated and/or searched. She asked me for help to have a "backup solution".

The requirements: a way to backup work (from a mac) to a secure location (I would offer my server running linux for it).
The upload would have to be encrypted (if possible, I suggested to use a VPN, is this enough?)
Access to the files should only be granted if you have the propper password (in my opinion the VPN tunnel should work here too, as when it's down, you can't just reopen it without a password.

What are your thoughts on this?

Me, working hard on a SQL project with a deadline that is half what it should be with no support from the other people on the project and was mostly made with with data I imagined would be in there cos no one could get me any fucking shit done (i.e. effectively designed, built, tested, fixed, upgraded, documented on my own for an entire weekly/monthly/ad-hoc analysis process that would output various reports for internal/external/management)

Manager - man who is a known waste of space but for some reason is in charge of the smallest part of the project, shouldn't have been fucking involved fucking management guzzling stain magnet...

Manager: Hey, do I need to refresh the database?

Me: .................

Me: .................

Me: ............I dunno, do you think we should refresh the database that this entire project is reliant? I mean...why do we need up to date transactions to analyse? Wait....you telling me it's not been being refreshed this ENTIRE time?

Manager: No....you never said I should. So should I?

Me: ..................I never said you should!?!? Are you not in the meetings talking about dependencies?????? Do you think i should have up to date trans or just run this with old stuff????? Why would you not update it!??!!?!?!? Its transactions...... (Desperately trying not to punch through my screen, through his, into his throat)

Manager: ..............

Me: .................

Manager: I think i'll refresh it and add it to the job?

Me: ....................(goes back to work cursing with music in so I think its quiet but who knows).

Tard, don't know how he even gets to work without someone holding his fucking hand.

Happy ending, I don't work there anymore :p

Sad ending, his spirit of tard follows me to my new jobs and possesses someone (or three sometimes)

My workplace is still using xml based configuration, and non-spring boot projects.

So every spring boot tutorial I find feels like "Look at how easy you can get this running" and then it's just actually a toy you can't get into production.

Also it kind of bugs me that you need to be online to actually be able to initialize/create a spring boot project and every single tutorial says so.
You can make a local network m2 repository, but can one make a spring initializer service?

Either way, migrating every single project to Spring boot is a no-no,

And I'm stuck with like 5 prototypes of SSO integration from which only 2 work, and the other 3 have their own problems.

One does redirect to the login and all, but the SAML endpoint gets 404 on response when you log in.

One is on OpenID Connect, but I would need to update the project from Spring 3 to Spring 5 to get it working, which upon attempting to do seems to break everything else.

One has an external library handling the security context just the way we are accustomed to, but it only does a 401 forbidden when you go without logging in and I'm starting to think it is actually one of those that require you to extract the token or something manual like that, which wouldn't work for us

The other two are spring boot tutorials that worked out of the box, both SAML and OpenID, still can't use those for the main projects.

I'm tired of dealing with this configuration hell, been two months at this, I want to get features done as usual, not be stuck configuring stuff that might or might not work.

Rant aside, I think I figured I need to use a different Security adapter, but I needed to vent.

Having too many projects in my team and managed to convince my boss that we need more people and even other teams to help on some really critical tasks. It was fine until today the technical project planner decided to scold me for not assigning tasks to developers in other teams for one specific of project of ours.

I tried to explain that its not the best idea external people working on a really spaghetti code project that we will be left to maintain. Its the same problem that led to the current problem.

And the PP response was "they are machines and have worked on many othe team projects".

So the help was delivered as a scolding and my team sucks in their eyes. Without any word from my boss that i havent talked for 6 months except on 2 accessions where someone else demanded of us to focus only on their project. Beautiful ❤️

Hello everyone, once again I’m asking for your help, for the first time I’m working as a counterpart for an external development company, this project already has a few months of work but there are not any technical documentation or quality metrics.

Would you suggest to ask all the necessary stuff with times, quality and requirements or it’s already impossible to do that?

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

I've been complaining for 2 years about working on a project with shitty external developers. Finally get another project done by internal developers and the architecture and decisions made were just as shitty. Like, there are Soap web services implemented solely for the web app ui alongside rest services for the mobile app. Now I'm left to maintain the failed attempt to correct the architecture 3 years ago and all the devs already left. Oh joy.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

Confession - Testdriven UnitTests
First of all, I regret all and wish there would be no SQL Scripts but an external tool to analyze data, but the project grew hysterically and when I joined the sh*t had already been established...
I had to test some SQL Scripts. As there is no real UnitTest framework which is under development/gets support, the whole suite is kinda buggy.
So I had my script, and had the required input + expected output, but the UnitTest always failed. So I manipulated the framework parameters until the test finally passed.
Shame on me and on the project, but atleast there are tests now...

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

Taking over from/working with an external dev company on an existing project.

Listen Mr CEO, I'm not here to mess with your firm's code and undo all of your work. I'm just doing my job. Stop telling me that the only thing left to do is "data" without any context. The site that I'm here to work on isn't even finished.

This is my frontend tip of the day.
If you have a frontend that consumes an external API:
1) Retrieve the json responses from devtools
2) Save them in your project as json files (trim the data a bit if it's too long)
3) When starting your app with a special env var like MOCK_DATA, make your app mock the data and use your saved json data instead.

You can associate each response with an url regex.

The package fetch-mock mocks fetch really well, it lets through the urls that don't match anything.
This way you can incrementally add responses.

And voila, you have a mode where you have near instant page loads to test things manually, and you also have mocked data ready for testing eg, cypress.

Watched 2 different vendors struggle to get something going.

I stayed quiet during both meetings, the first, was a misconfiguration error on their project code. They were tailoring the product that they sold my institution, I could see the simple error: key-value settings on one of their json files (it is a dotneto app)
I don't get paid to troubleshoot the code for an external company, so I was silent, knowing full well this would take longer to get done, needless to say, I had originally advised against purchasing this product but was not listened to, very well then.

The other was a configuration issue on the side of a different Java based product, there were some strange XML configuration entries, some other project files that made little sense, but again: quiet.

Department head is concerned about the delays that this might cause and will still not ask if I am willing to help since he knows I A) was against this product purchase from the get go and B) knows DAMN well I will say that I don't get paid to troubleshoot the issues that third party vendors charging us over 100k of product "worth", they wanna spend the money on "enterprise" shit that does not work,they can deal with their own shit programs.

Morale of the story: money moves people. If there is no bling in my account: then I ain't doing it.

Now, I do get paid well for what I do, and for that I do bust my ass, for everything else: there is mastercard.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

External evaluator in Final Year Project Presentation asks what does cout do in PHP?
smh

Today is the last day of my placement.

Over the past year, I began working on small front end bugs, to becoming the sole front end developer on the project, to being full stack.

Back in July, I and the other dev on the project released the app into the wild. It now is reaching 100 users.

The app has a lot of external dependencies (10+), one of which could cripple it entirely should it cut us off (which they can do at any time, it's a free API).

I was given, effectively a week and a two days to do a complete handover/transfer of knowledge to the placement student that will be taking my place. They hadn't touched front end (like me) when starting, but also had no experience in node/js.

As of this, I can't leave feeling like I've fully completed my work, and I feel bad leaving the new guy with these clients. Undoubtedly I'll be doing some off-the-record help.

!rant

This situation, when you are working as external employee in a company that needs you to test safety-critical systems.

You wait months for "THE" (internal) test tool you have to use to implement your specified tests.

Finally , you meet with the responsible dev guy to let him setup everything.

Me: Hi, I'm here for setting up the test tool for project XY
Dev: Eh? No one (manger) ordered the tool for project XY!
Me:

I've been helping a friend of mine with his postgraduate project the last 3 months.
It was a Java based program made in Processing. Though I am not a Java developer and I never used processing before, it wasn't that hard to write the logic of the program.

I noticed that sometimes Java made me use loops for almost everything.
Also I had to communicate between server and client via JSON but I had to write it manually as string due to the lack of keys in Java.

The main trial though was with the logic of the project. It was supposed to be made as a framework to be extended from custom user classes. I had to change the core classes I made many times because the user class had methods that should run while the parent class didn't have them declared. That could be my fault for not knowing how to write desktop application framework but you can't expect a framework to be extended in a compiled state, or so I think. Processing on the other hand doesn't seem to like the idea of an external java library. At least it didn't workout for me, it should be able to work normally.

In the end the project was never as completed as we wanted. It could rum a basic sim but we hadn't the time to test other possibilities.

I work daily on a project, in which, rather than buy in a decent message bus a bunch of half interested, unqualified developers were tasked with hammering together an in-house solution. This monstrosity has around six layers of abstraction, separate objects per project and dynamically loading converters between the components. It's largely not unit testable, certainly not integration testable and has already wasted more money in developer time and Bugfixes than a half decent external solution would have cost.

Every time I have to change an object in one part, start the associated web/win service and do a "update service references" I die a little inside.

There are so many better ways but we'll never be able to change because "there's no time for that"

And all for some up front savings

Working with external teams on this new project involving pretty sensitive stuff like bank transactions.

Talking about user flow and how to handle authentication, like 2-factor and stuff.

Newish guy on external team (though experienced) says they have a proposal.

Security Questions.

... like "What was you first car" security questions...

awkward silence in room...

So yeah, need money so I started looking for extra projects to develop and found a project to make "the new facebook" and it just kinda sucks.

I just got access to the whole codebase and it's done using angular, nodejs and typescript (which is cool to me), while the dude contacting me was telling me it was done in react (which is kinda a big no for me).

Well, anyway, I start by cloning the repo and the npm-i the whole thing, it's not even at 10% of the whole process and I already got like 50 deprecated packages over maybe a hundred needed (total of 2054 node modules installed).

Well I kinda don't even know where to start from this, all I know is that I'm gonna do it just for the money so I'll be a little underpaid (about 500$/month) while according to me the price should be about 1500$/month, but I can't do it full-time, so it kinda works out.

I 'm auditing the code of a client application and :

How the fuck do you create an external dependency (private npm) with it doesn't work outside of your project?!?!?!?

If it needs your project to work IT CAN'T BE AN EXTERNAL DEPENDENCY!!!!

I'm working on my own smarthome project (how rare nowdays...:) ). I'm using microsoft's git repo. I'm not make my project open source, not because I'm a douchebag, but because I'm a very bad coder. My biggest fear is not the fact, that it would be commented as wtf is this code, but receiving pull requests from pros and I wouldn't even understand their code.
This is my "training" project (python, flask, apscheduler, sqlalchemy, bootstrap2, mqtt, micropython)
I'm thinking to make it public without accepting external pulls, just for me to learn more.
I'm just wondering your thoughts on this.
Thoughts?

1. I love the challenge of a good puzzle. There's always something new to solve that I didn't know before, and it rarely requires external knowledge like a crossword...

2. At least in my current life situation, no one I interact with has any idea what I'm doing, so if I feel like working on a solution to side project at work, it wouldn't look any different. It also keeps people from trying to learn about what I'm doing. They leave me alone which is exactly what I want.

3. As my professor once said (and totally stole from someone else), "the people who are the most talented and innovative with their code are probably the laziest in reality". I feel like this is pretty true, at least for me. Sometimes I see a simple repetitive task that I don't feel like doing, and I have the power to create a program to do it for me. Ultimate laziness with a fantastic result.

At some point I need to do an older project i've had on hold a while, but it'd require writing my own ROM patch system as a major step in completing it, as i'd need to dynamically patch stuff into older games based on system, which current patch formats don't allow for. (This project will also help me learn a few things I need for yet more projects I've got stashed away, so it needs to happen eventually.)

Now, the interesting part: the patch format. I was debating on whether to use binary data, like IPS/BPS and similar formats do, which would be easier to implement... but if I were to have plaintext patches, you'd be able to not only understand what's happening, but also have things like scripting and conditionals and user-defined options and such. This would be WAY harder to implement, slow as fuck, and require an assembler per-target-system, either external or internal... but it'd be transparent, editable, and hella extendable.

This would all happen after I'm both over my burnout AND done chewing through my current stack of projects and such, of course, but still... which sounds better to you, dear reader?

so am switching jobs as an Android dev from a company which made android libs (using almost 0 external dependencies and mostly java) to a company which makes android apps( and is probably using either rx/guava/ribs/hilt etc or the more fancy hilt/compose/coroutines/clean-arc etc. its either one of them depending upon the maturity of product)

B2C folks use tons of libraries in favor of delivering fast but learning about those libraries while taking new tasks and fixing bugs CAUSED by those libraries ( or their inappropriate usage) is a big PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS.

I remember i had once became such a weird dev coz of my prev company ( before the current libraries one, which was also a B2C) .

on weekends i would come up with a nice app idea, start a new android studio project, and before writing a single line of useful code, i would add a bunch of libraries, gradle scripts and extensions .

that ocd will only settle once all the steps are done and i can see a working app after which i would write the code for actual code for feature implementation.

granted that these libs are good for creating robust scalable code, but most of the times those infinite kayers of seperation, inheritance and abstraction are not really needed for a simple , working product.

:/

i have also started reading about rxjava , and although i am repulsive to this library due to its complicated black box like structure, i find its vast number of operators nd built in solutions very cool.

at the end of the day, all i want is to write code that is good enough for monkeys, get it shipped without any objections and go back home.

and when you work on a codebase that has these complicated libs, you bet your ass that there will be thos leetcode bros and library lover senëõr devs waiting to delay the "go back home" part 😪

Would it be possible to use (S)FTP protocol in conjunction with push technology rather than pull? Perhaps websockets since both use TCP?

Say, something like an external server periodically sending my server files and when a new file arrives, I will get a notification. This instead of constantly polling my directory to check if there are files in it.

I think I can see this done with an Angular page that gives me a notification when a new file arrives on my FTP.

I think it might turn into an interesting little hobby project..

So I know that I'll inevitably need to use macOS for some project or another in college but don't want to pay for a Mac (I already have a Windows machine and will be installing some currently undecided upon Linux distro onto an external hard drive). Would it be worth it to try to make a macOS Hackintosh external hard drive just for the couple projects I'll need it for?

!rant
Stupid licensing issue.
I have a licensing question/problem.
I'm porting Lemonbar (the fancy GNU/Linux X11 statusbar) to D (which is awesome imo).
I'm adding Wayland functionality and since D is part of the C syntax family some code is just about exactly the same (the XCB libs are protocol-generated external imports).
Also, the X-specific parts are in a specific file.
What do I license the project against? My own license (I prefer Apache) or Lemonbar's? What about the X-specific file?
BTW, it's a full rewrite using the same concepts, object-orienting the whole thing.

So today I wanted to keep going in my project, did nothing in the morning had to do market and came back tired (didn't sleep enought last night) so tried to rest (couldn't because had to help in the kitchen with the lunch), had lunch then take a nap, nap evolved to a nice sleep, woke up @1600, got out to deliver a ddr3, came back @1700, wife asked to get burguers for dinner... went to buy dinner, watched a movie (gold) has sex... and now I'm writing this rant'... so coded nothing... now I'm playing bf4 just because fuck it I'm not sitting in my desktop now....

So have you ever wanted to do something in your project and couldn't because external reasons didn't allow you?

It was the minor in our college... i and my partner had not complete it till 1 day before the day of submission... Infact the minor file we submitted ... was the copy of somone others...it was due to lack of time we were not able to finish with it .... It was just our good luck that the external didn't open the file and checked it ... or it would have impacted our score for the project