Up for a rollercoaster?

I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.

Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)

Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.

Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.

Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.

I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!

🥶👰‍♀️💍👰🏻‍♀️

I was laid off right before Christmas because my manager would not give me any work (bully.. possibly discrimination). I asked for work to do for 2 weeks, even coming up with things to contribute on my own. My contributions were rejected and the lead developer agreed with me that it was fucked up but did nothing. The little work that I was given was always completed above standard and the lead dev had made comments praising my self tasked contributions but each rejection I was told it would be shelved for version 1.2.

Finally fed up, feeling as though I was being completely ignored, I told the lead dev I was going home half day early if there was nothing for me to do. The next day the CTO fired me and even lied to my recruiter telling him that I had not shown up for work for 3 days (easily disproven).

It's now the first of the year, probably not the best time to be looking for a new job, and my current outlook is that I am not going to be able to pay my rent at the end of the month.

My motivation has diminished, my confidence is gone. Job prospects are few. I don't know how to proceed.

A couple weeks ago, my coworkers built a site where 90% of pages consisted of all images and uncompressed images at that. I'm talking even the text was images. At the time I told my boss that it should be done with css and this would later come to bite them in the ass with page load speed and seo. He ignored me and said it was fine. Well today my boss assigned me with going back and basically removing images with things that can be done with css because load speed was terrible and seo wasnt too hot. Maybe if he listened to me from the get go, he wouldn't have to assign me this unnecessary work and I can focus on cleaning up all the other piss poor excuse of websites they have. Seriously tired of feeling like I, the junior dev is doing the teaching to these "senior developers" who get paid like twice as much as I do when I'm the one who is always doing the cleanups /optimization and guiding them on all their problems. Is it Friday yet?-_-

I'm doing a CISCO network certification in school and I get the feeling, that CISCO straight up ignored the last 30 years of OS development.

Third call of the morning. No one I need is answering. Boss fell asleep (but went on mute, thankfully) and deputy director is on the line listening in.

I'm hungry. Cranky. And feeling ignored.

To all my dev friends here: please answer your phones of you're needed to give information about your code. These are code specific issues (ie- application/program specific) that require knowing the code to know what broke so we know how to fix it.

The moment when you find exactly your problem on Stackoverflow...

...just to realize its the same question you read about a year ago when you already had the problem but since it was minor and there was no solution so you ignored it up until now.

Followed by the feeling when you see that there was not even a comment added the whole year besides it was viewed 150 times.

Followed by the feeling when you find the solution all by yourself and finally write an answer to the question.

Just to realize that this was the only question from this guy on SO and his last login was two years ago. :-~

Well at least the annoying log message is gone and I learned something new.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

When you have high pattern recognition but get rudely ignored until the problem you warned about becomes a very serious issue days later 😪🙄

Fuck I'm so tired of feeling like the only one trying to stave off bad practice sometimes 🫠

🙃

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

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

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

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

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

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

I barely sleep.

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

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

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

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

I don't fucking know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if the universe were bored.

a bet:
this birthday, i will get:
lemon glutenfree cake (if any) because mom can't have gluten and sister likes lemon cake. i hate both of those. but that's irrelevant as it always was.

if any, then gifts will be anything except cigarettes which is basically the only thing within price range they're willing to spend, that i would actually be happy about.

birthday is just an artificially glorified ordinary day. and i'm not the type to do hysterics to artificially glorify it. and it's fine. but then, why are they artificially glorifying it while unwilling to actually glorify it properly, as in, glorify it for me?

pick fucking one. artificially glorify it, in which case, FOR ME, or just don't give a fucking shit same as i don't.

but why are you artificially glorifying it for the purpose of ignoring me and glorifying everything exactly in spite of me, without even being aware that you're doing that?

like seriously, what? make your "i love not you, but my daughter" day, as an extra to her birthday. i don't give a shit, i'm happy you have a nice relationship. but doing all of the "i love my daugther day" shit on my birthday, AND PRETENDING IT WAS DONE FOR MY BIRTHDAY, FOR ME, and being sad about me being sad that all you did "for me" was in fact for yourself and for everyone else, that's the combo that gets me.

"oh why u making me so sad by being so sad that i ignored everything you like and kept telling me you like for the past X years and i just ignored it because it's not my nor your sister's preference?"

guess why, you fucktard. how about you ignore the day next time instead of making it an unconscious (that's the worst, that they don't even realize it) mockery of the day.

"oh why are you sadand shitty feeling that we made this bullshit ignorable "celebrate you" day about ignoring everything that celebrates you, and made it into the opposite instead? why are you so demanding and cruel?"

SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.
go have a walk with your beloved daughter and please ignore me as you always do.
just leave me the fuck alone.

That moment when you found out, the "digital PMs" and "digital art directors" who have NO FREAKING CLUE about the limitation of the web... promised the clients fantastical things... at ridiculous timelines... WITHOUT CONSULTING any of the devs... GARGHHHH

That feeling when you type out a hilarious response to someone's rant on DevRant, written with meticulous code styling, and then you realise formatting is ignored!

That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.

And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?

"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.

"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.

"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.

What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?

What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?

What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?

What if you've used more languages than you can remember?

What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?

What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.

What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?

Stuck in debugging a python script (using 'requests' library to achieve 'curl' type function) for the last 2 hours

Worked fine yesterday in Python REPL.. Throws exception when put in a long exisitng .py script.. Works fine again when put in Python REPL

Found out that when in REPL, I am careful to import 'requests' library every time but ignored when typing in .py script
(Feeling stupid)

Lesson learned: Don't use "generic exceptions"!! They never let you know what the real problem is.

#Suphle Rant 1: Laravel closing the gap

This is the first of a series of long overdue rants regarding Suphle, because I have had so so much to grumble about over the last ~2 years building it. A bit of introduction: I compiled a list of all the challenges I faced in my time as a salaried PHP developer. I also gathered issues complained about by other developers in a laravel group I'm part of, and decided to solve them at the framework level since they're avoidable. I also borrowed impressive features encountered in my time working with other languages and invented a new one, as well. I quit my job last July, still haven't get a new one yet cuz office workload kept conflicting with Suphle development. I concluded all work and testing on it back in August/September but it's yet to be officially released since the docs is still in progress.

Anyway, yesterday, I stumbled upon what is IMO the most progressive /tangible update I've seen in all my time following Laravel updates. It's called [precognition](don't have enough rep to post the PR link but you can search on their repo), and contains features that are actually beneficial to both developer and end user. It also turns out to be functionality that was part of Suphle's bragging rights. Their DX is still tacky but I'm devastated cuz it's a matter of time before they work it out. Makes me wonder what the quality of all I've built would be in a year if it doesn't become big enough to attract frequent contribution. I guess there's only so much one can do against a community.

Later that evening, I found a developer from my country on twitter who claims to be making a decent living. A little snooping around his profile informed me he's building his own back end framework but in NodeJS. I know with every degree of certainty that what he'll eventually do can't hold a candle against Suphle in overall functionality or thoroughness. Not a dick measuring contest but when your motive isn't significant innovation, you'll neither plan properly nor even know what exactly to build. You'll just reinvent the wheel as an academic exercise

Yet, I can't help but have that sinking feeling he's winging it, while making a windfall with his dozens of freelance projects. It kind of feels like I shortchanged myself, and Suphle's shelf life will suffer the same fate as a hobby project for 10 stars (which I don't even have yet!!). I reached out to him to rub minds together but he ignored. More pain.

I'll get over this and return to work on the docs, but from the look of things, the end isn't an appealing or expected /deserved one