#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

!rant I finished crocheting the capelet I was working on. Not too bad for a first attempt, I think!

A memorial for my favorite rant of all time "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Assembler Chicken: First, it builds the road ......

C Chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways.

C++ Chicken: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you' d simply refer to him on the other side.

COBOL Chicken: 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING.
IF NO-MORE-VEHICLES
THEN PERFORM 0010-CROSS-THE-ROAD
VARYING STEPS FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL
ON-THE-OTHER-SIDE
ELSE
GO TO 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING

Cray Chicken: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side frazzled.

Delphi Chicken: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped on the other side.

Gopher Chicken: Tried to run but got beaten by the Web chicken.

Intel Pentium Chicken: The chicken crossed 4.9999978 times.

Iomega Chicken: The chicken should have ' backed up' before crossing.

Java Chicken: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, then the server will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets.) See also WMI Monitor.

Linux Chicken: Don't you *dare* try to cross the road the same way we do!

Mac Chicken: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there's no way to tell it how to cross the road.

Newton Chicken: Can't cluck, can't fly, and can't lay eggs, but you can carry it across the road in your pocket.

OOP Chicken: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message.

OS/2 Chicken: It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so quiet that nobody noticed.

Microsoft's Chicken: It's already on both sides of the road. What's more its just bought the road.

Windows 95 Chicken: You see different coloured feathers while it crosses, but when you cook it still tastes like........ chicken.

Quantum Logic Chicken: The chicken is distributed probabilistically on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your choice.

VB Chicken: USHighways! <TheRoad.cross> (aChicken)

XP Chicken Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on running.

The Longhorn Chicken had an identity crisis and is now calling itself Vista.

The Vista Chicken dazzled itself with its own graphics.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

!rant

Yesterday I got my first promotion that was based on merit and not because I graduated or moved company 🍻

#feelsgoodman

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

!rant Went shooting for the first time over the weekend. Was so proud of my grouping that I hung my target on the door to the garage on the side that faces the garage so if anyone breaks into my garage they have to see it before getting into the house. 😂

!rant

This might be the most ambitious project I've ever started up till now, teaching my girlfriend everything college isn't.

As some of you may know my uni isn't the greatest and lacks in professor quality, my girlfriend (who's taking the same bachelor) knows this and when she knew I was starting a new little side project she wanted in.

At first I was skeptical, this could be just an excuse to spend more time with me, so I told her:

"if you really want to then I'm all for it, it'll be done my way and the first few weeks will be tough, however I promise by the end of it you will know 10x what you do now"

She agreed and so our journey began 3 weeks ago, my goal: make a kick ass project, do it in record time and teach her enough to cope with a IRL job.

I've setup the project so by the end of it she is well versed in the following: scrum, Django, MVC, python, HTML + CSS3, git, GitHub, PostgreSQL and Docker. In about 4 to 6 months.

We are into our third sprint this week, she had two small breakdowns because she couldn't believe how much she was missing out and felt she lacked talent, this is our third week and I'm glad to see that she's actually enjoying herself.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Someone here on devrant that used to go under the name LetMeCode ranted about php and said how much they'd rather work with the Phoenixframework.

Love on first sight. Studied Elixir to get a job as an elixir dev and got my first and current job right after graduating high school.

So yeah, that rant might have changed my life. Saved me from becoming a java or php dev for sure!

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.

Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.

I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.

She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.

Anyhow, that's my rant.

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

!rant, TL;DR at the bottom

Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]

And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]

and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]

His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]

Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"

Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.

TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

I covered it in a recent rant but it was for a marketing lead job (career switch for me) and they were very disorganized.

The HR guy just couldn’t shut up about completely irrelevant and personal topics. The CEO made fun of my cognitive disability, calling it “an excuse” (illegal in the U.S. under anti-discrimination laws). Then he walked out of the room to “go to the bathroom” and never returned. The HR guy grabbed the CEO’s notes and just read them to himself out loud like I wasn’t even in the room. He also asked me what my religion was (also illegal to ask in the U.S.) A third guy came in, asked me a bunch of questions, and then abruptly ended the interview. They only gave me a vague idea of the salary and benefits in all of that.

Two days later the HR guy asked me to come in immediately because I was needed to begin work right then. I said I hadn’t planned to start just that quickly (I already had plans that day that I couldn’t cancel) and especially not knowing how much I’d be paid. I asked for the customary time to talk it over with my family first. He asked me to get back to him before an hour was up. When I called back, he switched the story to say that their marketing lead just wanted to ask me questions before they made a final decision. But the fact that they had been interviewing me for that very marketing lead position was really confusing.

I said I was no longer interested and hung up the phone.

!rant Taking the kittens (they’re like 5-6 years old at this point but they’re always going to be kittens to me) to our old vet (45 minute drive from where we currently live) in a couple hours when they don’t like car rides or the vet and when we know they need to get vaccine shots and we’re not allowed to go inside with them. It’s the first time we’ve ever taken them to the vet and not been able to be there with them. 😭 I’m so nervous/anxious/scared for the little guys.

Wish me luck, friends.

I am a weird dev. No urge to rant really, mostly internal frustrations if any.

Today I had my first meeting with the client and it went smoothly - I showcased demo in the current state, they approved, asked a bit more about the technology and that's pretty much it...

I know, I know... I'm just starting and it's gonna change but, idk why, I think I'm in a good work environment.

"I have been pressing this button for FOUR HOURS now, and STILL it does not work!!"

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

yet another Microsoft bashing rant...

I'm trying to get `Visual Studio`
You use your Windows 10 VM, use Edge, use Bing and search for `Visual Studio`.
First fucking result:
A Visual Studio alternative - A powerful C & C++ IDE - CLion
-- from jetbrains.com

Like... WTF, you not even promoting your' own stuff ?

But then for when you search 'firefox' w/ bing+edge a thick fat banner: 'Promoted by Microsoft': There's no need to download a new web browser.\n MS recommends Edge for fast ...

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

Not necessarily a DEV rant, but a rant nonetheless.

This day sucks.
So first, my bus got late 25 minutes, because entire city decided that it will take a car - because it was raining horizontally. At some point I was doing 1 km in 10 minutes. Then my train got delayed by 5 minutes. So l had to do a little bit of cardio and ran to the next bus from station to school.

When I finally made it - surprisingly 5 minutes before the start of the exam, it turned out that I wasn't even on the list of participants. Which was surprising to both me and teachers, because I was clearly registered on the portal. Well, they hand added me in and let me in.

Then I open my laptop, I start it up
I try to start the exam. But it said that I don't even have the examination program - even tho I did install it yesterday.
So I had to quickly download it and reinstall it. Then I could finally write the Project Management exam.

Thankfully the exam went fine, I feel confident about the results, but it’s like everything tried to make sure I am not gonna make it.

A petty rant but I'm going for it anyway.

I don't like how Trongate is bashing Laravel, claiming that it is a "better" framework and "Pure PHP is back".

It's fine if you built a framework that is better than Laravel, good for you. But don't go around bashing Taylor Otwell's work. As someone, who has spent a major portion of my career in IT as a Laravel dev, that hurts to see.

IMO I think they never understood why Laravel became popular in the first place. It wasn't because it's the fastest, but because how beginner-friendly it is and how easy it is to maintain and many other perks it has.

Hello there. I'm a junior frontend developer, and I'm starting to think that IT is not for me.

Okay, first things first. This story/rant might be a bit longer than I previously thought, but whatever... :p

I started working in frontend about a year ago.

Now the problem is, that I'm absolutely rubbish with coding, and I'm starting to think that it might have something to do with my personality. While I loved (and still do) doing HTML and CSS, and maybe some JS as well, when it comes to working with frameworks, build tools, TypeScript, and all this *****, I just want to stand up and carefully smash the keyboard through the display. I can't stand the constant cryptic error messages and gazillions of config files, and don't even get me started with TypeScript. This is not how I imagined what programming is like - I know it's my fault, I was a bit naive. I still love making simpler things in HTML/CSS/JS and playing around with Linux, but I lost my will to do any of these even in my spare time. I don't have the patience to feel incompetent all the time with the promise that in a few years, doing this rubbish 8 hours a day, I will get better at it. Some colleagues even talked about it being like Lego and getting into the "flow": yeah... not in my case. There's nothing creative in this, it all feels like a factory line where I have to do the line work but also configure the machines as well...

The funny thing is, I made about the same amount of money working in less prestigious jobs. Sure I didn't like any of them, they were tiring and boring as hell, but at least they were not stressful and frustrating. I'm seriously considering moving to Western Europe and working as a bicycle delivery guy in the Alps, a postman, a waiter, or literally anything else that has something to do with the real world, and leave programming to the actual software engineers (who I deeply respect by the way).

I'll probably add more to this, but I need to go now and meditate a bit. :D

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

!RANT
Web Devs - I need your opinions.

To make a long story short, when my fiancé and I first moved in together I changed cities. One day at the grocery store we ran in to one of his old buddies, whom I had never met. His buddy works as a counselor at a non profit organization for mental illness. His friend asked me some questions to get to know me and found out I was a web developer. He instantly got exited and told us they needed a new website for their non profit, and asked me what I charged. Being shy, put on the spot, newer to the industry (uncomfortable talking $ due to inexperience) and seeing the guy was paralyzed I felt I HAD to say yes. I also said I would consider donating the site to them, as I knew my other web dev friends had done that for other non profits.

They were easy to work with and the build went smooth. We chose Wordpress so that they could go in and update the site on their own. I was under the assumption that I would create the site for them, but that they would take care of changes on their own, that I wouldn't be "supporting it". I even trained the friend 2-3xs on how to use Wordpress and make changes, but they ALWAYS have changes every month, including slides and content creation. Being a noob at the time, I KNOW it's my fault for not being more clear on the I'll build it but not make changes thing, and I've tried to kind of get them to see that I'm too busy, politely.

We'll, 3+ years later I've now found success in a different career path that takes up ALL of my free time after my 9-5 corporate web dev position, and am no longer interested nor able to do freelance work, including supporting existing sites. Since we don't have a contract in place, and they've never given me a cent, i was thinking of giving them a notice at the end of this month saying as of 2018 I will no longer be able to take care of their website, and that they'll have to find someone else by that time? I feel bad because it's a non profit and they don't have a lot of money. I'm afraid they won't find someone else nor be able to afford it. The situation is a little more sticky since this is my fiancés friend and I don't want them to feel like I'm leaving them high and dry, cuz I know they're very thankful for the site. I just wish they understood that I never promised to do changes for them every month. Even if they offered me money, I just don't have the time. I'm 100% fine if they want to keep the site and my code, although they really could use a redesign anyways cuz my code back then was terrible. What are your thoughts on this? Is 5 months fair? Am I doing the right thing?

!rant

Sooo not so long ago, i was saying something about my recent first interview. I passed it and it felt so good and that kind of made me proud. But now it is even better! I just got my first peanuts as a developer and i must say "boy, it felt good" !

Thank you all, members of the devRant community for always giving me not only courage to try, ideas to research and reasons to laugh, but the most importantly: some insights of how things are out there. For a introvert like me it is really great to not simply step into the darkness, blindfolded 😁

Cheers to you all! 😘

Literally had to quit the app to get rid of the pop up. My first rant is about this app…

!dev && !rant
so in my native language (slovak), basically any noun has a neutral (default), diminutive, and augmentative form.

including (first) names.
for literally decade and a half, SOME names sounded weird to me, as if there was something... unnatural about them, but I had no idea what, or why.

and then one day i finally gave it a proper thought, and realized:
those names don't have all three forms, only two.
because they basically lack the neutral form, and their default form is simultaneously their diminutive.

so i was happy to have figured it out, finally. but then i noticed that some names still sound weird, unnatural.

and then i realized, there's another cathegory - those which only have two forms, because their default is simultaneously their augmentative.

and so I finally had all the name cathegories figured out.

funny thing though, even though i now know this, and even though i've reminded myself of this many times...
...every time i think about it, I have huge trouble remembering even a single name for either of the two special cathegories, precisely as I have this time.

except right now i can't be bothered.
if anyone is curious, poke me in the comments and i'll come up with examples later.

Part rant, part a question. Im working with a colleague on an android app. The guy uses a library for everything that he cant solve on the first try. Need rounded corners? Get a random library from github. Settle a dispute. Am i wrong for trying to avoid using libraries unless i have to or is he?

I opened devrant with this rant in mind and the first thing i saw is a post about someones boss getting killed...

Fucking hell does someone have good news?
Everywhere i look is pain. Why is this world so cruel!?!?!
Why is there war Why did so many people get killed Why Why Why

My only safe place is while coding, this distracts me from this whole world. I create my own world while coding and dive deep into it. Its one of those things keeping me alive.

Why the fuck is gradle so horrible.

I literally have no idea why anyone would ever use this thing (other than being forced too because somehow the rest of the world is using it).

Every plugin has an arbitrary DSL that you have to magically know by piecing together enough snippets. At that point, no one is actually intuiting anything based on the beauty of the DSL, every build is a frankenstein of different snippets that were pasted from different versions of gradle blog posts or SO posts.

And if you do get it o work then the DSL changes, or it isn't compatible with another plugin.

I just want to write a fucking integration test in Kotlin. Can I just add an `integrationTest` task in `tasks` right next to `tasks.test`? No, obviously it goes in the `kotlin jvm() compilations` section, DUH.

The first thing anyone in the universe should have asked is "how is this better than literally hand writing a makefile"? At least then I would be able to see the commands that it ran.

Now I'm googling how to make the new jvm-test-suite plugin work when you're using the Kotlin plugin but every single result on Google for `jvm-test-suite kotlin` just returns the docs for jvm-test-suite (whose snippets obviously didn't work in my project) because those doc pages have "Kotlin" written above each of the gradle snippets.

Please just end this.

Oh and dev rant sucks too. It thinks anything separated by dots in a url.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

So I work at a big IT company. Keep in mind you could say I'm lucky to be here my last job was as a mechanic. So they put me on this team filled with the most draining kunts I've ever seen.

I have been here for about a year and I am yet to be put on a project, so im just training. They asked me to get certified to be on a project which is complete bullshit because every other fuckwit is on a project and noone is certified.

ONTOP of this, there's no work to be done anyway, yet they keep hiring fucking Grads. LIKE FUCK OFF, get work for the rest of us first you fucking IDIOTS.

Anyway, the cert is the driest fucking content, like kill me now, I try to read about it and I just want to blow my fucking brains out.

Like is IT all like this? I used to work at a web design company and that shit was fucking fun, but paid like $2 an hour the cheap fucks.

Anyway that's my rant, I'm sitting my exam tomorrow for this cert and honestly, I don't even know why. I literally know ZERO. fucking going in to guess this shit. would rather go down to bunnings buy the coarsest piece of rope and just dangle like a fat dick.

Anyway cheers lads. have a great day

This is a continuation of my previous rant...
I did it! I overcame my anxiety to work on the dev database (don't worry, I made backups). At first I got really anxious and almost panicked at the thought of possibly messing up and procrastinated a few minutes. After the intial anxiety has passed I just did it and it worked. I didn't destroy anything nor did I made any mistakes. One step closer to becoming more confident when working with company assets

First post yay!
I'm a "tech" lead for my team. The "tech" stands for technically, I can go on a whole different rant there but that's not why we're here today.
So we have a new PM on our side and a new PM on the client side. I've been working on this project longer than any of the devs and PMs have.
One of the tasks that my team does is validate and ingest data. It's pretty straightforward and it's fully automated. It takes minutes, and at most an hour, to complete this task. We get these tasks from users randomly and they don't have any schedule to it. It's FIFO basis and we just add it to our current sprint if we have bandwidth or add it to the next one if we don't. Not a big deal, no users have complained about it before, it's just business as usual. And we have a tracker of when we received it, how big it was and when it's been ingested. Super simple.
So now comes in the new client PM. He's been asking us to come up with timelines for these ingestions. My project's new PM is bending over to him and saying okay we'll come up with it, no problem. Well, there is a problem. We don't know that far in advance for when these tasks are coming in. Even if we did, now we're supposed to create timelines for a 10 min task? It literally is uploading a file and our system handles everything and I've explained that to my pm but he still is like well that's what they want. It takes less effort to do the ingestion than to make these timelines. It just means project managers bothering devs about timelines.
Idk how to deal with this. Thoughts? Any similar experiences?

In a continuation of my previous rant:
Alright KVM is running.

First devrant post from my Windows inside my Linux with dedicated pass-through graphics card. So far, looks like it's working.

Installing Horizon Zero Dawn to gage gaming performance. But it looks promising. With a stylish button on desk that switches between Windows and Linux.

man i see another group i'm a part of talking about "is it worth it to get degrees" and just, ugh. since this is a place to rant. here is why degrees are fuking useless.

first off, simple, like my friend said before, "if we all have degrees, none of us have degrees"

and let me tell you about some of the people i've had to work with who have degrees...

many dont know what "cd ; ls" is, okay. 4 fukin years, what did these people do?

some people have masters, multiple even, and can't read a for loop that jumps/skips(continue) around certain conditions in their 'favorite' language

looked through my favorite rants on here and there was someone who had a college hire who wrote a "for loop in HTML" L_O_L

degree != skill, ever, period, nada

the best people i have worked with? all degree-less

how is that? why would that have a correlation? degree!=skill but !degree==skill ? initiative? passion? giving a fuk? not droning on in classes that have piss all to do with your desired trade.

sure recruiters and companies will supposedly look at the degree like some special badge or say it's important. but if they've been around, they're savvy that a degree only means you're willing to go in debt and be obedient

i know there are those who don't learn well on their own, or prefer face time or structure, that's fine. but the lie that degrees are required and mean more than they do has only put half of my friends in debt. there's no magical "this person now gives a shit" or knowledge transfer that happens. you have to do that on your own.

I got a long weekend. I decided to see what React has been up to these days.

I happen to learn more about Suspense that now it allows f**king data fetching with relay.

I decided to give it a try . First time I am actually inclined towards trying out relay just so I can see what the f**king fuss about `Suspense` is all about.

Honestly the API is much better than what it looks like .

However what the fuck is this fucking relay. They have a page in their doc called glossary and most of the sections says TODO .

I wanted to see how the fuck data driven code splitting works . Due to the lack of proper documentation about it I could not get it right for two days . I stumbled upon couple of docs / blogs / github issues about it and then finally managed to get it working .

Well the end result wasn't as cool as I thought it would. The fucking API's to achieve this needless method of code splitting is insane
There are lot of better ways to achieve this with Suspense and the API relay offers is so shitty and not fucking type safe.

Now today I wanna learn more about the directives relay offers and there is no fucking documentation about them except for a fucking bold `TODO` explanation under the sections.

If relay developers thinks that they are fucking wizards and talk all about improving fucking performance . Please don't fucking over engineer API's and make it un un maintainable for the consumers of the library

Wow this feels good . first Day in rant and I m feeling great

This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)

I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.

And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.

One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.

What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".

I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!

! rant, but should I be concerned?

I'm writing an election results API and I imported the bottlepy+pandas and prepped the CSV that contains the data. The first row contains the column names, followed by the actual data.

As I typed my routes, VSCode kept suggesting route names, parameters, and return values. At first I was "nice!" but then it kept suggesting my intent, as if someone was reading my brain. I do have GitHub Co-pilot installed, but I didn't realize my access had been approved.

How many layers of tin foil do I need?

First rant here, in search of engineer memes… 🤔

Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?

- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?

Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.

I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.

This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.

I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?

My first rant but wanted to get it out!

New job - simple enough I think - it's a website with a login and profile that serves videos and shows your progression and asks you questions when you finish one.

Wrong - Kubernates microservice madness - functions and cosmos instances galore!

There is a full aspnetcore stack microservice with a restful API that stores..... drum roll please - a person's gender against a profile id....

Todays Architects are stupid fools.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

The work of a freelancer is never done 😑

>= rant
While its really hard to get code wrong in Rust, it is also really hard to get code right in Rust. It took me a considerably long time to write a code which returns the first word in the sentence

I felt the borrow checker introduces a steep learning curve into Rust which is otherwise a beautiful language according to me. C++, my current favorite language, also suffers the same problem with respect to certain language features.

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

!rant

Well, got my first codility challenge request. What do I do to prepare? Terrified tbh 😰

!rant
I'll be the first to admit that my web dev skills are average. Where I work we don't get pushed much since we work off of a very limited (custom to us) platform, which doesn't leave one very well rounded. I am very good with CSS/HTML/FLEXBOX/RESPONSIVE DESIGN and have minimal skills in PHP and JAVASCRIPT. In school I've dabbled with SQL, but hell if I remember much (beside key, the whole key and nothing but the key). What other languages or codes do you recommend learning; what's hot right now? Or should I focus on putting higher emphasis on the ones mentioned above first? I am a front end developer and don't plan on ever doing back end so not looking for the toughest of the tough - just something that will help me grow and land a better job. If there's any cool learning sites you know of too, or other tools, please let me know.

So I've been custom drawing custom controls for years now, and thought that by now I would know what the fuck I am doing.

For a while I have had plans to write a Vector-Bitmap based drawing application supporting layers to compete against RealDraw Pro (it's my favorite drawing app and highly recommend it) because it's not free and I can't afford it.

But now I'm running into an issue that is preventing me from doing practically anything.

I don't want to go back to StackOverflow. I don't believe in it and I hate the people there. I have a 10k+ account there, and know the rules but nothing is ever good enough for these retards.

I'll have to figure this out on my own, and without a video it's a bit hard to explain what's going on during runtime.

For the first time had a frustrating day at my new job yesterday.

Been solving relatively complex issues with ease past week but spent half day on fixing glorified true/false problem that I think should be simple, still not solved.

How come complex is simple and simple is difficult?

Rant over.

!rant
Finally set my first big ticket to "QA" and I hope it get's through. I put in a lot of work and it feels nice to have accomplished something.
But now I'm sitting here, waiting for another ticket to float in so I can do something. I've been sitting here all day and I'm writing reusable code snippets for VS Code so I can use them in the future.
Does this happen often in the life of a developer that you have to wait a few days until you get to do something meaningful again?

The problem as i see it is summed up in the following: everyone is fucking crazy

asked this guy i see here alot working, 'ever feel left behind in hell' he says 'oh this isn't hell it's (redacted) and we're on (redacted)'s mountain so we're closer to heaven'

so i make a not very novel joke anymore and I say "maybe there's a hellmouth over there, and we'd just have a farther fall" he smiled. it was a funny joke. whenever it was first made.

it was cynical humore expressing my present level of personal misery as I rot with everyone else.

also. remembered being able to convince someone to work for 50/hr doled out each hour as was satisfactory.

wonder if its possible again, person in question doesn't appear to be here today. oh well.

far far more honest than the other fucked up shit they do here and yes this whole rant was made before.

so. not a bot :P

and not making the comment about ownership let someone take this piece of life and let me get booted forward 15 years. fuckers.

Yukki Music Bot
okay so, I'm bout to post my first rant and its basically about this telegram bot whose dev team I'm a part of, Yukki Music Bot.
It all started around April 2021 when most of us were busy streaming Netflix, chilling and locked up due to Covid that some people decided to make something interesting and for the community.
It was at first just a simple bot which just played music on call but now, due to the countless efforts and time by the Team Yukki, now you can even stream Ipl in telegram voice chat! and almost all of the music platforms are supported by Yukki >~<.
Check it out at @TeamYukki in GitHub!

as my first rant here I thought i'd start with one of my favorite relevant quotes:
"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people, always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise."
-Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano"

#Suphle Rant 5: Xavi

When I first detailed what it was I was working on to my brother and its expected impact on the industry, I must have done so with an enormous amount of enthusiasm that he impatiently began to request when the dream will be realised. He didn't give a shit about specifics of where I was on the timeline. He kept repeating the same question. Exasperated with the futility of my explanations, I replied that I'd be done by November as this was far beyond my estimated completion date

Every milestone (e.g. my birthday) I've expected it to be ready at has come and gone, including the unrealistic November. My present state of mind is far from the optimistic pioneer I was then. I'm just going with the flow and won't be surprised if it's not officially released by the end of the year

This gonna be me in 2072, convincing anyone who cares to listen that I'm fleshing out the docs and that the reason the release date keeps getting pushed back is because nobody has shown interest in either using or contributing to it

On Friday, 2 of my coworkers asked for help on a concourse issue, it wasn't building correctly, and they had been trying to figure it out all day. It was an old VB project, which was built very weirdly. We made some progress, but didn't get passed the error. I recommend asking in slack if anyone had gotten the error before, but the refused, saying that they could fix it.

Monday morning, and at standup they mentioned that they still haven't solved the issue and were going to work on it today. I once again mentioned that (blank) could help them.

Monday afternoon, and they are still stuck the same issue they had friday morning. I give up and contact (blank) myself, who mentioned they have seen this error before and shows them how to fix it. Five minutes later and they are back on track, past the issue.

Why are people so adverse to help, it should not have taken 2 days and me introducing them to accept help... 🙃

#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