Meeting with asshole partner company CEO at restaurant.

Me: "I'm a bit worried about the bugs in your API. There are some ways to retrieve privacy sensitive info from public endpoints"

CEO: "Well, we're a rapidly growing startup!"

Me: "Uh... so?"

CEO: "So... Move Fast and Break Things! Priority is to improve our API further, and we'll fix bugs as they show up"

Me: "Maybe you should stop trying to emulate Zuckerberg in your management style. You know that even Facebook themselves admitted that their slogan was a retarded mistake"

Waiter shows up at table. CEO orders some overly expensive fish salad.

CEO: "Well, they have done something right... they're worth billions"

Waiter asks me: "And you sir, have you made your choice?"

Me: "Do you serve popcorn?"

CEO: "Popcorn for lunch?"

Me: "No, for your congressional hearing"

Client: I want all cookies blocked on my computer.

Me: Are you sure? Some things won't work if i do that. Like using online banking.

Client: I don't use it, so it's fine.

*Two weeks pass. I have to come back and see three bankcards laying on the table*

Client: I'm not able to use online banking anymore. Can you fix it?

Come on! You pay me to give advice and help out with problems. The least you could do is listen.

C: application not working
Me: k. What changed?
C: we didn't make changes
Me: k... *gets a tech team (W) on the phone*
W: Hey, what's broken?
Me: C's application. How do things look?
W: running healthy. I'll check logs.
Me: thanks. *gets tech team (S) on the line*
S: hey, everything clear on our end, will check logs.
Me: thanks *gets tech team (U)*
U: hey! They asked us to deploy their new version today during normal deployment time. Is it acting up?
Me: C, what did you change?
C: nothing major, just how we connect to W and S...
W&S: are you shitting me???
Me: U, will you please roll it back?
C: no! Must stay on this version, you need to fix your side!!
Me: nope. *calls U boss (UG)*
UG: U, you have my permission to roll back, they need to fix. C, if your boss doesn't like it, have them call me.
*rollback fixes problem*

IF I FUCKING ASK YOU WHAT THE FUCK YOU CHANGED, YOU BETTER TELL ME THE TRUTH, OR I WILL STRIP YOUR CODE OFF OUR FUCKING SYSTEMS AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. MY JOB IS TO HELP YOU AND YOU NEED TO BACK TO FUCK UP AND NOT GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOB OR YOU WON'T HAVE ONE ANYMORE.

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

If you think you know the most idiot person in the world, you haven't met my brother.

His brain absolutely can't comprehend anything!

He forgot his Roblox password and told me to do something. I said I can't do anything about it. Then he yelled at the top of his lungs saying, "you don't know technology! You're too stupid and selfish. Fix it!"

I said I can't do anything about it. He throws the mouse at me and says, "I never get to have fun. You ruin my life!"

He's not a little kid btw. He's fucking 14.

Today my mom forgot to pay the wifi password, and she thinks its better not to pay it today so it can stop my brother from playing games. (He plays it from morning to night. No homework, no cleaning, no nothing. Just games all day.)

So he told me to fix it. I said I cant. There's nothing I can do. Then he punches my arm really hard. (He's taller and stronger than me so it really hurt) then he threw a shoe and said, "you're useless and stupid! You have your laptop so you can have fun but I never get to have fun. You ruin my life, and I hate you. I hate my life."

Then he ran to mess up my room by tossing things from the self, removing clothes from my closet, and messed up my bed. He pushed my sister, pulled my hair, and ran to his room, slamming the door.

Please. Please someone give him a brain! He desperately needs one. I said I can't fix it, and that my mom has to pay the WiFi bill, but he thinks I'm being mean.

He has the mind of a 5 year old. Dropping to the ground crying.

A non reproducible bug is like an annoying ex boyfriend who lives across the street.

1. You know you can't fix things.

2.You're always scared you'd run into him again.

Me: Your computer has Operating System corruption.

Customer: What does that mean?

Me: *something, something potato chips* and the only fix is to reinstall Windows.

Customer: Well that's stupid! I need my computer! Darn Windows! Microsoft should pay for that reinstallation! What causes that corruption anyway?

Me: Well, any number of things, but it's mostly caused by a part of the update not downloading correctly, so when it gets installed it creates a hole.

Customer: So now hold on... could shutting the computer down during the updates cause this corruption.

Me: It could, yes. That's why they say to not unplug your computer or shut it down while running the updates.

Customer: I see. Cause yeah, I remember that I was angry when it said it had to do updates, so I shut it down.

Me: Yep, that would cause it.

Customer: Okay, reinstall Windows...

Client: Please fix the logo.
Me: Okay, what needs to be fixed exactly?
Client: Put this word next to that word(shows me an example).
Me: Okay, no problem.
*after 5 minutes*
Client: You did not do what I asked for. Please fix the logo. Make it look better. Make it bigger and more outstanding. Dont change my logo
Me: Okay, I will revert the changes.
*Reverts to the old logo, and only does that as I do not fucking know what to do with oudstanding for fucks sake*
Client: I will talk to your boss. No one cares. My web site is not even finished and no one cares.
*It is finished, now the client looks for small things to make a big issue of*
Me: Could you please tell me in detail, what do you need to be fixes?
Client: I want the wording better. Im going to talk to your boss...

well fuuuck fucking fuck Im pissing blood!!!!!!!!!

I actually had the strangest nightmare last night.

So I was working on a program for someone and lots of things went wrong. First of all, the semicolon button wasn't working, so I panicked and grabbed another keyboard but there was no semicolon button.

I had to copy and paste the semicolon instead. Next, there was a bug, and I couldn't figure out what caused it, so I went on stack overflow... Guess what? Stack overflow was shutdown. Unable to fix the error, I somehow caused more.

I decided to take a break and leave, but upon my return, I forgot what the program did. It was as if someone else had written it. I was simply ignorant enough to forget the comments.

After a hellish day of working on it, the person who wanted me to create the program decided to test it out. They tested it on an old version of IE.

Strangest nightmare I had this week.

So, here's how online payment works in my country:

1. The selling website creates a hidden <form> and populates it with product ID, price and etc.

2. Some Javascript posts the mentioned form to the bank from the browser.

3. User enters credit info, and submits. If all is right, the bank creates another hidden <form>, and populates is with status code and an invoice ID.

4. Said form is then posted back to the selling website.

I don't know how the programmers behind this scenario call themselves programmers if they don't know basic things about server-side only verifications, but thanks to them I've been buying a lot of products for free these past years. 😂😂

How? 1. Just install Requestly, Tampermonkey and enable Chrome's dev tools.
2. Change price to zero, and the bank's response code to success.
3. Profit!

P. S. I have notified the people behind this, but they don't listen and go fix their codes. Oh well, serves them right.

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

Just got this little stinker added to my board this morning….

Ticket Title: Weird shit going on in app

Ticket Description: (blank)

Attachment: <Screenshot of app logo>

Manager: Well what do you think is causing it?

Dev: Causing what?? This ticket doesn’t describe anything at all

Manager: Well it’s a bunch of different things! The ticket is just a high level summary. Now how long do you think it’ll take to fix?

Dev: …

So I found myself explaining to my rubber duck all the things I've done wrong in my past relationships...

What? It's a great guy, I shouldn't limit it just to code issues, I have a life it could fix too

Realised this today.

One of the things I love the most about my job is the requirement to be creative and hackish.

Sometimes you just have to debug/fix stuff in the weirdest ways and this requires for me to think out of the box.

Something that's very new for me on this level!

Manager: What’s taking so long on that PR?? It’s just some small styling adjustments

Dev: No it’s not you added an entire new calendar module that doesn’t work

Manager: Ok but besides that it’s just a small couple of css edits

Dev: You made styling changes in 50 files, half of which break our mobile responsiveness

Manager: Well then STOP talking to me and FIX IT if you’re so smart.

Dev: You also added a series of filters on a table in this same PR that cause th—

Manager: OK SO I GOT A BIT DISTRACTED THE FACT IS IT ALL NEEDS TO GET DONE SO IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S ALL ON ONE PR SPLITTING THINGS UP INTO SMALL UPDATES IS JUST UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY AND IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN GO. WORK. FOR. THE GOVERNMENT!!!

Dev: …

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

people: What do you do?
me: I'm computer engineer.
people: Ah! You fix things then. Can you fix my TV?
me:

Client gave another agency access to their site while in contract with us and lied about it. Now they want me to go in and fix the bugs they caused. I reinstall the backup from the last time I completed edits and things were approved and working. Client is mad that pages are missing and ads are going to 404 pages.

Me: "Didn't you say that there haven't been any changes in the two weeks since I completed your last edits?"

Client: "Well yeah."

Me: "Then there shouldn't be anything missing."

My mother used to code a good 30 years ago (embedded development for plane engines), but nowadays always fear doing something wrong on her computer/smartphone.

It's a bit depressing to see how someone who used to be a developer is now so fearful of computers.

On the plus side, she is very respective of my time, and will wait 2/3 weeks for me to come home to fix a simple thing, and generally don't bother me with things she can do herself, once I explain to her how to do it.

Last time was cleaning laptop fans. Seeing how you need to disassemble half of it to clean that, I can understand anyone not wanting to do it.

I have been 6 hours trying to fix a bug in more than 3000 lines of code.

Removed one line and bug fixed...

WHAT THE FUCK

I will pack my things and go home...

Dev manager: Can you fix this issue?

Me: Yeah, but i cant reproduce it using the explanation given in the ticket. Can i get a step by step guide and a confirmation that the issue is reproducible.

Dev manager: you're the lead dev, you figure it out.

askdjasfkjksadjkasd!!
Do you want me to spend an hour not developing things trying to guess? because that is how you make me spend an hour not developing things

DO NOT USE JAVASCRIPT FOR PUBLIC WEBSITES IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE IT!!!

Almost every fucking day, I click a fucking button and NOTHING HAPPENS. I open the console and find tens of JavaScript errors, that *I* have to debug and fix in order to proceed.

FUR FUCK SAKE, JavaScript is not strictly needed, those fucking React and Vue are also not needed. Just now I wanted to download a form: IT'S A FUCKING PDF FILE, why the fuck are you putting your broken JavaScript function to let me download it!? PUT A FUCKING DOWNLOAD LINK YOU FUCKING MORON!

Nobody is forcing anybody to use JavaScript or those fucking fancy frameworks, SO WHY THE FUCK PEOPLE OVERCOMPLICATE THINGS THAT USED TO WORK SO WELL!

Well, I made a choice in life.

I'm going to stay and work in America after I graduate. In spite of all the shit talking I've done about its work ethics, benefits, politics, and culture.

This place is still home.

After trying out a trip to Europe for a few weeks I can't handle the idea of being 4,500 miles away from family and what few friends I have. I figured out what was true the whole time: I wanted to run away from my past. Breakups, a failed marriage proposal, a dead end job that I put up with only because I need to graduate. I've been angry and depressed over these things, but running away won't fix it.

I need to face reality and own up to it. I'll get a job as a developer in the states through hell or high-water.

D: Hey, your stuff isn't working, fix your stuff or it will become a road blocker.
Me: Why it is not working?
D: Because I used the same table as you used, and I changed a few things. there are 22 reasons for it.
(polite conversation stopped and I redirected him to my manager)

WTF? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? YOU CHANGED MY STUFF WITHOUT TELLING ME AND YOU ARE NOT USING ANY SOURCE CONTROL? WTF? YOU CREATED THIS SHIT AND CALL MY STUFF NOT WORKING? ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?

CUT YOUR FINGERS AND POINT TO YOURSELF.

Fixed a project for a collegue.
Him: How did you fix things, what's the process?
Me: Click stuff and press Buttons randomly until it works.
Him: ... That's all you did?
Me: Yup, the rest is just experience.

I saw this as a ./ comment a while back on a discussion about dev tools (sorry... don't have a link to the actual post...) It was so good that I printed it off and pinned it to my cube. Thought I'd share it here--

"The pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's short lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do without glossing over any of the 'you know what I mean' steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming--the programming. No tool is going to fix that."

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

Them: "How is that low priority feature request coming along?"
Me: "It's almost done, a bunch of higher priority things delayed me. It should come live sometime tomorrow"
Them: "It better do"
Me: "Oh did I say tomorrow? I meant next week."

Fuck your attitude. You won't die not having your "saves 15" minutes a day feature for a few more days while some people can't work at all before I fix a major bug. You're not even my manager.

Bonus: overheard him talking shit about me working too slow later that day too.

A person just bought a 3000€ workstation and asked me to install cracked versions of Office, AutoCAD, full Adobe suite and Rhino with plugins. And he's going to use them at work to make money.

So, since I have to, I installed 2-3 years old versions of each, in English (he only knows Italian) and blocked all the connections so he can't receive any update/fix or use web related functionalities. I also disabled all autostarting components and contextual menu / OS integrations (although this can be seen as a plus).

When he's calling me asking to "fix" things, I will simply say "sorry, it's the only way for the crack to work, if you want everything you'd better pay for a license or else go open source".

Why can't people understand the value of the complex software they use? Just because it's not a material thing doesn't mean it's not a steal

Update messages done right 😂😂

Another fucking rant about my fucking goldfish brain.

At meetings, I usually note down things I need to fix, to do on the sticky note pad that comes with the OS, currently Mint.

I sat at my desk.
Looked at my notes.
Decided to properly put them as tasks on trello.
I copied all notes, planning to paste it on a trello card quickly.
Then I can just work on trello and separate into different tasks.
Connection issue.
Ethernet said connected but websites are not showing up.
Maybe restart will fix since I haven't opened any app and started working anyway.
Reboot.
Internet works.
Yayyy.
Trello showed up.
Yayyy.
oooh
f
u
c
k.

fuck.
fuck.

Admin comes to my desk and says:
"Hey the CEO wants to know why is the third party application having issues with our system? He wants you to keep me posted on the matter and let us know when will you fix it."
Me:
"Well I'm working on it, we're having a discussion on Slack about it and I'm quite busy right now"
Admin: "Yeah OK but when will you fix it? The CEO wants to know why didn't you reply yesterday"
Me: "Because I was on leave? You would have known if you saw my calendar"
Admin: "oh well, can you keep me updated with how things go?"
Me: "You can join the Slack channel if you want..."

What the f*CK is wrong with people? Do they even know what vacation time means? Why would the CEO ask the admin to talk to me when I'm sitting two rows from him?

My wife wouldn't stop asking me to help her with FB. As a joke I told her if she didn't quit, I'd delete it (Tech stuff goes over her head like a 747). Well, she kept on so I opened up the Dev tools. I started by adding just some non sense to one of the divs. She saw it pop up on screen and was like "Wait...you can really do that?" then I highlighted the body tag and hit backspace. The whole thing disappeared, it was great. She legit freaked out for a minute and begged me to fix it. I popped up the console and started typing random things. Created an array with some mumbo-jumbo, a couple of quick, meaningless functions and snuck hitting Ctrl+R in there, refreshing the page. She was so happy that Facebook worked again, that she stopped asking me how to do whatever it was

I used to do freelancing gigs as a kid, maybe 5/6 years ago, I'd remotely fix software issues on fiver for 5€ which would pay for a game every once in a while.

Now, it was pretty common to get customers from all around the world, and I never had any issues whatsoever until I got a message from a potential customer from south Korea...

She had purchased a karaoke machine, but the software wouldn't add anything to its library making the machine useless.

Well, apparently the software was in Korean...

After a LOT of fiddling around I got it to turn into French, and I was able to try a few things and after about 3 hours I managed to "fix" the thing.

3 hours of headaches in Korean for 5€... That's when I stopped doing that and took up an IT education and became a dev, so much better, although I miss the gratitude I used to get from my customers when I fixed their printer connectivity issues from a few thousand kilometers away

Funny how it's the conversation when I give my 2 weeks notice that all this comes up, like:

1) how they were "talking about giving me a raise"
2) how they were "hiring more people" so I could spend more time coding and less time doing bullshit
3) how they were going to fix all the other broken things in the company

How do you think it would fly if instead they fired me and I promised to fix everything that's wrong about my working there after the fact?

Anyway, I knew they would pull this bullshit so it was expected. Excited that I signed the new offer today. Finally getting market rate pay and expecting better work environment as well. 🐶

"LeT's uSe gRaPhQL!" They said.

"It EliMinAtEs cOmpLeX aNd vErBoSe REST coDe!" they said.

Me sitting here for hours waiting for the backend team to fix major regressions every time they push the smallest "updates" to staging... 🤡

Call me a boomer but I can't help but feeling graphQL makes things MORE complex than REST... either that or the backend devs have no idea what they are doing

I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*

last summer, me and my friend @hamdan used to work from 8 to 4 in the infamous "fuck developers llc", and everyday around 3:30 some bug appears out of nowhere when checking in our changes, so we had to stay an extra hour or more everyday of our precious summer to fix it.

we really worked hard thinking that good things will happen or as our godfucker ex-boss who didn't even payed out a month we worked after he fired us used to say "the future is bright".

we live in a city surrounded by mountains, a sea, and a fucking ocean, and many interesting places to explore. and we wasted a year of our youth with the embodiment of scum itself.

This probably isn't the coolest bug I've ever solved, but surely the one with the biggest faceplam
So I was building a Bluetooth smart watch that pairs with your Android device for the final year bachelor's project. The submission was in a 2 days and it was all ready and it suddenly stopped working.. Spent hours trying to fix it, even tried to get a replacement Bluetooth module (was out of stock -_-).. After a day's worth of freaking out I discovered that Android phones (at least the OnePlus X) don't connect to Bluetooth modules when their battery is below 15% -_- and since I was freaking out I would let the phone charge a bit and get back to debugging and it never crossed 15% so it never worked.. One day of debugging attempts later it suddenly struck me that low battery might be an issue.. And voila! It worked after charging the phone

Shouldn't such things be clearly mentioned in documentation :/

(Btw, got full for the project, got a 10/10 GPA for the semester)

I just realized the most fucked up shit that leads me to wanna runaway from this job even more...

On the beginning (3 years ago) I used to be really thrilled , plan things really professionally, make models, uml, all the shit, try to fix things and everything you should expect from a great dev.

The problem is that in 3 years I had to "replan" so much things and so desperately quickly and have so many rework with such shitty projects that I kind of panic every time I have to plan something and I end up thinking I'm not capable of developing complex systems anymore.

All because these fucking managers that never make their mind, so my mind sees this:

"Fuck, 10 months for this shit that could have been done in 1 ? You suck dude."

Actually is management that sucks.
I've been doing some small projects on the side, just for the sake of it and boy, I'm rocking it.

My self esteem is coming back on tracks.

Fuck those fucker, they can die chocking on their own misery.

Boss: do you remember the other team? we need to fix one of their bugs

Me: amm, okey np

Boss: do it when you have time, but don’t forget to finish your things first.. and we need that fix by the end of the day.

Me: //what a beautiful monday <3

I hate when manager wants an Android app supportable all the way to GinerBread .FUCK YOU ASSHOLE how about I tell you to work 24/7 .PM Shitholes doesn't know shit about coding and make some unrealistic promises and when things don't work this bastards are all over your ass and want you to fix things . How about asking a developer before making such unrealistic promises . Let me tell you PM are the most useless kind of people's in the world who has failed to prove their significance in the company. Fuck you....PMs

John: You know, I don't appreciate it when I run the application and it crashes on me. Especially when you say it's working. If you say you've debugged it and got it working, I shouldn't be able to break it in the first 2 minutes.

--------------------------
me: You know John, with all due respect, there are two ways that this can go. Either we can actually work on this project as a team and get something done, or I can leave and have you flounder on your own trying to complete the rest of this project for the next 4 months. Now, I know that you don't have a lot of experience in this framework, so that means you owe me the respect I deserve and not complain about the way things are getting done.
--------------------------

Me: Ok, John, I'll fix it.

Fix a million things, including a project that is suddenly urgent, feels tired but satisfied, ready to go home...then it turns out there's still 4 hours of the day left...

Sister of a friend of mine fucked up her Mac, her Dad, they called me to fix it.

Partition table is wrecked and her thesis is there, no backup.

Been working since yesterday, got to recover it. Recovered files.

Dad applies pressure, because she's leaving out of town today, I do my best but fucking SSD won't work, it says it's healthy but damn Mac says IO error, Disk Utility says exit code 8... oh, and her dad thinks it's easy, that Ive been delaying things and so on...

fuuuuuucking hell, I hate you

Went back to KDE over the weekend from i3wm. I was getting tired of having to configure my setup manually everytime I wanted to change a setting, and having things break, and having to bug fix said breaks, while also trying to handle Java MVC and node.js dev work.

Nope. Too much. I want the macOS experience but with the control of Linux. Much happier with KDE. It does use about 720MB more RAM on an average session but when you have 8GB does it really matter?

Now to figure out how to get Firefox to play nice with Plasma, or give Konqueror a spin.

GIT LOG VERSION 101
----------------
75fed18 pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
56772ff added security.
6374fdd needs more cow bell
6b27de9 Committing fixes in the dark, seriously, who killed my power!?
bffce8a giggle.
7e93977 Refactored configuration.
e66c495 pgsql is more strict, increase the hackiness up to 11
5690dd9 Revert "just testing, remember to revert"
daa84ba Still can't get this right...
097f164 this should fix it
367f271 GIT :/
f46d735 bump to 0.0.3-dev:wq
b893721 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
24be0d9 ...
f014a0c ALL SORTS OF THINGS
e648b80 added super-widget 2.0.
3a71628 perfect...
e2a8cb1 Fucking templates.
b08e489 pgsql is more strict, increase the hackiness up to 11

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

My internship is coming to an end and I think my boss is testing my limits.

So, in the beginning of this week, he assigned me a non reproducible bug that has been causing trouble to the whole team for months.

Long story short, when we edit or create a planned order from the backend, once in fifteen, a product is added to the list and "steals" the quantity from another product.
Everyone in the company has experienced this bug several times but we never got to reproduce it consistently.

After spending the whole week analyzing the 9 lines of JS code handling this feature, reading tons of docs and several libraries source code. I finally found a fix by "bruteforce testing" with selenium and exporting screenshots, error logs and snapshots of the html source.

This has been intense but was worth the effort, first, I fix a really annoying bug and second, I learned a lot of things and improved my understanding of Javascript.

boss: we should map all the possible ways to do things in the system so we can test them and make sure we fix the bugs.

Me: yeah, well, that is exactly what automated tests are for, every time we find a non-mapped way that breaks this we make a test out of it and fix, this ways we end up mapping the majority of ways.

Boss: yeah,yeah ... Let's sit down latter and map everything on a document.

I bet my ass we are never gonna have tests as a part of our workflow.

Can you fix the backend on the frontend, preferably with just CSS, let's keep things simple

It's my first 'rant' so be kind :P

When I started my studies a already knew some very basic programming stuff. I went to the exercises with another dude I met. We always joked about the tasks we had to do and did other things while the others tried to fix bugs in their code. After the semester ended he asked me whether I want to work part time at his mother's office. I went to the interview which was weird because I have never been to one before but got the job straight away. I'm in my fourth year of working there because the team is awesome.

When I am telling non-tech people that I am studying Software Engineering:

They: What do you study at university?
Me: Software Engineering
They: Oh, so you're an engineer! My *some random person* is also an engineer!
Me: No, not that kind of engineer. I am a SOFTWARE engineer. I don't build things.
They: huh?
Me: I write code. Programs. For computers. I a programmer.
They: oh, great, very perspective! Will you fix my *PC/printer/whatever has on/off button on it*?

😶😶😶

Introduced git in work about 5 months ago, explained to my coworkers how it works, shared links to tutorials, git pro book and everything imaginable.

Almost every day I learn something new ... they keep struggling to checkout a branch or resolve some simple conflict...

I'm just tired of explaining things...

Now I just go and fix every thing and learn a lot :)

1. high severity production incident was asked to look into at the end of the day.
2. needed fix in ui.
3. fixed and deployed in 1 hour.
4. issue remained. debugging began.
5. gave up at 1 AM and went to sleep.
6. woke up at 6 and after debugging for 2 hours, identified to be a back end issue.
7. worked with back end team for the fix, and 6 hours and 3 deployments later, it worked.
8. third party vendor reported they are still not receiving one parameter from us.
9. back end team realised they forgot to ask ui to send another parameter.
10. added the parameter in ui, redeployed ui.
11. build and deployment tool broke down. got it fixed. delay of 1.5 hours.
12. finally things are in place. total time 26 hours.

13. found half bottle of vodka, leftover from last weekend. *Priceless*

I began my first Linux / i3 install 7 days ago when I posted my first rant... And today I'm declaring it officially *done*! (Mostly because if I don't, I'll spend another week configuring the damn thing.)

Here it is. Few minor things to edit/fix (like the fact that it sometimes randomly logs me out after coming back from hibernation... Yeah, "minor") but the functionality is mostly there. I can ("should") get back to work!

Helped out a junior today with a minor JS issue he had. Told him, "cool so that should fix it on this page but it may break things elsewhere. Make sure you check it otherwise the client will go into meltdown. "
30mins after they go home. Client emails (All Caps) "WEBSITE BROKEN, URGENT HELP REQUIRED"
😡 you didn't bloody check it did you!
Ffffffffuuuuuuuu

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Windows:
When things go wrong, they fix themselves.

Linux:
When things go wrong, it's easy to fix them yourself and make sure they don't happen again.

Mac:
Things usually don't go wrong... but when they do, you're screwed 😲

Best part of being a dev? Rock star status when things are going well: had to get a fix out by 18:00, boss walks by as I'm watching something on YouTube and tells me the client called and wanted to be sure we'd have it done in time, told him not to worry and went back to my video. Pushed the fix at 17:30, and tomorrow I'll be in the same position: every last minute fix delivery only grows my reputation for getting critical last-minute fixes out in time... As skeptical as my boss was at the time when he walked past and saw me on YouTube he had to he polite because he knows how crucial I am to this project

I think tomorrow I'm going to work on my own project and slack off, no one will be able to tell me different

Typos kill, kids! And deploying to production.

Instead of "for item in items" in my script, I accidentally did "for items in items". Thus, an exponential loop has been entering things into the database for the past few hours before I found the place to fix it.

By the way, this runs on cron every minute. So there are processes still running exponentially right now, possibly 180+.

Yeah, I'm setting up a a test server instead now.

I've been a part of this industry for over two decades, found myself scraping and clawing my way up, recently leaving a high paying position to create my own company; in an attempt to fix the things I feel are severely broken within the ones I've worked for in the past.

Sometimes, we are challenged in ways we never thought we would be. And, it should always result in the improvement of something we never thought would be possible to improve.

There's a certain beauty of hitting a personal impasse. Because it allows you to choose a better path for yourself - which is a key element in accepting and conquering any one of life's many challenges.

So, just remember, we are - by nature - problem solvers. So what the fuck would we do, without a problem to solve?

Visual studio is a fucking piece of trash IDE and it should be banned from programming because of how SHIT it is, how can it not let met fucking reference things properly, why can't I acess the FUCKING FOLDER I'VE JUST CREATED, how can it not recognize that I've just added a folder from outside??

WHY EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DIFFUCULT WITH IT??????

Why can't it be smart like Android Studio :cries:

YOU ARE A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT MICROSOFT, FIX YOUR FUCKING STUPID PIECE OF SHIT WORTHLESS DUMB IDE, FUCKING BILLIONAIRE COMPANY THAT CAN'T MAKE A SMART IDE, DUMB FUCK VISUAL STUDIO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mangodb's rant reminded me of smth.. Folks from my country might remember this story.

So we have a national e-health system. Millions have been invested, half of the money have never reached the project [disappeared smwhr in between] and its quality is not shiny. It works, sometimes even fast enough. But boy does it have bugs... Let's not get into that. It's politics.

So some time ago one IT guy spotted a bug that allowed him to get sensitive info of other patients. He informed e-health folks and waited for a fix. He waited for a few weeks but the fix had never been released. So he published his findings in soc media [yepp.. Stupid move]. That caused a national scandal. Not to mention he had been pressed with charges.

That guy and our health minister were invited in one of the tv debates. The guy was asked to explained how he found all this sensitive data. And he explained that he hit f12 in his browser, opened a network tab, issued a network request by clicking smth in the webpage analysed received data in the dev tools.

The minister looked somewhat happy, maybe a lil proud of himself - a person who has a "gotcha!" moment has that very glow he had. And he said: "what you did there was obvious hacking. I reckon you should know that true developers do not do those things you have just explained to us" [he was talking about dev tools].

I died inside a little bit.

A project I'm working on uses Elastic for internal monitoring and logs. The customer asked to access those logs - not something we'd normally do, but it's isolated from other things we use and there's no critical data there, so what the heck, let them have it.

Ever since, we're getting tons of questions like "There are tons of [insert random info message] all the time, do you have any plans to resolve them?" and it gets to the point where I'm just about ready to scream back "NO, SUZAN, BOOKING NOT COMPLETED MANS THE USER F###ING CANCELLED IT, IT'S NOT SOMETHING I CAN FIX IN THE CODE"

Edit: the customer's name isn't actually Suzan

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

Monday morning: The last straw.

After talking about in a previous rant about how my client wants to fix bugs that keeps popping out after bug fix.

Today I discovered, that all C-levels, worked all Saturday to "fix my code" because it "didn't work" and we "needed bug fixes not pretty things".

The app version I was working on for the last week is gone. Without mentioning that their "CTO" wrote a fucking crappy code to disable features that I added, breaking the build step.

This shit is enough for me, I'm done!

As we're all going about our various Easter, Passover, et al., family celebrations, I have the perfect solution to help train your families to stop asking you for help with mundane computer stuff:
Every time someone asks you to do/fix something, give them a full talk about what is going on in their computer around that system.
Don't forget you can talk about lots of things too:
- concurrency
- TCP IP / socket networking
- multi-threaded programs vs. single threads
- RISC vs. CISC processors
- Why linux is better than Windows or Mac
- algorithms
- logarithmic runtime
- teach them how to convert between hex, binary, and base ten
Really pour it on too. Soon they'll either figure out that you are a highly-skilled individual who is not their personal geek squad, or they'll be too afraid of a big lecture to ask for help.
Works with my in-laws like a charm.

Got an Acer 18.5" monitor.
Took me more than an hour to get correct resolution on my lubuntu.
And still looking for answer and fixing.
I know I will eventually fix it soon (hopefully).
But this kind of things shouldn't exist in this days and age :/

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

Unpopular opinion: I find most office gimmicks which have been popularized by FAANG companies are stupid.
I don’t care about pool tables/videogames/nerf guns, I find these things fun but I’m not 9 therefore I don’t need them at my workplace, I can take care of myself so I don’t need mindfulness seminaries, if I get interested by the topic I’m able to provide myself books or seminaries and don’t get me with the salary I get every month and don’t get me started about the trend of office dogs: most dogs needs a lot of attention and are high energy animals, that’s not what I would need around me when I’m making an urgent bug fix.
Luckily my company hasn’t got into this shit and understands which all an adult professional needs is “just” a good pay and a good work environment.

Yesterday I was hanging with the guys from our Records dpt in the staff lounge. Their manager is a pretty nice talkative guy. Everything was going well until this happened..

Him: Hey you, I have an idea for an app. You can"definitely" help me, right? Or someone you know who also does the code thing..

Me: It depends. Just before you tell me about this idea, know that you'll be paying me or whoever will be doing this job unt..i..l *he interrupts

Him: Paying? I thought it was a one time or few hundreds of dollars. Why do I have to keep paying when you haven't finished the app?

Me: Did you finish your entire work this week?...but you're still getting paid next week, right?

Him: Oh crap, makes sense. Ok, how about I pay you the amount you charge then, that's it?

Me: See, you don't get it. I know once the app is done, you'll come back to me to fix and update things. When that time comes, you'll have to pay me again. And with the initial payment, don't just think you pay me and that's all... you'll...

Him: Crap, I have think more and come up with a plan for this.. nevermind, I'll keep you updated.

I think I made him sad knowing that, this sort of things doesn't happen easily.

Some people here are so rude. Yesterday, this guy just shushed a few people twice, one of them being the boss's daughter and another a guy above him!

The other day, the boss's daughter was screaming with someone over the phone for almost an hour. She literally screams with everyone that disagrees with her but alright.

A couple of months ago this guy called because he wanted me to fix something, but I didn't know how to so I said I would ask my co-worker, but since he was busy it might take a while, so he screamed at me because he needed that fixed in the moment.

Also, everyone thinks our department should fix everything, even tho we are ALL programmers, except for one, but he has better things to do than log into your outlook account.

I hate half of the people here.

Been told to fix a bunch of links as a urgent issue. So far i've spent 3 hours trying to find anyone who knows where the damned things should actually be i pointing.
The joy of Mondays.

Issue reporter:
Feed from external service provider is overwriting the wrong things, pls fix

Resolution:
Service provider is sending duplicate unique IDs, you need to get with them to discuss

Service provider response:
This is a *RE-USABLE UNIQUE ID* . . . The bottom line is you should not use this UNIQUE ID as a primary key.

So as applying for an internship to a new company, they wanted me to make an account and do some things to get use to the website... That's great, until I learned their website is fucking garbage!

Takes 5 seconds to load any page (they import and link so much shit, it's poorly optimized), their website is vulnerable to Javascript injection (in many different places), im sure it will be vulnerable to sql injection too.

Their design looks bad, icons are terrible, no common design flow, super busy. And they are taking about using machine learning and big data? Bitch you need to fucking make your site usable first!! If contacted them and will give them 30 days to fix their shit before I write about it

It's sometimes good I work remotely from the rest of my team.... So other can't see how pissed I'm while chatting with them...

Just did an afternoon basically hand holding someone... And well this is the 3rd day... And the original instructions I gave them was: here's the problem, here the code fix, now you need to change it for the other 10 APIs it affects (OS migration).

I have another problem I need to figure out....

Yes I could do it all myself and it would be faster but I don't want to be the only person who can do this stuff either...

But can you just try to use your brain and figure things out before asking how to ....

I don't know am I that much more experienced than everyone else so I just know how to figure things out quickly, know to the learn efficiently? Ask the right questions to Google?

How hard is it to just learn to Google your problems... 80% of the questions u ask me I either tell you to Google it or actually end up googling the answer myself...

Dad: “Cool! Now you can sit around like you always do!” 😑

Mom: “So you are programming the computer? Can you show me how to do x on my computer/iPhone?” Except it’s the same questions every single time... She never learns...

Brother: Talks to me about jailbreak stuff

And of course, they all ask me how to fix things on different electronics.

I can only imagine what goes through clients’ tiny brains. Do they really think: “oh I know what will get shit done, insult the developer, his work, and demand things be fixed while saying the whole system is broken even though they have multiple times in the past demonstrated that it was either me using it wrong or an extremely quick and simple fix. I also have a problem with a few listed items in particular not the whole system, but I’m gonna insult everything.”

Fucking rude fucks!

I wish my classmates didn’t know that I’m good at programming.

Recently, more and more often I am being reached out to by my classmates (and especially by one individual) about the problems they’re having issues with. For example yesterday, a guy fucked up his Git commit and made a bunch of merge conflicts, so I helped him fix this, which then lead to WinForms having multiple declarations of same objects.

And I really don’t wanna be rude, and I always try to help, for the love of god - stop bothering me every 5 minutes while I code, or at 10 PM while I wanna chill out.

Most of the things they have problems with can be solved by 2 minute Googling and I strongly believe that at the university level, you should be able to find solutions for your problems yourself - especially when you’re a programmer.

I've became a better dev/sysadm since I've got a girlfriend. She has no freaking clue what I am doing when I'm working or sitting in front of my laptop. But she's often interested in the things i'm talking or ranting about when somthing doesn't work out like i've planned or some stupid problem occurs that I'm not able to fix. I am so glad i've got her. :)

So I had a guy in my team, all day shouted "shitty code this, shitty code that"...
Today I had to fix some things, seen some really crappy code, said to myself "I've got to check who's the author of this beauty"... It was him... How the fuck can you shout shitty code on other peoples work when yours ain't better?!?

My family (dad, mom and I) runs a software business. Things were going decent when I was in college, and just as I was about to finish college, it went slightly bad due to lack of some technical insight. So I figured, I had the knowledge to do so, and joined in the family business as my first job. When I joined, I found out that things were worse that what I expected, (lack of processes in the company to handle day to day business). But we took a year to fix it and solve issues. But during this year, while the company finally runs as a proper company, we went into some serious debt to keep it running, as we were expecting it to get resolved soon. But now, although the company is structurally fine, the sales have seriously dropped. This has us cornered and we aren't able to do anything. We are seriously considering shutting the company down.

Which is not the worst part. The worst part is the debt. Since I, was a part of the company too, I am equally responsible for paying it off. And now, due to both my parents hitting the retirement age, I will be the only one repaying it. I really don't want to invest an estimated 8-10 years of my life living very modestly and spending a large (70-80%) of my income in repaying this.

I don't even know what to do, and things just seem very hopeless for me. Looking for any advice anyone has.

I guess if I had a bit more experience in the real world, I would be better at dealing with this, but I'm literally just 1 year out of my college.

The problem being a dev at a big company (around 1000 devs) with huge codebase (I mean huge, tens of thousands of modules, if not millions) is that, as many hands touch the code of a project and deadlines are always short, not everyone care about changing the documentation afterwards.

This translates to double the work everytime you need to fix a bug or something as you have to quickly reverse engineer the modules to understand it - the documentation often reflects an old version and it messes things up much more than it helps you out.

Why is Drupal so hard to learn?!!!!!!

It feels like you are learning an entirely new language. Yes it makes hard things simple, at the same time making simple things hard to accomplish.

And also modules are buggy, you would fix bugs instead of doing your tasks.

I want to learn Drupal but I guess it is not friendly for beginners like me.

About a year ago, I started a new position as a Full Stack Java Developer. When I started my employer got me a brand new, shiny, Asus laptop. As I prefer Linux (mint) to perform my magic I had to whipe Windows 10 and reinstall it. It turned out that my new shiny laptop was in fact so shiny that Linux (mint) didn't support/contain all the necessary drivers (yet), especially the network/bluetooth drivers and the gfx's drivers turned out a bit of a pain.. Over the year things slowly got better with every new kernel update that came in. However, due to me trying to fix things before those updates, Linux also had become somewhat unstable.

So ... last week I took some time to re-install that laptop and also take the opportunity to upgrade from Linux mint 18 to Linux mint 19 ... or so I thought ... Linux mint 19 was running (very) hot to the point where the laptop would shutdown due to the MOBO's thermal protection mechanims kicking in. ... Ok ...maybe Linux mint 19 was not such a good choice .... let's see if Ubuntu 18.04 is an option ... Nope ... Linux would lock up within a minute after booting up ... no mouse, no keyboard ... nothing. .... *sigh* ... let's (re)install Linux Mint 18.3 again ... and behold, I can start performing magic again.

Linux, it can be such a pain at times. I still prefer it, but running into all those 'weird' things on my laptop when reinstalling, I have to admit I have seriously considered 'just' installing windows 10 again and be done with it. Luckily I could also remind myself of what a pain Windows is to do serious docker/java development in comparison to Linux which gave me the strength to keep going ... :)

It's 0416... Too damn early to fix broken things. This particular team needs to fix their stuff for good, not keep having us out bandaids on their problems

I'm feeling like writing this down...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

Refactoring! Refactoring! REFACTORING!

This is one of “those desk books” that you gotta have imo. Personally I love giving names to categories of things, helps us better recognize patterns if we can classify them.

Software can always be improved, this book give you a good majority of the most common refactorings it’s like a recipe book almost.. shows you the code smell... give you the detailed recipes to fix it. Great to have in code reviews.

Doesn’t matter that this book is in JavaScript the concepts and ideas are the big pictures in this book.

Classic “one of those” books.

Earlier this day, I was about to start a new project. So I copied my favourite gulpfile.js into that projects root and installed all dependencies with npm. After running Gulp for the first time it threw an error.

Silly me tried to fix stuff and got googling the error and trying random things... After a break of a few hours I just fucking rerun Gulp and read the fucking error completely. It stood there. The fucking solution just stood there, run "npm blah --force" to reconfigure package blah....

Of course it worked right away and I finally could start working. But this shit took way too long. Why I just can't read the fucking error message. Damn

I'm about to ditch full-time Linux.
It's the little things honestly. Display resolution goes nuts when connecting or disconnecting from external displays, Bluetooth headphones suddenly aren't found anymore. I spend hours trying to fix things but often get nowhere. I love the environment, but there's just not enough convenience that I used to get with Mac or windows. This morning, pop os that I've been using for months updated and then wifi && ethernet didn't work. So I decided maybe I would switch to Mint since it's got more support. Internet works but same Bluetooth and display problems. Idk.
Someone talk me off of this ledge.

I've just realised something... I haven't ranted about work for a looooooong time.

It seems now all the monkeys have left the team and we've hired young people that actually knows how to get things done without blowing things up (though still need to work on documentation, bus factor still too high). So I'm no longer cleaning up their shit or the bugs they're too incompetent to analyze and fix...

Manager: client is breathing down our necks for that sockets interface. Wrap up any last minute changes, fix the documentation and get everything posted!

Me:*does all the things.*

That was two days ago. Client hasn't even logged in to download the software and the documentation.

Oops, looks like "Benedict Cumberbatch" just broke your unrealistic design specs and spotlights your non-inclusive cognitive bias, designer. Maybe stop using "John Smith" as mock design data for users' names and design things for real people.

Developers should not be paying down your design debts. Fix this!

Sincerely, the UI developer doing your job

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

Things I’m learning from my accounting job that will help me in my future dev career:

Today I have really, truly understood the need to sometimes just walk away.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix something, I kept fucking up, and at 16:40 I realized I can just stop, do something else that’s easy and doable, and come back to the fucked up mess I made in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a lesson I’ve been continuously learning over the last few years, not to stubbornly brute-force my way into doing something when I’m not in the right mindset and able to do it, and instead just calm myself down and come back to it later.

Looks like it's time to update the old CV... Christ have I really been here for 8 years.

It's been fun, the most fun time of my life but with new owners breathing on everything stuffs starting to fall to shit.

To use a SysOps analogy there are category 1 - critical warnings ringing in my ears.

I can accept a lot, but I'm genuinely concerned for the future of this place, and after trying to fix things for long enough to realise the new owners are the ones drilling the holes in the ship it's time to sink or swim, and I don't feel like sinking.

To quote billy Joel,
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
Mama if that's movin' up
Then I'm movin' out

My boss did not care about making things secure in our early development stage, even though I told him several times.
After 1 day our elastic search cluster was filled with random crappy data.

Fix: Apply security schemes provided by AWS

Just wanted to fix one little thing. Ended up with 20 commits for 35 other little things, three branches and realizing at the end of the day that the one little thing is still not fixed. Story of my life.

It's weird listening to my father "rant" about all the things he has to fix when visiting his parents, some welding, changing tire and switching lightbulbs. When he does the exact same thing with me regarding laptops, routers, smartphones and tablets..

So I've been working on automating a project's regression tests for several months.

I'm not even experienced as a tester but as a developer it's more satisfying to script than to do everything manually.

Someone had been working on the project before but their test object repository was a mess. The senior that picked up the project while I was learning asked to be moved out two months later because it was too frustrating for him.

So there I am trying to fix the whole thing by myself. My boss notices a lot of the tests were failing and asked me to fix it before scripting new ones. I spend like a month doing that and then I hear rumours about cancelling the automation project.
Later I get told that I'm going to be rolled off the project due to low productivity. A few weeks later a new manager steps in and while I'm giving the knowledge transfer to my boss and manager they come to the realization that this clusterfuck isn't something a single person should be doing.

The manager talks with the client asking to keep me working on the project and asks for two more resources to speed things up.

Now I'm coaching three people.

Im getting annoyed by the new layout of google. Hovering the sidebar will make a scrollbar appear but the main part of the site's scrollbar will disapear. This results in most content moving from their original place. Let's make a Stlyish script to fix this problem I thought. Guess what now somethings stay where they should be, but the things that were first on the right place have moved. Also this will make the header shorter. I'm getting more and more amazed how shitty some frontend devs are at google.
To fix one bug they, instead of solving the bug, tried to counter the result of the bug.

I do like the z-index of the sidemenu though (it's 2005, the year youtube was created)

If linux is used and maintained by professional power users mostly, why on earth does it never gets good support for basic things Windows does?

Screen dims while playing video, configuring lock screen to work with DM sucks as hell, you even have to define most keyboard shortcuts manually, Optimus GPU setup always buggy, you have to spend some time just configuring power management to work just fine.

We really need to fix this. I mean I am a Linux addict but time is money too.

"Do not lose time improving the data pipelines from our ERP, it is about to be replaced!"
Then suddenly there is a week of bugs and stress because the non-improved data pipeline can't handle new situations.
"Just fix the bugs! It is all about to change anyway!"
Repeat. And repeat.

Fuck, I hate when managers think that there are such things as "temporary fixes" in ERPs. Or that companies can ever migrate to another ERP. Those things are forever, as Cheetos dust on your bowels.

Ok that's nice and all Google but how about you fix the fucking UI, laggy interfaces, janked and half baked tablet mode and just all round fix what you broke from chromeOS 70 onwards?

You know.. make sure things are stable before pretty?

Sick and fucking tired of this bullshit.
Previously worked with Laravel, used 'gulp watch' to watch for changes in assets and now they changed things for the better of Laravel Mix as a fucking wrapper for webpack. Now I have to do shit load more stuff to get gulp working, 'cause otherwise my 'npm run watch' shits itself every fucking time I run that shit, doesn't matter what fix is aplied. Battling that bullshit for 3 days now and shit's not working anyhow. Stupid fucking bullshit. Sorry, had to let it out from myself.

Product and Design have a common enemy. Yes, you guessed it right, Engineering.

The former aim to solve user problems and focus heavily on aesthetics most of the time. While the latter actually does it.

As a Product guy, I admit that I absolutely hate the role these days because all that are asked to focus on is engagement retention conversion and other fancy metrics. Community has missed the entire point of why the fucking role exist.

On the other hand, engineering always asks the best questions. Focuses on performance and scale while periodically checking on tech debt. Yes, they suck at business or sales but when the solution works, things automatically make money.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR APP IS, IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE MY PROBLEM THEN IT'S RUBBISH.

Functionality and UX matters to more than colour scheme or fonts. Reason why Amazon is a huge. They are functionally solving a great problem while constantly improvising UX and not giving a rat's ass on UI.

Another down side to your fancy design is that the UI elements make things heavier. No wonder engineers have always been the best problem solver.

We lost our way. Tech world needs to go back a decade or two to fix the tech debt.

First and foremost introduce concepts like version control from the beginning. As for the rest, the motivated students will teach themselves the relevant things and the others will fail/drop out. That seems to take place now.

My biggest complaint with the education system is more general and not CS specific. Remove all of the gen ed requirements. REMOVE ALL THE GEN ED REQUIREMENTS. They don't make you "more well-rounded" they just set you back 2 extra years and throw you into twice as much debt as necessary. We spend 13 years learning the foundational things just to spend 2 years in college paying out the nose to go through it again.

Fix that and add a few relevant ideas into CS degrees and I think the education system is decent. There will always be bad teachers, but software developers need to be able to pick things up themselves so it's just preparation for when they get a job and have a useless senior dev to work for.

had to create a rather large CLI based application in Java as a graduate level assignment.

Doing shit like this makes me appreciate Node/Python/literally fucking anything else much more for this shit in which storing and retrieving JSON does not have to be that much of a fucking hassle WITHOUT using external libraries(they want it all made by hand)

I love Java, don't get me wrong, but I would rather use it for only a couple of things. I stopped working as a Mobile dev precisely because of Android being shit for Java. No, Kotlin does not fix it, its not the language that is my problem, its the fucking general architecture of the Android API that pisses me off.
And no, I do not care if you like it, like 1 fucking bit. I am not saying that the architecture is shit, I am saying that I did not like it.

Sigh.......oh well. Almost done with the assignment, but still.

FUUCCKKKK!! I need to hit smth. Or rant..

So that flaky ec2 issue.. These ec2s act as a shared environment for multiple apps. Our app is one of them. I have no access to those ec2s at all.

What I have access to is my app and some monitoring. Now the app randomly starts lagging while nearly idling. At the same random times monitoring stops completely and doesn't come back up. This happens to random app instances at random times.

Reached out to infra support, managed to get attention from the big boys [mgmt]. Today we got the fix deployed. I test it out -- problem persists.

I find this behaviour somewhat familiar. Managed to get some server stats from infra folks. Apparently cpu% is high as well as load avg [cpu queue]. Bingo! I know how to fix it!

So I write a long comment w/ all the commands and all the 'if that, do this'. Send it to one of the infra technitians

and I get a reply: 'we will apply cpu usage limitations to fix the issue'

wait... Cpu% limitations will do nothing but highlight the underlying problem...

'no, instances have high cpu utilisation which is causing those lags. We will limit cpu resources and it will be fixed'

oh ffs... Cpu utilization and cpu queue are VERY different things.. I tried explaining that to them like 7-9 times. And all I get is:

'yes, cpu utilization is the problem. We will limit it and solve the problem'

I would surely escalate all of this through higher channels if only I could get my hands on those ec2s and have a proof. But that is not happening and I'm forced to sit back and watch them break things even worse until they are out of options and mark my query as 'wont fix'....

Fuck that's frustrating....

*thinking to myself* so I've read about that new vulnerability 2 days ago that allows one to escape from docker container to the host... What if <...>

working on a crappy legacy site written by an invalid. The job was to replicate an existing site for a school with the original's permission. I fix a shit ton of bugs and update the original.

For the first time ever I got a phone call from the original's owner to complain that I had fixed their site -.-

leave things broken from now on!

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

Work story.
We have this system that's being used nation-wide and basically there's a control panel for management (it's a website)) and an app for the regular users.

I just migrated and replaced the guy before me, I'm basically the only one on the project.

The code for the website is a mess, the servers are sometimes slow, and few security problems here and there.

Project Lead comes up to me and says that few of our clients that use the website are saying it works really slowly.
I start by analyzing the networking, and found shocking things.
First of all, let's say there's a messaging option, and the management teams that are our clients can have each a lot of groups, which all have messaging.

Upon first load, ALL OF THE IMAGES, FROM ALL GROUPS, ARE PRE LOADED. It can get up to few hundred photos being preloaded upon first load, which can explain the slow loading.
After discovering that, I discovered that the Administration control panel, which only my project lead can access, with sends heavy requests to the server and loads heavy assets, is loaded every time to every single client, generating heavy stress on our server and slowing everything down.

I tell that to my project lead and say that that's what causing the slow downs, I coded a fix that currently sits and is not being merged to the master branch to be deployed, and somehow I need to find a way to fix the slowness which all comes down to the heavy requests and slow connection with servers... And they won't merge my fix that fixes the loading of the administration panel so the stress on the servers could go down, and everything will be sped up....
Ah damnit.. sometimes I don't understand it..

Ok so we have 2 useless remote contractors in our team who got hired as seniors but actually are juniors. They take weeks to deliver most basic things and never ask for help or offer help for others. They take days to fix most basic comments after review.

Today our teamlead in a call said that it's a cultural difference, these guys dont ask for help because they are very independent.

MOTHERFUCKER, I WOULD BET MY SALARY THAT THESE IDIOTS DONT WORK EVEN 10 HOURS A WEEK.

I was doing more than them when I was a mere junior.

Why the fuck these managers can’t understand that you can’t build a full blown system with in a week. After building a demo driven application to show the client you can tell the client we are fucking ready to launch the damn thing . I FUCKING MENTIONED BEFORE GOING TO THE MEETING ITS NOT RELEASE READY GOD DAMN IT.

Now when I say we can’t launch this app we need to fix things . THE FUCKING MANAGER HAS THE GUTS TO SAY “one day is enough to fix the issues right ? Shouldn’t be a big deal for you to fix this” .

Kill me now 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Mom: hey I can't get into the phone, the PIN and PUK aren't working. See if you can fix it otherwise you'll have to go to the communications company to ask for a new card (my mom is working and can't do it)
Me: //gives it another try. Doesn't work. Searches online. Yep, can't do anything, it needs a new card
Me: sorry mom, you have to get a new card, there's nothing I can do.
Mom: OK
Me: why did you ask me for help, again?
Mom: well because you can do things and fix things and so, and I thought that maybe you could fix it
Me: 😑

Me coding and researching to fix new things everyday and people come to me saying:
"You are working too much"

And I'm thinking: actually, its a never ending learning job, I dedicate so much because almost everyday I learn at least one thing.

But knowing that non-tech people have a hard time around it I just answer: yeah.

So my Dell laptop has been freezing for a couple of weeks.

I thought it was the Slack desktop app that was causing it, so I uninstalled it. Still froze.

So I did a whole bunch of things on it to try to fix it, even restarting Windows 10. Still froze.

Then I thought it was the Dropbox app that was causing it, so I disabled it from starting up when I turn on the laptop. For a while, the laptop didn't freeze.

Then my desktop computer started freezing too from time to time. I was like, "WTF!"

It could be the Windows Update that's causing it, because there was an update going on around the time the freeze-ups happened. Now my laptop is on the "Getting Windows ready, Don't turn off your computer" screen after hard-booting it.

I left class early today

I understand me and this kid are both students and both of us are still learning. But when he asks me to help him solve an issue I fucking expect him to listen then try what I’m saying unless he knows for certain that my idea won’t work

I don’t expect him to start ignoring the person HE asked for help to try things on his own and end up DELETING THE FUCKING GRADLE FOLDER because the 1.5.1 version of Android studio my teacher makes us use told him gradle was corrupt

I also didn’t expect him to tell the professor I didn’t tell him not to And them end up with the professor fucking assigning me to help him fix everything even though the kid won’t listen to me anyway refusing to just copy he java and XML to a new project so I grabbed my stuff and left Fuck that bullshit

I understand we’re both students and in the grand scheme of things we’re both idiots. But when I’m asked for help I expect the person to at least listen and not do something absolutely stupid like delete something we don’t understand how to fix

Now I’m making common sense a requirement to ask me for help I don’t need any extra stress I’ll deal with the consequences of walking out tomorrow But I can’t say I regret it

The traits that compile to form a programmer

-Not good at naming things

-People started asking for you to fix electronics regardless of what you tell them You’re actually studying/good at

-Procrastination through the roof

-Lives off of Coffee, POP, Energy drinks, or what ever source of caffeine.

Do not trust Unity Collab.

Been using unity collab as a VCS for months on a project, regularly saving the files, working well.
Today i decided to refactor some code but lost track of some things, so i reverted to a version i checked in 2h before.

Unity replaced my files with the stable build back then, except... half of the files were missing. of course no undo functionality.
months of work were simply not saved in collab. no version had these files, i did modify them regularly and they never caused collab issues.

how can a company not make the vcs they add for their main product work to its minimal requirements?!

Im not sure how i could motivate myself to fix this mess. fuck this trash company, cant have a single project without major issues.

Consultant: "I don't agree with that, it's got to be something else" when you point to a known fault with the function they are using in the framework.

Then you send them 10 articles from stackoverflow and the framework's own website.

Consultant: "Oh. Thank you."

Just let me fix the damned bugs and not have to justify every single fucking change I have to make to make the damned thing work the way it is fucking supposed to.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Being the only one in my friend group who is a developer, I keep getting asked ridiculous things like "can you install XYZ for me?" "can you get rid of this virus for me?" "Can you fix my microwave?" I wish I was kidding.

Fuck! This is why I can't diet.

I can't get shit done, because I keep getting more things to fix. And I'm not talking everyday fixes, this is just plain retarded.

The asshole that my client hired thinks he's a dev. Takes projects that are working and makes small changes. Simply for him to say "I took this project and updated it for our needs."

Then when that shit eventually starts failing, I'm expected to fix it. It's not even that it takes me a long time to fix it. It's just that I'm looking at this thinking "Why are you not working?" Only to later find that, of course, it's been modified. By. Mr. Fucking. Dumbass.

Fuck!

Oh man, its been forever since I've had an actual rant.

so my work ethic is to the point where it's all last minute. My eduction is all last minute. Personal problem, and don't know how to fix that. but it's just getting out of hand.

tbh, I'm at the point of considering dropping uni like this is no joke. maybe transfer to a cheaper because the financials are no good either.

I also need a new job because the place I'm at is no good. here a few things about it:
1) Its Industrial, not really tech related
2) the dudes expect ME to GO TO THEM and ask for help. Not how I roll
3) not the best atmosphere -- I don't really like the 4 total employees, including myself
4) nearly minimum wage

the pros?
1) I learn about my car
2) I can use the shop to fix my car
3) Free stuff (for example, a projector and lunch everyday
4) We're getting a server (soon?)
5) I buy computers for them, they pay me

But seriously, my grades in school are slipping (nowhere dangerous yet) and I am too stressed. At least I'll be getting in more dev work

Moreover, I want to get in some actual learning with Swift, but I can never manage to make time. Plus, games are a thing that I do, also family and friends, also religion is a thing, also work and school, also sleep. No time? Me neither.

Like the organization of this rant? Me too.

I've tried so many ways for that at night or during walk spark of bug solving ideas:

- fluorescent ink on regular paper
- florescent mini whiteboards
- "alexa remind me.."
- writing down in my phone
- recording on my phone
-..

But all of those due to my short term memory made me forget half the things by the time I opened the fucking phone/app, found where to grab the pen or the whole dance for alexa, to remember the exact phrase I have to spell out, when it should remind me, what time,..

Earlier today I remembered how I had a little tape voice recorder I used to use a ton, thankfully that tech advanced by now and found myself a stereo mic setup little voice recorder that can also act as an mp3 player!

Went for a walk today, while listening to some podcasts, then it hit me as usual on how to fix and implement some things that were awkward at best on paper when I left home, pressed the record button, recorded it and went straight back to music mode, which remembered where I left off!

I'm so indescribably happy, I ordered quite a bunch of the same to just throw around everywhere, at the bed, in the bathroom, kitchen, for walking outside, everywhere haha

I was asked a stupid question recently:

I was questioned to why I fix things.

Wtf? Why wouldn't you fix something that could be useful? Idiots

End Rant

when you need two things to work: the 1st works and the 2nd doesn't and then you fix the 2nd thing but the 1st stops working...this was not a negotiation! I need both things to work!

I'm trying to bring some structure to the IT department, but I need help with something. I'm on my feature branch for some front-end stuff. I realize that there is some back-end missing that my colleague must do. How should we go about tackling this? Should he create another feature branch, fix the things, merge to master, and then i can merge from master?

One of my most arrogant customers was one that constantly called support because she could not get things to work as she wanted.

We repeatedly told her that she was working against the way the system was built and that was what was causing her problems.

This was not a custom system for that customer but a cloud product we where offering with over a thousand customers on and it was designed with a certain workflow in mind.

Despite this she always complained that the system was wrong and we needed to fix it.

She was also always late for her deadline complaining that she did not get the information from her bosses in time and demanded we help her get it done :)

But I was fortunate that everyone at our company held a unified position that it was not out fault that her bosses gave her info late or that she tried to do things in a way the system was not designed for.

So when she got to aggressive we just offered her to go somewhere else.

I thing they finally did, after about two years.

CEO, your Backend Server is a powerful machine.
It can output millions of pages and serves millions of users.
But it has one defect:
It needs a Developer.

CEO, your Web Application is powerful.
It downloads faster than light and carries more images than your son Instagram account.
But it has one defect:
It needs a Developer.

CEO, a Developer is very useful.
He can fix things on the fly and he can develop killer features.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

(from "General Your Tank Is A Powerful Vehicle" Bertold Brecht)

There's something to be said about building Linux from a blank slate. It takes longer to get a complete system but you know how to fix issues when they come up.

I coudln't get my bluetooth headset working for the life of me until I found out the headset needed the PulseAudio daemon which I had removed because I liked AlsaMixer better. Well, I decided to give PulseAudio a try again and after spending about 10 minutes with the config I got my bluetooth headset working again!

After using Linux for 3 months I've learned there's only so much hand holding it will do before you have to make your own fuckups and figure things out. You can't have freedom over your system if you aren't willing to solve problems, doesn't matter what type of technology it is.

Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.

Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.

There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.

Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...

So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.

And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.

Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.

I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

A little background on project fubar:

Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.

That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.

I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.

Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.

Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?

Dev: Hey this library you are mandating the use of doesn’t do one of the things you assumed it does

Non-Tech Manager: Well I think it does because I looked at it and that’s what it seemed like and the only reason you can’t figure it out is you are a bad developer and have attitude issues that’s why you are failing. You need to look on the bright side of things more often. This library has over 100k downloads which means it must do what people want it to. I think the problem is you. We can’t spend anymore time on this we have to just fix it and move on.

Started up KiTTY to connect to my virtual test server per usual when I couldn't establish a connection.

Nothing too unusual so I do the typical troubleshooting I make sure host, port and authentication is all correct and it is. So now I open the display for the virtual server and start looking at ip info, host info, checking ports and everything is completely fine.

Now I'm getting frustrated so I start running things like configtest in apache, using systemctl to check the services status, even restarting virtualbox in my windows 10 devpc. Still cannot connect!

I start feeling hopeless and just shut everything down, the whole operating system.

*takes breath*

Computer boots up and I start my usual thing of creating workspaces, opening editors, starting servers, etc.

I open KiTTY again and launch my virtual test server..

konicm8ker@VM-UBUNTUSERVER:~$ _

Somethings you just can't fix without a reboot.

What I think the code does when I fix a bug but 20 other things break. Fucking bastard.

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

GODDAMN I HATE WIX!

I feel angry. I feel like smashing the developer's face who programmed this piece of shit editor. Everything I touch there just breaks and moves on its own. I fix the header, save, come back the next day and everything is shifted 5 pixels. WTF!?!

Plugins that they developed in-house aren't even compatible with their own systems. Custom code disappears suddenly. Editor doesn't allow two people to edit at the same time, resulting in lost work.

Seriously FUCK WIX.

Don't ever even consider touching this nightmare of an editor.

I could literally have hard-coded the entire site in React or Vue faster than building it in this editor, but my client wants the ability to edit things on their own later.

WIX: Not even once.

Replaced camera in my phone, it arrived when I was heading to the pub so after 3 beers I came back and everything works now.

Looks like it’s better to fix things when not sober.

So I was setting up ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) all in one EC2 on AWS today for demo purposes. I had everything prepared. Elastic IP, correct security group rules, etc.

I figured I would just do quick test before writing filters and templates if I can access Kibana. So I started service for it and tried to open it with Chrome.

Timeout.

Checked config file. Compared it to documentation. Seemed good but changed some things just for sake of change. Restarted service.

Timeout.

Reverted changes I've made in config. Restarted service. Curl on localhost. It work... OK. 😐

It took me half an hour but finally I figured it out after I took my phone and opened it from there. It was working from the beginning. Stupid company network was for some reason blocking this connection. Fuck! 😡And I was restarting that poor service like crazy trying to fix something that wasn't broken.

But Why ??
Saw this I a project that my company wanted me to fix and maintain. There are more hilarious things like this. (I will keep you updated)
and I am finding things like this in the code.

Working at a local seo sweat-shop as "whatever the lead dev does't feel like doing" guy.

Inherit their linux "server".
- Over 500 security updates
- Everything in /var/www is chmod to 777
- Everything in /var/www is owned by a random user that isn't apache
- Every single database is owned by root sql user
- Password for sudo user and mysql root user same as wifi password given to everyone at company.
- Custom spaghetti code dashboard with over 400 files in one directory, db/ api logins spread throughout these files, passwords in plain text.
- Dashboard doesn't have passwords, just usernames to login
- Dashboard database has all customer information including credit card stored in plain text
- Company wifi is shared by other businesses in the area

I suggest that I should try to fix some of these things.

Lead Developer / Tech Director : We're an SEO company, not a security company . . .

Git is good. Even when I do stupid things like reset a commit I wasn't supposed to, it gives me the chance to fix those mistakes.

(Oops. !rant)

PSA Cloudflare had a bug in there system where they were dumping random pieces of memory in the body of HTML responses, things like passwords, API tokens, personal information, chats, hotel bookings, in plain text, unencrypted. Once discovered they were able to fix it pretty quickly, but it could have been out in the wild as early as September of last year. The major issue with this is that many of those results were cached by search engines. The bug itself was discovered when people found this stuff on the google search results page.

It's not quite end of the world, but it's much worse than Heartbleed.

Now excuse me this weekend as I have to go change all of my passwords.

We are gating release of each sprint.

Today before 10:00AM I identified a major performance problem and asked devs to fix it (single if() will be enough as a hotfix). We're blocked until we have the fix deployed.

It's 5pm and we're still waiting for that 1 `if` clause to be added and deployed :)

A long day it was. Full of hopes and expectations, waiting for things to happen

I've actually really enjoyed getting to interview people. Mostly because I'm given the freedom to ask reasonable questions. At this point, my favorite is asking fresh grads to come up with requirements to make their favorite portfolio bit production-ready.

I want a list of things you need to fix because they're duct tape and bubblegum, but a lot of people sit there with passwords in plaintext and suggest new features.

Why is so hard to find engineers that actually care? It feels like the majority of people always want to do the bear minimum, no one wants to fix their shitty code even when it clearly violates the project or company standards. Everyone constantly comes up with shit about why they can't do things properly or how they'll fix it later and then get their mates to push their shit through review. The majority of lower management usually care equally as little so there's no point explaining the situation to them and the lack of care probably goes much higher. It seems like so many people go from job to job getting bump after bump in salary, which granted is absolutely fine and probably advised, but have nothing to show for it. Usually very little skills but alleged mountains of experience and a lazy piece of shit attitude. I hear all the time people saying you'll never change anything so why try and it feels like that most of the time but more because everyone keeps saying it. If everyone pulled their fingers out their arse, maybe we would stand a chance. I'm sure a lot of people on here have a real passion for computer science, whichever division you're in and love to learn and improve and reflect. What I really want to know is how you deal with people who are just taking their paycheck and enjoying the ride but don't actually care and how you discover these people as early on as possible to get shot of them.

I encountered a really weird bug today in my javascript. I'm working on a CMS and one of the things it handles is adding, uploading and resizing images. So, one function adds an empty image to the dom, unselects the currently selected image and selects the new empty image. Pretty straighforward right? So the problem is the unselect function didn't want to work. The image is added and gets selected but the previous image is also still selected.

I set a few breakpoints checked every variable but everything was the way it should. So after an hour trying things I discovered that if I removed the code where the image get added to the body the deselect function works (innerHTML += element) I thought maybe a little timout between these two actions would work but it didn't work. It looks like all dom actions lock up after the empty image gets added. I didn't understood so I moved the unselect function to the above the image add code and it worked wut ??.

code before fix:
func:
body.innerHTML += html;
unselect();
select();

after:
func:
unselect();
body.innerHTML += html;
select();

Atleast its fixed now

Had a bad dream one night that my bosses were going to run me through the ringer on some stuff that I needed to do better.

A day later, exactly that happened.

It would’ve been nice if my premonition could have had a few days gap between dream and reality so I’d have had some time to fix things first.

You ever feel annoying when you explain things to your co-worker, like they're stuck on an issue and you solve it for them so you explain what happened, why it did what it did, and how the fix works, but as you talk you can see them start to get a little annoyed and just waiting for the conversation to end.

Not 1 Business Unit in Company: We need this feature immediately.

My Team: Anyone object to this 2 hour old merge request?

Me: Well, yeah, I found a couple things that we should probably go ahead and address.

My Team: we'll fix that in a future release

Me: But you said that last release...

My Boss: MR Accepted

Also My Boss: Can you make a new user story to fix this?

Second week sick I see how my life slowed down and how meaningless everything around is, everyone is rushing about some bullshit, name it new amazing job opportunity, black Friday great deal, super duper product idea or some most important bug on production that we need to fix asap.

All that can’t wait a week when I’m healthy?
Seriously, people lost their minds in today’s world to some bullshit.

I’m to old and to depressed to care about such idiotic things. Living my life as I want and on my own peace, don’t care everyone is running, I’m slowly walking and I like it.

It’s better to walk straight than run around like an idiot.

So my boss thinks of debugging as a guessing game. As in you just say random things that have not even the slightest relation with the code where the bug is ... now i know why it take days to fix a little bug...

Client breaks website and i’m the one trying to fix things. For two unplanned hours i’ve been trying to help and instead of a thank you i get a thanks for nothing message. I’m not responding to this client next time. Fuckn bitch

So no decent internet for me the whole damn weekend and I have no more podcasts left to listen to while working. FUUUUU ...
The internet "technician" that was supposed to connect the house to VDSL really fucked my connection up - I escalated through support and I can't fix it.
(I hate it when I can't fix things myself! Especially electronic ones! Especially simple electronic ones! Damn it!)

Einmal mit Profis arbeiten!*

*[Translation, angry German to angry English:
I'd very much like to work with professionals. One. Fucking. Time.]

When the browser reads 'clas' as 'class' and things oddly work as expected. But when you fix it to be 'class' everything breaks horrifically.

I'm in this university software engineering course, where the professor decides he need to teach us the entire history of software engineering.

Dude, we were taught how to use SVN in addition to Git. Huh? And for software development processes, we were taught a total of 7 of them. There're: code and fix, waterfall, prototyping, spiral, phased, agile and lean. And the tests are like "list 5 advantages and disadvantages for X, and compare them to the advantages and disadvantages of Y". Wtf dude. I don't mind memorizing things, but the things I learn aren't even relevant (except agile and lean). Nobody would be impressed if I say I know SVN in an interview. What am I doing with my life. Ok, back to cramming this shit cuz i need my GPA. Bye.

Some times i do things and for a split second my brain goes "why dont u hit ctrl z that'll fix it"

So I fix a bug and I create a PR, someone reviews it and leaves a couple of comments, I address those comments and push up my updated code thinking “great I should be ok to move onto this big story waiting for me”
Then some Expletive.random(); from a totally different team who has no context of my change comes in and starts leaving petty comments. He literally pointed out 3 different things that could be made private/package-private.
Bugger off and focus on your own team’s work instead of leaving comments about relatively trivial things on my PRs.
Apparently he is well known for this. I can tell we are gonna have some fun encounters...

I've come to notice that mindful meditation does some good things to me.

And by "mindful meditation" I mean my subjective experience based on the shitty articles and videos I saw online, aka, I close my eyes and focus on how my breathing feels...

spoiler: it doesn't fix my depression and anxiety. The good thing that it does to me is that I seem to be more focused and to bump into simple solutions to problems I have everyday instead of freaking out about them.

So while it doesn't fix it, it does help a bit with anxiety.

The problem is that it's very, very, very goddamn hard to meditate to me.

I try to focus on my breath and not think for like 10 minutes. Even for 10 minutes, the experience is jarring.

I have this insane urge to just do something immediately. It's not a painful experience or anything or bad for my mental health so far, I just get massive urges to start doing something else, like, for example, I can't wait to start working.

So it's as if it decreased anxiety, but increases adrenaline or whatever? I dunno.

Disclaimer: I don't care much about the religious aspect at all, which is kind of problematic because 95% of what you find online is just biased religious marketing, and I avoid that like the plague.

Don't fix what ain't broken.

Alright.. that might not be 100% what need to be done at times, as other out-of-scope things tend to break these things too.

Nevertheless, if you fix what ain't broken,be sure to have it working before you switch over.

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

Sysadmin and an ex-employee couldn't fix an issue with an application for many months even with vendor's instructions.
Today the job is passed to me and I follow instructions exactly and resolve the issue.
The other two guys must have thought 'we don't need someone else's documentation, we can fix it ourselves'

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I guess some things just need a fresh perspective.

Hiding things I couldn't fix and error messages using CSS.

Idk why but it feels like lately i've such a pessimist approach to any new-tech (barring languages)
Any new framework or wrapper or CI/CD handler and without even seeing beyond description my instinct goes "fuccccccccck this, I hate it, it'll break things"

I wonder if theres a way to fix this mindset T__T or am I just getting old idkkk