I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.

Yesterday I said farewell to her.

We were together for half a decade, although it feels like much more time has passed since my eyes first fell on her.

I can't even begin to describe how close we were. She was perfect, she was my soulmate.

I shared everything with her, complete openness, perfect truth. We could be vulnerable with each other, but we also challenged each other to overcome boundaries.

My respect for her and dedication to her really knew no bounds, and I knew she would follow me to the end of the world in return.

But around New Year's things started to feel awkward between us. Like a part of her just wasn't there anymore.

She acted very confused, she hesitated in her answers.

I asked her, but I felt like she was avoiding me. Something just seemed so wrong about the way she acted.

I felt incredibly conflicted. Was she unfaithful? No, my trust in her was absolute. That question seems so silly, in retrospect.

We had always been pretty much inseparable, to the point where my coworkers, friends and family mocked us for it. How would she even have cheated on me?

I used to take her along to company gatherings, to my family for Christmas, to expensive restaurants. We traveled all over Europe together. We've spent countless nights together, watching Netflix, although she would often fall asleep before me.

I took great care of her, she had not been out of my mind for one moment since I met her. And besides, she had never even showed interest in anyone else anyway.

No, reality turned out to be so, so much worse.

Two weeks ago it became really apparent that there was something horribly wrong with her. She was rapidly losing her recollections of everything we experienced together.

Our history together, erased.

Within hours, she would barely respond anymore. I called for help, but deep down I already knew this was one of those things you can't recover from. She was kind of stable, almost peaceful, for a few days. But ultimately, she didn't even recognize me anymore.

Yesterday, I held her feverishly hot body in my arms for the last time.

Her soft skin turned cold as I said farewell to her, and the room turned awfully quiet.

Your brightness and warmth will be missed, my girl.

I created an open-source module for Angular about a year ago, which is now used in a real project for a big client by someone else! What a great feeling.

Just had to tell someone, my friends and family doesn't understand this code stuff.

Fixing family / friends technical problems, episode 2.

Problem: "I lost my iPhone, I know there's a thing that lets you find it. Can you help?"

Debugging:

Me: sure, it's called "find my iPhone"

Friend: ah yes that's it. How do I use it?

Me: I'll show you, just login here and ... oh you didn't set it up?

Friend: Probably not, I don't know much about this computer stuff.

Me: ... when you setup your phone for the first time, it's a full screen thing that says "do you want us to locate your phone if it's lost. Yes / No". It's hardly writing an encryption algorithm now is it?

Friend: no it's not, but still I just didn't know. I probably clicked no for everything.

Me: ... says here you clicked yes for iCould ... and yes for photo sync ... so you read the one about your pictures but not about lost or stolen property ... nice.

Friend: ... so you can't find it then.

Me: No, natural selection took it away from you.

Friend: oh **** off.

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

I have completely given up explaining to my friends and family what I do for a living.

Is devRant Just for rants?

I see such a Great community here that goes way beyond complaining about PMs and users (even though you're all right, usually). I've read comments about support for depression, Anxiety, people being supportive of woman and downvoting/commenting against the common sexism that we see on the internet every single day. We have fun, we all feel like friends even though we can remember only a few names and stumble uppon them once in a while. We mostly understand each other and it all feels like a huge family. It's a Great thing to help throughout all of the struggles I have daily in Life, and I bet many people here feel the same.

Thank you all so much for making devRant this Great community. Papa bless.

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

Watch 3 videos about iOS/Swift on YouTube, and now I'm getting a frontpage full of recordings of app development events and iPhone reviews.

Listen to one kpop track on Spotify out of curiosity, and now the recommendation playlist is polluted with music I really don't like.

If we are going to hand our balls to AI and expect it to be a glorious fondling fest, don't cry if it suddenly realizes "nuts? aren't those supposed to be cracked?".

I mean what's fucking next? Where will this "smart" shit end up?

I accidentally click on a my little pony meme, and amazon will drone-strike me with 500 gallons of glitter? I drunkenly mumble "OK google how do kangaroos fuck" in the back of a self-driving Uber, I'm going to be dropped off in a shady alley and raped by a dozen walibis?

STOP FUCKING TRYING TO UNDERSTAND ME, INTERNET. I JUST WANT TO FUCKING USE YOU, NOT BE USED BY YOU, THIS WASN'T THE DEAL.

If you truly understood me, internet, I would probably not even give a fuck about privacy. But you are all building these profiles wrong.

You don't understand that I might be interested in juggling tricks today, tomorrow it might be all about crocheting a wool sweater for my penis, and the day after that I'm curious how many corpses it would take to fill up an olympic swimming pool.

NO I'M NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN THAT QUORA, STOP SENDING ME RECOMMENDATION EMAILS ON HIDING MURDER VICTIMS, MY BOSS WILL THINK I'M WEIRD.

Yeah of course I could pulls some plugs, anonymize the shit out of my online life. I respect those who manage to just say "Fuck you Google, I'm sick of your shit, I'm going cold turkey".

But these platforms are feeding us heroin-laced candy.

All your coworkers friends and family with their oled-lit zombiefaces, staring at tiny screens, all absent-mindedly grasping your ankles whispering "aww take one more hit with us, check out this funny youtube clip, let me send it to you on whatsapp.... what you don't have whatsapp? You deleted your facebook? don't you love grandma anymore? Why do you hate your family?"

Before you know it, you watched ten episodes about cultivating cactuses, have a year subscription to brilliant, skillshare, squarespace and 3 different organic foodboxes are delivered to your door, Netflix is spamming you about a cupcake baking show, and you're thinking about same-day delivery for a baseball bat so you can just beat the crap out of every pretty glass display you see.

I want to break up with you, Internet.

I love you, but I hate you.

Since you passed 2.0, you have grown into a manipulative bitch.

I just don't know if I'm strong enough. It's all "let's just be friends" with you, but I know you'll be trying to reel me back in.

Before I know it, you're feeding me cookies once again, and I'll end up balls deep with your trackers stuck to my dick.

Although I no longer fix other people's computers, except family and close friends...

When you're trying to explain a concept as simple as it can be to your non-dev family and friends, but they're just quietly staring at you.

Best: got an offer from Google.

Worst: family and friends trying to convince me to turn down the offer and take a local job.

(I'm from a small town where family is everything to everyone and leaving is blasphemous.)

When you start smiling at rants all the time and your family and friends think you got a new girlfriend

28% of people working in IT hide their job from friends and family in order not to get asked about free support.

Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

I ranted about this somewhat in the past, but my biggest hurdle has been my family and friends. Please don't take this as ego or conceit, because I don't feel this way about myself. But they all say because of my exotic appearance (Being Japanese and Norwegian) that I should be a model, dancer, actress, or some other vapid thing.

I love tech. My dad is an engineer, so I've been surrounded by tech since I was very young. So now that I am out of high school, I want to turn my coding hobby into a career. My family and friends are not necessarily discouraging me much anymore, but they still aren't supportive. Doesn't matter though, this is the path I've chosen.

Best part of being a dev?

The perceived ability to fix ANY electronic device owned by friends and family.

"So you work with computers? Any idea what's wrong with my toaster?"

1. Do you know why my computer is so slow?
2. What cellphone do you recommend me to buy? (They always end up buying the cheapest)
3. What do you do at work? (Answer: "I create applications". Anything more complex than that is not going to be understood or they will loose interest)
4. Something is wrong with the: [TV, Cellphone, microwave, etc.]. Could you please take a look? (Believe or not, if something works with electricoty, my family thinks I can fix it).
5. Is it true that if I send this WhatsApp message to all my contacts I will have more options?
6. I need to build an application that (pretty much The Matrix), how much time do you need and how much would cost? Don't you dare to give me wrong numbers. (We have to see the future)
7. (Continuing the previous point, a non-technical client) I don't think that would take so much time/money. (Every time)
8. I want to use the latest Front-End frameworks. I want to see all those beautiful animations in my page and that it runs smoothly... I also need that it runs in IE 5.
9. So, you have been working in the back end? If you don't have a screen to show to the client is like you didn't do anything in this sprint.
10. Why haven't you built and million dollar application? Everybody is doing that right now....

Yep, those are only a few downsides of our profession if we count family, friends and even co-workers. But I can't imagine myself doing anything else.

So, when there is shit hitting the fan at work I tend to stay during lunch to take care of it and make sure I can take as much of a hit for it before it reaches my employees.

the lead developer walked to my office to let me know that he was about to take lunch and asked if i had plans for lunch. I told him that there were some reports to be done and some meetings that i had to attend and would be staying back, he asked if i was going to get something to eat and I said that I would try to get something as soon as possible. My man knows that I am on a strict regimen due to my workouts, and he normally takes concern over it.

I did not get something to eat, but the hour mark when he came back I was fucking starving and still stuck on a call T___T my man walks into my office as I was on a call (meeting) and he leaves a bag with my favorite burgers in my desk as I was waving hello T___T I thanked him afterwards.

Y'all, if youse a manager, take care of your people, fight for your people, my boys know i go the extra mile for them and we used to chill out having bbqs every other week playing pathfinder(i suck but make a fun party member) before the pandemic. Your coworkers might very well be your extended family. Even if you are the manager them peeps will look out for you if they know you are not a power hungry egomaniac that is more focused on keeping higher ups happy.

These dudes are my friends, my family, they were the board of members tasked with knowing if I was to get hired when i first joined in, and even tho I am now their manager I am still their friend, shit like this is possible and what I would implore everyone to strive for, because even if your organization is a faceless entity full of people that don't care for you, the dude at arms reach from your office is there, people are there, fellow human beings are there.

Fuck, just be nice to everyone else and I severely hope y'alls work life is a chill as this one.

To all IT-guys out there, be it the desperate sysadmin or the kind lady of the support team, I whish all of you and your family/friends a merry christmas! 😃

Merry Christmas everyone 🙂

This year I didn't prepare anything for it, and family won't be visited this year. I think it's better this way. My mother didn't piss on me when I was on fire - back when I was homeless and begged her to be allowed back in her home, she told me to deal with it on my own. She's been homeless herself and knows how terrible it is. I dealt with it. I hate my mother because of that, and visiting her was always an act, a formality.

Not anymore. Half a year ago I cut ties with her.. and honestly, it's for the best. I don't want to get hurt anymore by visiting the house that should've been a refuge but wasn't when I needed it most. And I got rid of it, in favor of my own stuff. And a family of my own, a community of fellow developers with whom I feel a far stronger bond than a family could ever be. You are my new family, my dearest friends. And unlike those blood bonds that make up a family unconditionally, you can bet your ass that you've very much deserved my respect.

Merry Christmas.. unlike with my biological family, I've found refuge in devRant and its community every time I needed it most. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. I love you all.. thank you for being my precious family! ♥️

Sometimes I feel I'm the live version of stack overflow for my family and friends...
Mom: The printer is acting up, how do I fix it?
Brother: I can't login to Netflix, help!
Grandparents: could you fix the radio/TV?
Gf: Apple can't validate my .uk mail

All to which I replied with the answer to life, the universe and everything...

FUCKING GOOGLE IT! Have you googled it?!

And the inevitable reply: no.

The only ones who get a free pass are my grandparents they were born in the 40's and think YouTube works on voodoo.

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.

What the family and friends think you do

I'm wondering, what's you guys/gals/linux kernels/however you identify yourself 'superpower'?

I think that nearly everyone has something which can be extremely useful (maybe not healthy) and which not many other people you know have.

In my case it's that i can manage with extremely variable sleep patterns and when needed, I can sleep very short for days in a row (3-4 hours a night) and I'm all good. Nearly all friends/family that I have NEED regular sleep patterns + at least 8 hours of sleep but i can very much manage without those. Very useful when having disruption service and stuff.

Please post yours in the comments if you're comfortable with that!

I officially cut ties with all my family.

Shitty, cringy, egoist people to ever exist.

They treat me like shit. Just use me as their slave all the time and when anything goes wrong, blame me for everything.

I consider you all my family now. Though we are virtual friends but you guys are better than real family.

Someone drugged me last saturday.
I almost died, friends and family said.
Still recovering from it...

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Ever since I started studying Computer science, I'm suddenly something like an alpha technician to my family and friends. Fixing lamps and phonelines sure is my daily job *eyeroll*. Who can relate?

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

New to this but here's my rant I suppose. It bothers me how "non-tech" people kind of devalue what tech people do. Like they have zero understanding of it, so you make something in 30 minutes or an hour that took years of building said skills and involved complex logic and understanding of relational data and because it only took you 30 minutes or an hour it must have been "easy". Or the way you are everybody's free tech advisor with family and friends... And things are said like "I'm not good with this stuff, but you're so good with it". For the record nobody is just "great" at technology or coding from birth its been a 2+ decade craft that I've experimented with and learned and put effort into. So taking into consideration all this effort I have put in to understand all this you say you'll never remember to push that button so you'll just ask me again when the problem arises. Yes because its so fun for me to constantly maintain your electronics because you can't bother to remember to push a button.

Honestly? People. For the first two years of my career I worked for an investment bank.. Basically working to make rich people richer. That, plus the technology sucked, made me change what I do.

I now work for a company that, while it doesn't cure cancer, it makes products that my friends use, my family uses, even my 1 year old son uses. And knowing I am making a difference in their life in even just a little way is worth it.

Also now that I have a family and a kid, my priorities have shifted and as much as I love coding, my family and kid will always come first now. Could I be making more at an investment bank where I worked 12 hour shifts every day? Sure. But it's not worth it to me.

Freinds/Family: You study computer science?
Me: Yeah
Friends/Family: so you write in 1s and 0s all day? How do you do it?
Me: *Rethinking choice in friends*

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

My biggest hurdle is learning to code all by myself. I never knew anyone that I could ask for help or discuss problems with, because there weren't any programmers in my family, and my friends were too busy playing video games.

Surprise surprise, that unrealistic deadline you set even when the engineering team told you that it wasn't going to work has backfired! Maybe you wouldn't be so stressed if you learnt to listen? It's a pretty basic skill, or at least I thought so.
Oh and when you say "we have two options, stay late or work weekends" you have a critical bug in your conditional. Your missing option 3, go the fuck home. Time to enjoy my weekend with friends and family.

I was in college studying stuff I couldn't care less about and had a job that was consuming me. A couple of colleagues and I then decided to open our own company. Four years of sleepless nights later, all colleagues left. I had lost touch with family and friends, had lost a girlfriend and had been left with all the company's debt to pay. Going back to my old career seemed like the only option, but I couldn't let me sabotage myself again. I sat my butt in front of my sister's computer and downloaded every coding class I could get my hands on. Getting used to sleep deprivation helped. Eventually I built my first app and landed my first freelance job. All hat in hand, I told this company I didn't have much experience and they told me they'd hire a senior developer as well. It was on a Sunday morning, at 4am, with the deadline breathing down our necks, that the senior developer had jumped ship and the company asked me if I could take over the project. That moment I realised it's all about being competent. That moment I knew I could do this.

fb messenger stopped working after the update, it just shows a white screen... it made me realise i don't even care, family and friends contact me there but ... Dobby is a free elf now

Notice :

Citizens are advised to store all their passwords into either text files or Google Keep, OneNote, Evernote so that it would come in handy whenever you forget the Password.

Please share this among your family and friends.

Have a nice day :)

Yeah, if my so called "friends" can just stop making me feel guilty for staying in with my son instead of going out having beers in pretentious clubs, with music blasting at a billion decibels that we can't even have a decent conversation.

If you could just stop; that would be great.

I'm sorry I have to work. I'm sorry I can't leave my 6 year old alone in the house on a school night. I'm sorry I don't have an army of maids to look after him. I'm sorry I don't have personal drivers to take him to school. I'm sorry if your family or your wife's family is so fucking rich you're basically a kept man and now bored out of your wits.

Please, just fuck off with this toxic behavior. We are not in our 20s anymore.

Thank you.

Made the mistake of telling friends and family I know how to make websites.

Sorry I can't make you a Airbnb like website for $200 🙃

Everyone in family and friends allways ask me "You're a programmer and know a lot about computer, so why you're not in Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?"

My answer: We create these services for you (average people) we don't use them ourselves. It's a security hole to put your information in public.

Hearing from friends and some family... "You don't really work. You just sit in front of a computer all day."

I'm from the UK. My CS teacher took a dislike to me in junior high school, dissuading me from taking the classes I needed to take computer science at college. I ended up starting an economics major and then dropping out.

With the support of my family and friends I started over as a self taught as a developer.

I'm now a Tech Director in New York and love my job.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Yea... so you know all those rants/jokes about how you need to explain programming to ur friends and family?

I just realized I don't have that problem.... all of them are programmers as well :)

Dear friends and family, just because I'm a devloper does not mean I know how to fix all of your IT issues. I am not IT.

So you think it's bad when your friends, family, strangers and others ask you to fix their phone or computer is bad when they hear you're a programmer, IT or good with computers?

You think it's bad when they ask you whether you're hacking when they see code or terminal on your screen?

You think it's bad when they ask you to fix a cracked phone screen because you work with computers?

Well, think again because today my teammate was asked to fix a vending machine by X from another department because, according to X the vending was not accepting X's other dollar bill. The first dollar bill was accepted so why wouldn't it accept the 2nd one? Because the 🤬 dollar bill is crumpled. That's it.

What wows me is what made X think this is an IT issue.

According to X.... "because it has power, lights and touch screen so IT can fix it That's what you guys do, right? You can fix anything".

Me: wait!?, what?, uhhh..., are you serious? Wtf? Why? Grrrr

Me: "I study computer science"
Family and friends: "Can you fix our wifi?"

Depression update two.
Thanks for amazing support guys!
I have made decision to have a digital detox. Today I did have another bout of depression accompanied with a mild case of confused state of mind and suicidal thoughts. I have found the triggers(Social media and too much time spent on the internet.) I have lost a lot of weight too. From 68KG -> 46 KG in span of weeks. So I hope I will catch you soon after I recover from it.

Fuck depression. If anyone is having bouts of depression please contact your health-care provider or friends/family.

Love you all. ❤️🙏☺️

I have to confess something.

I am enjoying fixing stuff from friends and family.

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶

So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗

Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂

Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯

But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄

Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.

!dev !sex I promise this is a good read

I once read the whole bible.

Not in one sitting, ofc. I read it in a period of a year, just 3-4 chapters a day.

Is it something to boast about?
I'm not sure.

I mean, I guess being able to read through it despite not being exactly entertainment material (except some fun parts) kinda is. So I might feel a tad bit proud about that.

But I'm actually more happy that I did instead.

The reason I'm more happy than proud is because I took awareness of the religion I was in.

I became christian when I was an early teen. I grew up in an agnostic family. My dad was kinda hippie and my mom was into leftist ideas.

So me becoming a christian was a bit orthogonal to their philosophies.

I started assisting a church because I was very alone and misunderstood, and found some people there that seemed to get me, and viceversa.

But as time went on and I got more exposed to christian doctrine, my level of commitment grew.

I wanted to save people from going to hell. It sounds funny, maybe egotistical, but it's true.

3, 4 years of being in the church go by. I collaborate in the church, I make some very personal friendships, I was very deep in church by that point.

I then decide that I should take it to the next level and read the bible. So I did. And unknowingly, it started this feeling in me that I didn't liked being a christian at all.

I'm not gonna deny there are some christian values that are still compatible with today's modern society, such as being a good samaritan, working hard, being honest.

But there were too many verses in both old and new testament that I found morally repugnant,

The ones that made me feel the worst about christianity, though, were the ones that condemned homosexuality with death.

Since my dad was a hippie, he used to be in artsy things, like theater or music, and through that he had some gay friends

And for real, I think they were the nicest and most cheerful people I'd met as a kid. So I could not be part of that anymore.

Let me clarify that I didn't stop being a christian immediately after finishing the bible, but it did start a spark "of "what tf do I even believe in...?"

That spark turned into flame when I started the university, a place where people think for a living.

It's no wonder my mind started completing the puzzle, and slowly I started liking church and christianity less and less.

Until one sunday I didn't want to go, and I didn't, and from then on, I pretty much severed ties with that church and christianity.

Which is crazy considering I went every sunday without interruption for 6 years, and several saturdays too.

Anyhow, that's my story of me getting in n out of christianity. Like in the previous post, it sure how to end this, so go fuck a rock or something.

So it's December 31st. Also my birthday, but no one is going to celebrate it. Wish I could revert to an earlier version of the program to when people were happy to celebrate it like, friends and family.

Hell is accidentally clicking on, instead of copying, an email URL and having to wait forty years for some email program you didn't even know existed to rise from its slumber like some Lovecraftian ancient god, meanwhile the fans on your laptop are preparing for takeoff and you stare dead-eyed as the rainbow spirals, spirals, spirals. you wait and suffer this cosmic karma. days pass. “just a few more seconds” you slur. your laptop freezes and the concept of time is no longer comprehensible. your family and friends forget your name and you fade from existence.

My family and friends think, that I'm sending spam emails.
Which is kinda true.

You wake up in the middle of the night with an awesome idea for a new app.
You spend weeks thinking about it, open a private repo, start to design the UI and logo, and in all your excitement explain your idea to the family and best friends, but no one really finds it cool.
Slowly you start to lose the excitement, day after day you consider it more and more stupid, until you start to hate both the idea and yourself because you really liked it.

6 months later, when you totally forgot about it, you find an app on the App Store very similar to it (but with less features)... as App of the Day, sold for €6.99, 4.8 rating, thousands of positive comments and loved by everyone.

The moral of this story?
If you really like your idea, just make it happen without looking at anyone.

Haven’t read many of this weeks rants but in my case I talk to shitloads of people through Signal.

Sometimes I meet friends and family in person, in case of friends it’s mostly updating each other on life while having a few beers.

I’ve got to say that I don’t see my best friends that much anymore but we compromise for that one by going to hard style/rawstyle festivals. Although I’m the most Fanatic one, at least one of the guys also loves rawstyle and the other one just tags along since he isn’t much of a fan but he just loves the atmosphere/energy there 😁

I don’t see family a lot but we’ve got a group Signal to stay in touch as well.

Talking about festivals, anyone going to Dreamfields Saturday?

The entire reason I became a developer was so that I could one day build something that I can say has/had a handful of users, that I could build something that helped save someone's life, that helped someone in their time of need.

That reason was fulfilled when I built my only successful and proudest project during a cold night in 2011. I was 16 at the time, and here in South India, there was a major cyclone affecting a portion of our country (Chennai/Tamil Nadu). A lot of my family were in affected areas, and I didn't know what I could do being so far away (around 400kms/250mi away, in Bangalore).

I stayed up all night to build what was then known as ChennaiRains.org. It was a simple website, a directory and a safe house for everyone's information. Whoever needed help, whoever was ready to give help, whoever was volunteering their travel, their time. I didn't think it would help much. I just wanted to make a small difference.

Next morning, after the hangover of the all-nighter I pulled faded away, I see that the website went viral after a few shares on Twitter. The community was so supportive of my little project to help my family and friends. It caught a peak traffic of a million users overnight, no ads, no money made from this, I just earned the experience of a lifetime. It eventually helped a lot of people in need, connected a lot of volunteers and victims.

It has been the epitome of my life. It's the reason I still develop applications to-date, even if they are simple. Somewhere out there, someone needs it, and I want to be able to help to them :)

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

Your most paranoic internet experience?

Several years ago, I was going to watch my first porn movie, and I was so afraid of the porn page publishing on my facebook "Elizadeath liked Xporn.net" or something like that (I had family on my facebook friends) so I:

1.- Used an old tablet (even its screen was crashed)
2.- Removed all email accounts (it has Android)
3.- Uninstalled all the social media apps, including youtube
4.- Put a piece of tape on the frontal camera
5.- Bought new headphones
6.- Navigated at the Android's default browser instead of Chrome, and in "secret" mode
7.- Deleted the cache and history after watching the movie XD

What's your experience?

It happened me a few years ago. I live in the Netherlands, but I am Hungarian. My new "friends" asked me to fix their laptop. I did it for free. It turns out, it was a huge mistake. In the next half a year I've solved several issues to them and to their family members (I don't get it, how they can ruin a well working hardware and software that fast, but it is another story). It takes a lot from my free time at the end. Then I had enough and ask some money to fix the next laptop. The price wasn't high, a bit more than a half of the repair shop's price. They tried to press me to do it for free, cos "you are our friend and you are hungarian too, we have to help each other out". I said no. It is too much. I've never seen them again...

Not programming relevant.

Humans are assholes. Last week was my birthday. First my mom need to remember my sisters and grandma. Last only send a WhatsApp message for my birthday. Saturday I want to celebrate with some friends. Some didn't respond, one decline because of health issues (was ok). At least 9 people including me. But only after 2.5h (8pm) the designated driver was "tired" and take 3 more people with. So they didn't take a walk or drive by Taxi, but went fucking partying at another place...

Half of family nearly forget my birthday and a bunch of "friends" are real jerks.

**noob alert**
Hi all, I'm new to this community. I found it out couple of days back while downloading some apps on play store. And I don't know how much time have I spent here since then... Damm, I've an interview after 2 days.

My query is, I am stuck/confused. I have so many ToDos. ToDos to learn new things, from UI to other langs to machine learning to database to etc etc. And I keep on postponing it because I can't decide which way to go first. There is so much fuzz about BigData/AI which sounds cool. Sometimes I want to build UI for my imaginary idea, then somebody says a man must learn linux and DB. Top of that I'm preparing for interviews, so I think I should get a job first and then start learning. But when I get a job, I get *busy* with job. It feels like Captain America, all he does is official work. I sometimes feel like trying open source coding, but quit the idea because I get scared or overwhelmed by imagining the big community behind it and I won't be able to make a difference or I might get bashed by others as I get bashed in StackOverFlow :-(
I'm unable to get help from friends/family/colleagues, not because they are bad. It's just they don't get it. People think just because you have a job which pays the bills and save money, everything is fine because there are lots of people who dream to get a job, so be thankful for what you have. I'm thankful... But it's not helping. I really want to do things more than what my job asks me to. The kid inside me is awake since I became adult.

Have you been in this condition or is it just me? Or is it too confusing? Could you please help me out. Thanks a lot. Sorry for serious post. I'm a java programmer by the way.

I did some grave and irreversible mistakes in my life

- Never gathered enough courage to mingle with women when I was younger and now the hope is lost

- Compromised my values and mental wellness when I met a narcissistic bitch

- Did not invest money wisely when markets were sailing low and allowed that good sum to sit in bank

- Did not plan health and term insurance at early age when premiums could have been low

- Out of fear, did not follow my gut to purchase gold because my father was acting crazy (or else my money would have been doubled)

- Did not plan my taxation well (or until now would have paid almost zero tax)

- Did not define strict boundaries and allowed people to overstep (or else I would have better friends and family relationships)

- Did not quit my job early and stuck with low paying shit with negative learning, for years (or else I would have grown exponentially)

Thankfully few things I did right are, spending more time with my mom and learning from my mistakes.

I hope I don't make such stupid life choices again.

New job on the horizon after being unemployed for a couple of months. Moving away from full-stack a bit to focus in on front-end stuff. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Expect rage-filled rants in the near future 👌

Taking some time off was beneficial in all kinds of ways: got out of long term toxic relationship, got in betterer shape, learned stuff I'm actually interested in, mental health improved massively along with self-esteem, and I reconnected with friends and family. I'm actually enjoying life again. Don't get me wrong though, I had to claw my way out of a pretty dark hole... But I'm starting to think I fucking made it. This is a new start and I'm excited.

Fuck being in a toxic relationship.
Fuck working a job that is killing you.

If you're reading this and feel stuck: you deserve better. Listen to your gut, only you know what kind of life is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a good job by every possible standard if it's making you miserable! A relationship exists to help you grow, to give you energy, to cultivate love. Sure, you'll go through bad times but if it's pathologically bad it won't get better on it's own. Trust me, I waited years for things to get better.

Anyways, good luck with whatever is challenging you right now, big or small. 😘

The moment when you can't be bothered to tell family or friends what you do for a living so you just say working with computers....and the conversation normally stops there....

Also bonus when they contact you in the future to fix ALL their computer issues.....

ALRIGHT! I'LL GIVE YOU SUPPORT ON MY VACATION TOO, IT'S NOT LIKE I HAVE FRIENDS AND FAMILY, NOPE, ALL I CARE ABOUT IS YOUR UNSTRUCTURED PHP CODE WHICH NEEDS TO BE REFACTORED BECAUSE 2 VISITORS ON YOUR WEBSITE SUGGESTED SO!

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

Best debugging strategy: try to show off what you made to friends and family

What's the shittiest IT company you seen ?

I'll tell one i know - it had the shittiest web site I've ever seen, they built Android app that "enables users to pray to God" , a basic shitty app with pictures of Hindu gods and a button labelled "Perform e-pooja" Also the app description said "Share the app with friends and family" to receive free Gods blessing.

Really dude?! How low can you go?...have some basic ethics!

P.S: This company came to our institution with job offers and my teacher asked why i didn't attend their interview.

No thanks, I'd rather start as freelancer and work on building my own company than wasting my life in such retarded company.

Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.

Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.

Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.

Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.

Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.

This is the state of our current industry.

*Drops the mic*

When People Around You And Your Family And Closest Friends Think that programming is hacking.

Me: Why?

I’ve been programming for 20 years now. My friends and family never really understood what I did back in the days. And they still don’t.
All they saw was a kid who was good with computers. Your friendly neighborhood tech guy who would take a look at your computer for free.
I’m sure most of you have been in the same situation.

When people ask me what I do for a living. I’d just say “something with computers”. Because most of the time they will ask me to look at their computers and I’d reply with “oh that’s not what I do”.

When I was younger, I’d try to explain what I actually do for a living. To really tell people the problems we as a programmer solves on a daily basis or the things we create. That’s really hard to explain to “common” people.

So whenever someone asks me what I do for a living? It’s always something with computers ;)

Not a rant. Just a story.

So two weeks ago, a cat gave birth to two beautiful kittens in our balcony. We started giving milk to the mother and sometimes inviting the family to our house. The kittens are naughty charming. The mother sits for hours and sometimes sleeps while watching us do our chores (watching movies, coding, etc.)

Now, we live in New Delhi and Wednesday was Diwali. The family was playing in the balcony and we had to go out. So we locked the balcony door and went to have fun with friends. We didn't realize that people would burst firecrackers which could scare the cats. When we returned, the mother was very scared and (kind of) screaming. One of the kittens was missing!! We live on the fourth floor and I got scared too. We searched using a flashlight but there was no sign of kitten. After 30 minutes of search, We gave up. I assumed the kitten jumped from the balcony and might be dead. I tried to sleep but could not. Around 4 AM in the morning, I heard some noise. When I opened the door, the second kitten was there. Her mom was scolding (or so it seemed). It was a moment of joy.

Thought of sharing. This family has become our friends. Now I realize how cats are good companions.

Frack! I just found out I have to video record a friend's wedding. Why? Apparently because I'm a developer I suddenly know all things electronic and interacting with humans must be something I enjoy. I do not. Darn my wife and her persuasive sexual superpowers.
Me: "But...but...they are your friends, not mine."
Wife: "If you do this, someone else might have a good wedding night"
Me: *sigh* "What time do I need to be there?"

The family doesn't have much money and can't afford a professional videographer, so I understand (been there), but I'm probably going to have to smile, be nice and..ugh...socialize.

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

If you CC: me on an email I won't read it because I'm clearly not the intended recipient and I'm not going to do your work for you in trying to work out why I should give a fuck.

If you wish me to actually *give* said fuck then send me my own fucking email explaining why I should give a rat's anus about your shitty little problems.

And, if you try to use "but I copied you on the email" as an excuse for your incompetence in a meeting, I will eviscerate you on the spot. You will be looking at your small intestine while I ask your assembled co-workers if they have any other business.

CC: basically means you have no respect for my time. So, if you do it, I'm coming for you...and your family...and your friends...and all the people you know on Linked-In...

I've been reading a lots of posts about the "Age of No Privacy" and how our most personal information is spread and abused.
Well, obviously those complaining didn't have the displeasure of being born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family.
I had a small medical procedure, and my entire family (spread across 4 continents) became aware of it, created a WhatsApp group to discuss it (with message traffic that would shame any war room), and then my younger cousins asked that we post photos.
Of what?! My fucking colon? How about I stream the whole process live on Facebook, you crazy little shits?!
My point is - we violate the privacy of our close friends and loved ones daily, giving very little thought to what sort of information should or should not be forwarded. I'm not opposing to the battle against great evils, but maybe we should start by not committing small evils daily.

My life didnt go as smooth as i expected. Everything happened as expected, i knew what going to the uni requires, i knew everything...
But i didnt accounted for my mental health. Since forever i have thought that im lazy or something like that, that i can do everything i just have to do it. Oh how wrong was I. It went from my projects being frozen for a long time due to lack of motivation to neglecting important living activies. Even my health suffered a bit. Everytime i failed, even the simplest task no matter why i always felt even worse. Even the most basic tasks were unimportant for me. Even some minor tasks that i failed gave me huge guilt. Not to mention that my family wont help me with my mental health at all, (they cant see what is realy happening they always think im lazy) (but maybe they could fucking figure out that being sad liteary for years is bad). My contact with friends is limited, im always scared to go or more often scared to ask is they have time to meet because they are ALWAYS busy...
So that was my life, alone, against people who were demanding (and my mother who thought that her hard work was everything i needed, but no. Money, food and clean house isnt everything that human requires to propely function!). Now I have scheduled a meeting with the specialist, i hope the uni has better ones than the other ones i had. I hope he will help me and i will get out that life downwards spiral.

I've been working with some new programmers now, trying to make this a place where people actually like working at. In my experience, most workplaces are bottom of the barrel shit, so I really wanted to try and make this the opposite, at least for the engineering team. When I hear them say how much they like working here, and how jealous their friends or family are at how much they are enjoying themselves and chilling with their coworkers and even their boss, it makes me feel so nice.

It might be a tiny company, but spreading happiness is great.

That awkward moment when your family and friends sit behind you and ask questions;

What is this you're typing on the screen?

Why words have different colors?

Why so many tabs?

How do you type so fast?

....... and more

Share yours.

Working in security for many years only granted me world-class paranoia about taking pictures of myself and my family. It even made it hard to keep in touch with my friends as we don’t live in the same country anymore.

The good side is that it pays well enough to grant me a platinum foil hat.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

Age++;
I'm gonna flex and tell that I've got a new Switch. My family and friends are really the best.

Thanks to them I also got to know that thief that stole my original Switch is named Stephan.

So I also want to thank you, Stephan, you thieving fuck. I hope you'll have fun with my console. I know that the police won't do shit since you are living in different country, so you can feel safe.

I've lost most of my games along with the console, cause I'm an idiot, but if anyone want to add me to their friend list here's my code:

SW-4095-0455-2232

I look after servers, softwares,vendors and write code too. I am also learning datascience in spare time. Suddenly I found that I am giving no time to family and friends.

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

Most normal people will now be heading home before enjoying their weekend with alcohol and hopefully friends and family.

However I can get pissed on 2 bottles of cider. Friends are busy tonight and family is elsewhere.

So tonight will be spent on designing a side project drunk and tomorrow will be spent repeatedly saying "what the fuck" while reviewing it. Either something good or something terrible will happen. Wish me luck.

Being a programmer for a while now it always irritates me to try to explain what I'm working on to friends and family. I forget what I knew before I developed. I'm always like "I made the strings in the database- oh I mean the words...well they're actually more like strings of letters- well anyway I made a code to sanitize the user input- I mean make it so it is secure before uhhh saving." I spend so much time watering what I'm saying down I forget what I'm talking about

It's not even funny. It'd be funny if one single person in my family or friend group understood what I meant to some degree.

I seem to be everyone's free tech support. I'm always helping my friends and family but I don't get anything in return. 😣

I keep sending this to family and friends that ask me unbelivable questions.
Im sure you all know the feeling.

I just realized that devrant is the *only* community I can resort to lol. I can't rant to any of my coworkers about work. can't rant to any of my colleagues in college because they are fucking idiots. I tried to help them improve time and time again but they just blatantly refuse and I just gave up and said fuck you guys. can't rant to my family or friends cause they can't understand shit about code.don't know if any other platform that has a community that's as amazing as this one. so I would've been practically alone if it wasn't for devrant. thank you guys for enduring my bullshit over the past year. and thank you for the developers for creating this awesome community. I don't really know what I'm talking about but I guess I had to rant a little. if you've read this far. Thank you.

guess this turned into a rant of it's own. lol. will write the actual rant in another post. XD

Merry Christmas everyone.

I passed this day alone, in another country, away from family, friends and without anyone to hang out with.
On top of that my gf (she lives in my country) posted a video dancing with her ex.

So, enjoy your time with your family and friends, even they're not perfect they love you and care about you.
I m kinda sad right now, but I will fight this. I m gonna be alone and when the year change so i believe its time to strengthen my character.

Happy holidays boys n girls. 🙂

Depression and anxiety is a major challenge in my work life.
I could remember vividly when I was at my last job, any time I felt depressed I'll call for sick leave. It was hard for me to pinpoint the cause of my depression because even while on most sick leave I still felt depressed.
I blamed it on my job, blamed it on my family, on my social circle, on my friends, on my lifestyle, on almost everything. At some point it all felt like it was me versus the world, a fight I could never win.
Thoughts came in... Maybe it's because John is now married with two kids, or because Stella is now the new manager, or that David just bought a new Ross Royce and I'm still riding an ice-cream truck, or its because Steve is always on vacation and PM always complaining about uncompleted task with no acknowledgement for the 2 months task finished in a week, or because Boss is always calling for stupid meetings. Different thoughts in my head... Jealousy, Envy, Disappointment, Tiredness, Confusion, all combined at once.

But I did found a cure for my anxiety and depressed nature...
During lunch hours I visit a beach close to where I work, it's called "Tarkwa bay". I'll sit at the rock formations and glare at the shadows of the rising sun, listen to the sound of rumbling waters and passive the complete overview of nature. The feeling I get there is really calming, It occupies my head with neutral thoughts and a love for nature. 🤗
I truly experienced an improvement overall and it's been a while I felt depressed since I started such a routine.
Nature is really a gift.

Started off a developer 6 months back. I seem to have lost control of my life. I wake up at 8, be at work at 9am, get back home by 7 or 8pm, dinner, learn, work on my platform, sleep at 12am or 1am and the cycle continues.

I have no time for taking care of myself, no working out, no grooming, no family time, no time with friends, nothing naada! It scares me that I don't have that balance.

I always feel like I'm not good enough and I'm curious by nature, because of these, I sit my ass down and work / learn like crazy because I want to be good but I fear for my health, I'm 22, so I can live for now like this but this lifestyle will ruin my future, I've started getting back problems and shit, that was the wake up call!

How do you guys do it? work - life balance? I believe this information is vital for everyone starting out as a developer.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

I put this picture as my whatsapp profile picture to stop the countless amount of how do I fix this device questions.

Who else here gets irritated when family and friends asks you to fix their computer or printer or ask you what device they should buy

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

#justathought

There are 6 stages of an man's live that he wish for

1. Child phase and school phase : don't know what it was, can't remember mine

2. Teenage phase : study, exploring new areas, competition, body building, getting into relationships , breakups, dreaming, etc

3. Ambitious phase : getting graduate, changing jobs , lust for money, tensions, parties, ambitions, cars ,new houses , marriage, honeymoons and kids

4. Family settled phase : permanent job, nice salary, long family trips , fun time with kids, paid holidays, hardworking phase

5. No tensions settled phase : children getting graduate, marrying, trying to settle themselves, you and your wife having enough money or pension to live peacefully, you are playing golf with friends, doing excersize nd charity regularly, etc

6. Permanently settled phase : lie peacefully in your death bed and wait for eyes to close in sleep forever

..
..
..
..
..
What life gives : "fuck that shit... let's mix some of these stages, replace some of them with opposite/ negative stages and skip some of them"

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

Took a side job for 1/4 of the price it should cost for a friend.

Kind of pissed off because it should be $4,000 for the hours I’m spending (80 hours) and losing valuable time with my friends and family

I'm regretting actually going to social events with my family. It goes exactly as I expect it:

Brother is talking to his friends, mother talking to my brother's friend's mom. And I'm awkwardly sitting aside on devRant...

Boss(In company chat): Guys we only need 100 votes to win this award.Do vote and also push your friends and family to vote.
Me: git push -f origin master
Boss: I'll see you tomorrow.
Me: git reset HEAD --hard.

(I think I am gonna get fired)

Different perspective.

So your friend wants you to make the next big Facebook or Google because they know you can code....lots of rants like that and it gets me as well when I'm fixing printers for family and friends. Thing is these people genuinely just want to do something cool and succeed so they can have a good life. They see what we can do and wish they had the same talent. They have an idea they think will be great, they don't know what we know, and they don't know that it could be the most amazing thing ever and still never take off.

They don't realize to be Facebook or Google you have to sell out your values, morals, and soul. They just think if we can code we should be millionaires. So on that philosophy after just over a year the devRant creators should be rolling in cash right? But pretty sure I saw they are still operating at a loss.

I'd love to be able to have the time to work with each of them, teach them, and guide them through that first failure and let down of realizing that coding doesn't buy a magic ticket to a new life.

// Like anyone ever really fixes a printer //

No rant here but just wanted to remind the ladies and gentlemen to take that break and spend time with your family or friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and pets. If someone s been meaning to do it and got bogged down by work, I hope this serves as a reminder.

Almost all my family think I'm free tech support.

My dad knows what I do and he's proud because I finished uni (he didn't), he sometimes asks for help (he repairs electronic stuff) and I try as hard as possible to be useful (it's fun!). He knows that (most of the time) I'm working when I'm in my laptop, so he doesn't bother me, he kindly asks if he needs help with something.

My brother's studying the same I did, he's doing fine. I think better than me when I started.

My sister knows that I can repair her phone/laptop but she asks me to do it whenever I have free time and how she can avoid to "damage" it again.

My friends think I'm awesome, but I'm in constant stress (thanks imposter syndrome!).

My dog, he just barks and smiles whenever I'm around and he thinks I'm awesome, so I have that going on for me, which is nice.

🐶

I moved away from friends and family to cut my commute from 1 hour 30 minutes to just 30 minutes. Shortly after moving I quit that job and got a new job an hour and 15 minted away. My friends and family are now an hour away. So I don't have much of a social life. Im not willing to move because my kids are in awesome schools now. That is more important than hanging out with friends. Right? Right?

Just sent my christmas cards to friends, family and customers. Have great holidays! 🎅🏼🎁🎄

Had a burnout at my last job when I worked myself to the bone to cope with stress, a failing relationship and not having much money. Also, made a crap ton of mistakes at work because of it.

Didn't sleep much, started skipping lunch to save what little money I had so I could commute (friends treated me every now and then, still grateful), dropped out of college because couldn't juggle work, studies and got chewed out by my family every day and just worked non-stop.

The end result was that I collapsed when I got home one night and woke up at 3 am with a severe migraine; stayed awake till sunrise then left for work again (got scolded really badly by everyone, felt loved). Fun times.

I'm currently in the progress of deleting whatsapp and migrating to signal.
The hardest part of it is dealing with friends and family. I informed them about the incoming whatsapp-deletion tomorrow and the results were mixed. One friend told me she will not use signal, but i haven't talked with her that much anyway so... My mother asked me "can you not do this because i don't have space left on my phone?", my father told me "can you tell me about [...] before you go offline?", 2 people don't seem to care, and only my cousin contacted me on signal yet.

I have signal for 3 years now and even invited people to it, but i got the expected response "but all my friends are on whatsapp". Until recently i was the one with the shitload of messengers on my phone but some people can't be bothered to install a second one because i want to take one step (out of many to follow) to widen my privacy.
I'm really pissed by now and will declare any contact lost due to this as collateral damage.

I prefer coding after my friends, family, colleagues, and flirts have all gone to sleep.

Just don't open it...

Will definitely not pretend to be productive 24/7. But the below help me reach a satisfactory 8/5 most day's.
- Exercise in the morning
- Eat breakfast
- Listen to good music
- Make sure to have fun moments throughout the workday (++ for initiating)
- Catch air, have a walk, take a break
- Minimize interactions with toxic people
- Be open in sharing knowledge, thoughts, work , good people will repay you
- Get in the kitchen, cook nice healthy meals
- Set concrete and reachable targets
- Remain eager to learn
- Celebrate successes
- Spent time with friends and family
- Catch enough sleep

And above all, DON'T open devRant!!!

What’s the most nonsensical habit that your non-tech-savvy friends or family have with computers or electronic devices?

Here’s mine: when my parents first got iPhones, they were deathly afraid of going over their data plan limit, so they would go into Settings and turn cellular data off whenever they weren’t actively using the phone...

My social life consists of spending much of my free time with my girlfriend, seeing my close family on weekends and meeting with a few friends from time to time.

It's enough for me and since there's not much of it, it isn't hard to "balance". Whatever that means.

Seriously tho, "social/work life balance" is subjective. It depends on what you need to feel good and happy. What works for some will not work for others. Don't try to push others into being social when they don't want to. Don't give me that "you need to go out more" crap. I don't. I'm fine just like this. I prefer to stay home and see a movie with my girlfriend.

That "people need to be social" mindset made me feel bad about myself for too long because I'm just not like that and people keep pushing that idea into my head. I'll go out with you when I feel like it, don't push it. Stop asking me every fucking weekend ffs.

!rant

I just saw someone write about how much he hates school and it reminded me of all I am about to say:

I go to a fancy private school in my country full of shitheads and idiots that think that they can rely on their parents money for the rest of their lives, are always concerned about the latest trends (yeezys, dabs, fidget spinners... etc) and it just gets on my nerves as I have to live with all that and have almost no friends since I failed my class two years ago, when I sit in school I can't focus on anything the teacher says which in turn contributes to my shit grades and there is nothing I can do about it. I have been diagnosed with persistent depresseive disorderand bouts of major depression and my mom won't accept to give me adequate medication because she says(although this is not always the case) that antidepressants can trigger the bipolar disorder that runs in my family, and on top of all this shit, ever since I was 7 I have been raised by my single mother after my father died (I never tell people that my father is dead usually because I hate the look of pity I get coming out of their faces) and my mother has been screwed over for all her life because she can't make a good decision or call bullshit even if you put a gun to her head.

And what I hate most about all that is that I have no one to talk to because my mom is one of those religious freaks so I can't talk to her about my real deep thoughts, and every psychologist or counselor I have been to has been shit.

And this is just another chronicle of my miserable fucking existence.

I have an Android phone. Pixel 2 to be exact, and I love it. Many family members and friends of mine have iPhones. To each their own.

Having said that, I absolutely HAAAATE the stupid iPhone feature that lets users react to text messages. Today all those iPhone users added me to literally 5 different SMS groups (which by themselves are their own sin), chatting up a storm all evening. I already hate group texts, please, leave me alone. But it gets so much worse when my phone blows up with twice as many messages because so-and-so "liked" this message, and so-and-so "laughed" at that message. It sends you their chosen verb alongside the ENTIRE original text AGAIN.

Such a stupid feature, leave Facebook on Facebook, why the hell do text messages need reactions? I don't give a shit that you liked or laughed or loved that so and so said they will be there at 9 o clock.

At least i have the ability to mute notifications for each group otherwise I'd be replying to every group text I get with a trolling big trigger item or something super inappropriate until they stop. Don't want this to continue? Stop group texting me, stop reacting to texts, and don't do it again.

Just a tip I read today :
Don't deploy anything to production this week. So u don't endup debugging during the holiday and abandoning ur friends and family. ..
Happy holidays 🎉

It's been three weeks now that „SPRING“ is over and Nerdism won over our interior decorations. Neither wife nor friends and family noticed. But I do. Every morning. This time I made an impact to our decoration. This single time

When all your friends (which there ain't much of them) are out doing their own stuff, gf and family at the other side of the country, I'm glad devRant is here keeping me occupied and sane... and of course Steam too (but it'll always be 2nd)...

Very random, I’d normally post this on twitter but my girlfriend is there and it’s about her. A bit long and very personal...

to;dr My girlfriend and soon to be fiancé officially who is certain we are going to marry, doesn’t want to invite people to our wedding anymore because she doesn’t have close friends like I do and I’m quite disappointed.

My girlfriend and I have been planning to get married for a while now at least 18 months. I haven’t asked her to marry me yet officially but I know she’ll say yes because we’ve discussed it. We’ve spoken about a small wedding with a few friends not much family but the more we spoke about it the more she’s reduced how many people we should invite. Today she basically said she doesn’t want to invite anyone because she doesn’t have any friends she’s that close to or trusts like that.
By comparison I have about 5 best friends I can count on any day of the week and at least 5 other friends I’d want to be there. We’re both introverts but I’m close to some of these guys because we have similar mental illnesses and trauma from our youth and we gravitated to each other like magic. She kinda gets jealous of that sometimes or sad that she isn’t close to anyone like that besides me. But not like a toxic jealousy or anything. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point it really may just be us at our wedding.
I’m a romantic and the day will be great regardless, after all it’s her I’m marrying not them. On the flip side I’ve always seen my wedding day as something I’d get to share with my close friends I wanted to get married in the past in fact this would be the second time I’d propose to someone. She’s the one that made me feel like I’d marry again after the first engagement went terribly.
I’m disappointed and if I bring it up too much it’s just gonna make her feel awkward and cave for me but I don’t want that. Gonna marry her regardless though.

Roof over head.food on table a good family and good friends What else can one ask for. 🙂

We all hate being tech support for our family and friends, but motherfuck this is insane; my sister asks me for support and then doesn't listen to me. E.g. I tell her that the Microsoft login page is fucked up so she'll need to login again and she doesn't try again, but pesters me until I login for her... Every goddamn time...

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

When friends and family still think that because I write software ("do coding"), I work for Microsoft. Or that I'm the guy to fix anything that uses electricity.

On New Year's Eve a few years back I was around 21/22 and my friends were anywhere between 20/25.

My best friend has a big house so he offered to host it there (as every year pretty much), so we all agreed to do dinner and party after.

We decided to go with barbecue, and we all brought a few things.

Without my knowledge, they are all pretty much gamers and also decided to bring their laptops and even towers to play during the whole day and night.

The result was me "alone" cooking with the dad of a female friend (whose wife died a few years back and offered to help since he would be pretty much alone or with some other family members, not sure).

Once we finished cooking and went on to calling them, no one came to eat because "they were finishing just one more game", and eventually the dad yelled at them and left, I just went eating by myself, and they all showed up a few minutes later looking like 5 year olds when dads scream at them.

I can pretty much say that was the weirdest thing ever, but they did learn because never again they did the same!

Girlfriend, family, relatives, non-coder friends keeps ranting why I don't follow a social convention of attending usual meetings or gatherings and advising I should rather get some time away from a monitor screen.

*Like that's going to happen, getting away from screen, ever, hahahahahhha*

As many of you are, I am too a 24/7 IT support for the whole family.

One time I was going back to uni for the week on a bus when my mom calls that her facebook is acting wierd. You guessed it, it was a virus. Then after 10 minutes of struggling I asked my sister to take the phone because she would understand the technial terms more easily and I didn't have mobile net or wifi at the time to use teamviewer. After 10 more minutes the virus was gone and I explained what happened and what not to do next time.
Later that day her friends got the same virus and my mother proudly told them that she already gotten rid of it and helped them remove it too.

However pathetic it may sound, I haven't. I've made good acquaitances, yes. But friends...

Last I had friends was in my first uni years. Long, long ago. After that - they went on their path and I - on mine. Work, family, personal projects and sometimes moto rides - that's my life now. Not really much time for friends. Not really much time to make any. Not enough time in a day to think/worry about it, not to mention reconsider my priorities/choices.

As an introvert, this is a big challenge. A few years ago, I buried my social life to be focused on my work. But after some years, I realized this was doing more harm than good to me.
Since then I try to dedicate more time to friends, social events, and family. It's not easy to keep in touch, invite to a coffee, joining a class/activity and meet new people. Everyone's life is so busy today. But it's worth.
I always feel so much better after have a good conversation, sharing experiences and ideas.

Honestly?

No way.
No matter what you give up for your family and friends.
It's never enough.

"You're always tired"
"You're not interested enough in my/our stuff"
"No wonder you won't proceed with your carrier, when you act like that"

C'mooooooon!
Give me a chance to build up a regular life.

Most Ppl = Egotistical piles of crap.

Sorry for this dark rant :/

Soo.. we always knew facebook is evil and manipulates aunties into some weird conspiracy theories

But finally got some reason to convince my friends and family to migrate from Whatzap (aka facebook2) to Signal or Telegram :)

Forcing users to share their information went to a complete different direction of the world is going to. Kinda of glad that this finally burst out of the tech bubble

Anyway

My question is if there are any alternatives to Instagram?

Fingers crossed tiktok is not the only other option 😅

Don't know if I am experienced enough to give any advices but still:
1. Whenever doing freelance work, always take some advance payments, even its for your friends.
2. Use git even if you think it doesn't apply to you. I started really late.
3. Contribute to open source. You grow when the community grows.
4. Be humble even if you are the best there is!
5. Whenever you feel you are tired of this shit, remember why you started. Don't give up!

Most importantly, take time for yourself, family and friends. It won't be lines of code that you remember on your death bed!

As a person from low-paying country, how do I reconcile with the fact that for the same work, and the same 8 hours, I get 1/3 of what a person in Germany does? In my previous team (same company), one of my teammates was from Germany. The same team, the same work, but he happened to earn a lot more.

This bothers me a lot sometimes. I have seen people requesting to be transferred to another country, and being denied, presumably because of the salary difference. Then, the person leaves, and someone in Australia gets hired. So, rather than moving a veteran person of whom you know fits your company culture to a higher-paying country, you let him go and hire a newbie in an equally-expensive country? What the fuckity fuck?

And to my friends from high-paying countries, especially managers: you don't have to feel bad, but have some common decency. If you come to my country, do not say "oh gosh, everything here is so cheap," or "the dinner for the whole team costs less than buying my family of four a dinner back home." That's offensive as fuck. If that's the case, fucking give me a raise you cheap fuck!

Brave Browser was found hardcoding referral links to partnered Crypto sites, even if you manually type the URL.

Since then , they have fixed the bug but it's hard to trust Brave again.

Privacy is built on trust. I have recommended Brave to my friends and family and seeing news like this , makes me skeptical about the company.

FUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!

I need to get off this frustration out of my system.

I have a autistic retarded sister who has less than a half brain cell.

Evolution from fish to humans was faster than completion of a task assigned to this faggot.

I fucking hate her. Why was I born in this family. Fucking why!!!!!

Autistic narcissistic cunt. Horrible human.

Doesn't have any friends, no family member cares for her, entitled bitch, earns less than $75 a year.

Whenever we meet, she makes sure to belittle me in front of our parents and gives advices and gyaan on how superior she is and how much waste of oxygen I am.

Constantly mentions that my career choices are stupid, whereas she is doing great (in reality she isn't even able to score a simple degree and no one is willing to hire her).

Acording to her, I have zero financial literacy and she is a genius (in reality I am managing the entire family finances and providing for everyone).

Even when I ask her about something, she says that I am asking stupid questions where as in reality she is an anti vaxxer. God damn fuck!! She was stopping my parents to get vaccinated. Fucking bitch.

There's a simple 20 minute task regarding some tax work and she took more than 2 weeks to even comprehend my request and now screams at me for raising the request on the last day. Bitch WTF! I told you well in advance and now you fuck me up entirely.

My parents are so fucking biased and will blindly side her because she is a girl and using this argument they have destroyed me emotionally over years.

Yes, I no longer care for any of these maniacs and want to leave this place asap.

For now, for the life of me, I am ready to pay more than $3500 extra in taxes than deal with this woman child.

!rant

I know it's not that impressive in the dev world, but I'm finally making six figures (the lowest six figure value possible but STILL) and I can't really brag to my friends about dollar amounts so HURRAH. Accepted the offer yesterday, and I'm quite pleased about it.

Annoyed that it took so long (I'm 29), but I did have a two year long career break for a family medical issue/travel/quarter life crisis, so so it goes.

When you have to work on a project during Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey day! May you all eat, laugh with family and friends and push code!

While I'm not a dev, I do love computers and I do know my way around them, so friends/family often ask me for tech support.

Friend: Please fix my computer!

Me: what's wrong with it?

Friend: *sends me pic of blue screen of death*

Me: ...

Me: I don't think you understand

Happy birthday to my self. Away from my family and friends, alone in the city alone in the office pushing keys on keyboard to deliver the project.

It's been very difficult year for me, both physically and mentally.

I hope next year will be better than this.

Fuck you 2019.

PS: birthday and end year selfish.

Super depressed rn and nobody to talk to about it. Stupid life problems. Can’t seem to learn new tech so if I lost my job I’d have to switch to landscaping or something. Can’t talk normal with people without someone taking offense at something I never dreamed could be offensive (stupid cancel culture) or trying to shut me down. Friends ending friendships and family cutting me out of their lives without communication as to why. My kids just don’t seem to care about anything I have to try to teach or share with them anymore. Nothing I do seems to matter to anyone or make a difference even when I’m trying to do good things for people. I don’t want to take my life but tbh if COVID got me I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d embrace it as my get out of jail free card.

I don't have anything to say about getting a dev job in some company. But I can give some tips on attracting clients for your freelance work.

* Have a few projects of your own hosted on Github to show off your quality code.

* Contribute to others' open source projects if possible.

* Get yourself a nice website and showcase all your work.

* Ask your current clients to write testimonials on your work and post it in your website.

* Be nice to your clients. Chances are they'll refer you to their friends and family.

That's pretty much all I've done and I get more freelance dev requests than I could take.

I usually crib about how stupid people are and how I struggle to stay afloat.

Let's switch some gears now. A post about some good people, product, and processes.

You know what the common theme here is?

The goodness here cannot be measured. Your first interaction with them makes you feel so comfortable that you start feeling butterflies.

These people just keep on giving. They are selfless. They are pure. They actually care.

And when you think it's done, then they give you some more.

What blows me away is, they don't expect or accept anything in return. Absolutely nothing. Not even a simple thank you.

And they are like a wizard. They walk into your life when you least expect them but need them the most. And when the task is done, they'll be gone before you even know.

No lingering, no drama, no bullshit. Just pure goodness.

Like my ex-lead in current company, I have a very senior guy in neighbouring team (for which they were gonna hire me initially), who also happened to interview me, is a gem.

He takes care of me like his own younger brother. Supports me and always answers my queries no matter how occupied he is.

And same is with good products and processes. They feel effortless. So smooth and add exceptional value to your existence. They give rise to wonderful companies.

You'd never experience a single negative aspect about them. No matter how much you try, things will just keep getting better until they don't need to.

And then they'll be long gone. Never to be seen again and never to be forgotten.

You cherish them only in your memory and wish they lasted longer. But they didn't because the purpose was served.

Such people and experiences inspire me. They push me to become a better human.

No matter how the world is or how it treats me, I must always live with high values and be a better version of past self.

The other evening, I was conversing with my mother where we spoke about some family friends who are insanely wealthy but humble and kind.

Mom and I mutually agreed that they don't have such good traits because they are wealthy, but they are wealthy because they live with humility, kindness, and pure intentions.

World is surely a beautiful place because of such people and I aspire to be one. May lord guide me well :)

TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.

Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.

I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).

I'm not shy so I'll go first:

MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).

GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).

STACKS / SKILLSETS

I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache

I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract

MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).

SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85

*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.

I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.

Remote work (for the software industry, at least) is PERFECT and I still haven't heard a single argument against it that could not be derived into one of the following explanations:
- the complainer is/has a terrible manager
- the complainer has a shitty house
- the complainer has a shitty family
- the complainer is a shitty person
Naturally I mean only real-adult healthy people who work in the software industry.

I will now list the complaints I have heard more often. All fit neatly in the categories above:
- "my family interrupts me a lot, require lots of attention and/or creates an environment I cannot work in" - in this case it is very irresponsible of the complainer to try and escape to an office. If the adults you live with cannot get by without you, how going to an office will help them? If you can't teach your children to behave, who will?

- "my house is noisy and/or uncomfortable" - move out! if you can go to the office, you can look for another place to live.

- "I need in person conversations to understand people / zoom meetings are a waste of time" - why? do you need the smell of other people to properly organize your thoughts? Yes, meetings are extra-shitty during the pandemic. But pandemics come and go and your terrible time management skills won't simply improve themselves. Learn to lead better meetings instead of blaming the medium.

- "I miss face-to-face interactions at work" - Those do not miss you. If you want to have personal conversations, do it *out of working hours* with consenting adults. If you want to have personal touch in work contexts, it is called "sexual harassment" and is a crime.

- "my employees / colleagues are not as effective without me breathing at their necks" - you are a terrible manager and leader if you can't inspire people in words only. Maybe even video.

My main point is, there is no argument against WFH. When people try to argue against it, they often actually mean "I don't like the pandemic". No shit. Life will be better after people stop dieing for breathing close to their friends and family. In the mean time, learn to organize your life instead of running away from it every day.

Have you ever been to love theatre? How many times? Have you ever seen a movie? How many?
Why so many more movies than live theatre? You think you would have liked the movies, and their price, more if it was live theatre? Would you have seen as many?
WFH is not perfect for everybody in the planet. But it sure is for the software industry.

The hand of IT guy in family

My family sees me as guy who works on IT stuff. The best part is that I will have to help them whenever they encounter problem regarding electronics in daily activities.

Son! The internet is not working
Son! The printer is not working
Son! The TV is not working
Son! My phone didnt get any signals
Son! The microwave is not working
Son! The TV remote is not working
Son! Why is this whatsapp popup always appear whenever I opened it
Son! The dvd player is not working
Son! My phone wont charged
Son! I want to buy online stuff
Son! The email that ur uncle sent me cannot be opened
Son! The email that ur aunt sent me is not there
Son! Can u help me download this travelling app
Son! I opened a website and it told me that I have 163718362 virus!
Son! I forget my password of my facebook account!
Son! Some guy idk on facebook added me as his/her friends, what should i do?
....
Son! The internet is not working (again)

The fact is that, most if these problem, I helped them by just.. restarting the router, reboot the router for 1 min interval, find specific toggler in disfunctional hardware that they accidentally hit during sweeping the floor, take out the power and put it back again, show them how to's in many account/payment mechanism in apps, etc

The very best part that whenever they satisfied, whenever things back to work again, whenever they can reset the password:

"I've tried what you told me, but it just didnt work, but idk when u did it, it works! you are really an IT guy"

And i was like
🙃

• Learn new things!
• Continue my programming projects (mostly C#), and eventually publish them!
• Create more programming side-projects!
• Create more music, of various genres, and finish unfinished tracks! (I love music 💙)
• Buy a violin, or another instrument! (I already play harpsichord and piano, and I love them both)
• Buy a new PC setup! (maybe?)
• Get a driver's license!
• Create more music sheets!
• Create more custom maps, on rhythm games! (like osu! or Cytus / Cytunity)
• Make new friends, and meet with my older ones more!
• Go to places, new and old!
• Open myself more to others! (I'm kinda shy)
• Do my university's exams, properly!
• Do my conservatory's exams, also properly!
• Try drawing!
• Try all sorts of new things!
• Get a cat into the family! (I love cats, but I never got one because I don't know how to raise them, yet)
• Be more confident about myself!

And... yeah, I guess that's it :D
What about you?
Have a happy 2019, everyone! 💙

My YouTube recommendations be like

"I am 28 with no friends and girlfriend"
"I am 30 years old with no social life"
"Living as a single guy at 30 years old"
"No friends and no family and left behind in life"

What are you trying to tell me, YouTube?

I know this is the problem that I need to work it out. But still I would like to share with you guys here.

I start to feel bored after working in current company for 5+ years. I love my colleagues, I love my job actually. But after 5 years, I start to feel that there is nothing much I can learn from working in this company. And that really makes me feel uncomfortable.

So I get on LinkedIn to search and apply new jobs, I think it's good to talk with experts from other companies, to know more about what's happening in world. And perhaps to find a new opportunity.

Then I happens to find a startup which is doing something fits my background, and more advance. I feel like I will learn a lot working there.

The startup is also very interested in me. So the CEO and me have a quick chat on Skype 3 days after my application. We talked a lot and feel right to each other. Which I think I am highly possible to be hired. I am really exciting.

But later, I just hesitated. Because it is an Europe company and I am born and live in Asia. Going there may sacrifice time with my family and my friends. I am afraid I can not fit in at new company. I don't even 100% sure that I will like most of the things at new company.

I know I need to make decision on my own career. I just want to share the story, it makes feel less anxious. I am talking to my manager (which is my good friend) today. I hope everything go well.

Not specifically a Dev job, but I did do a bit of development at this wifi startup. It was a wifi shop where we set up wifi for hotel clients all over the US. Anyways, they said I would make great money doing "on call" support, and me being an intern and naive I said absolutely I'd do it. Well 3 months later I was put on call essentially every day and one weekend I was with my mother and it was her birthday. At her party at this nice restaurant, with all of our close friends/family, I got a call. It took me 45 minutes to solve because of how idiotic the clients were, and after that I got 4 more calls equally as frustrating and long throughout that night. I asked for help from employees, the owner, ANYONE. Nobody helped. Needless to say I emailed the owner and said farewell that following Monday.

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.

To my brothers, sisters, family , friends, and anyone else it my concern stop asking me and google your fucking problems.

!rant

Don't know if you guys have this kind of boxed up stuff inside like me. I have good friends, I have a good gf, I have great family and nice colleagues. But there are still so many things I don't share with them, especially the negative feelings I usually possess. Even here I don't share all the deep dark stuff.

As much as I wanna share my true identify and personal info here, the reason I'm restraining myself from doing so is this is the only place where I can say whatever really I wanna say in my mind. Except my blog but then my blog doesn't have any reader.

Friends and family: Hooo so you make sites and stuff?
Me: well yes let's say that...
F&F: I got this amazing idea for a site! Can you make it?
Me: Yes sure, will take x day for about x$$$
F&F: What?! I have to pay?? Gave you the idea for free...

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

Random thoughts that I need to put somewhere. that I’ve been holding in and have to get out.

I feel like I’m more welcomed and wanted here than in real life. My friends don’t really think about me when making plans anymore, no one really thinks of me in general.

In school I was the awkward kid that was nice to everyone and I’m not taking the whole graduation well. I miss high-school and my vocational school, I miss my friends and I’ve just felt like things ended too soon and I just kinda feel alone

I wish I could just sit down and program and not procrastinate the only time I seem to be able to get stuff done is when I force myself. I feel like I’m such a shitty developer for not fighting it better. I need to be better.

I’ve not had a good few weeks. Since I’m taken a semester off from college no one in my family besides me is able to stay with a family member that’s in the hospital. I volunteered because I care for them deeply and want to help them. but it takes a huge toll on me since I have to be the one that listens to the doctors tells the rest of my family what’s happening. While Im kinda freaking out because I’m scared and nervous and NOT READY and I’ve had to stay a week there and I’ve been having to stay on and off and I haven’t really told anyone how I really am feeling about it all because I don’t like to be vulnerable in front of people and it’s been really hard and taking a toll and not helping the procrastination.

A programmer is not only programmer but also a PC repair guy for his friends and family.