I apologies for my bad English.

I was 14 and addicted to PC games, I take money from my dad and bought new games every day

One day he got angry and told me: "What's are you doing with your life son? I don't pay for your games anymore! If you can build your own game and play with it!"

My mother had a computer academy, So i ask her to teach me how to build a game! She starts teaching me VB6, It was amazing.
After that, i started programming, Searching for VB6 sample code all day.

We had a local online game and it was a time killer, So i build an auto bot for this game to play for me, wit VB6. It works great, And send it to my friends and they loved it. Then I create a website and put it there so other players can use it, And after some days downloads reach 5000 times! I was shocked! Then I put a lot of time and improve it, Downloads reach 15000! After three years it reaches 50,0000 and more.
Between these years I learned VB.Net, C#, HTML, CSS, JS, Java and Android programming. Just because of some game.
And really thanks to my parent to put me in this path, It's great.
I think I can never get enough of coding!

But haven't created any games yet, So learning continues :)

"Stop working from home. Fuck this. We do enough and don't get paid what we should. It is you and me for two campuses and you are far more knowledgeable and qualified than what they offered you at the beginning. I get that the benefits are killer but don't burn yourself out. I am not expecting you to work from home. Will not ask of it unless really is required and would much rather we have a few beers instead of getting together to finish bullshit deadlines...for 2 devs"

My current lead developer. He turned into my work best friend and he is really into the whole concept of "fuck it we ain't getting paid enough"

Dis b ma dude.

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

ME: Here's an endpoint to get all the textual info about the entity. And this one fine endpoint is to fetch entity's files

FrontEnd: This is no good. I need all entity info in a single JSON

ME: but files could be quite heavy, are you sure you wan...

FE: Yes, Just give me all the info in a single JSON

ME: okay... I hope you know what you're doing..

ME: <implemented as requested>

ME: <opens a webpage with 2 files attached>
Browser: <takes 30 seconds to open a page and downloads 30MB of data in the JSON>

ME: As mentioned before, your approach is a performance killer

FE: No worries, we'll fix that in the next version. First let's see if anyone will be using this feature at all - maybe it's not even worth working on

ME: <thinking> I know I would NOT be using an app if it takes over half a minute to open up a chat channel. FFS I wouldn't even be using Slack if it took 30 seconds to open some other conversation, because for some reason it wanted to fetch all the uploaded files along with all the messages each time a channel is clicked on.....

ME: <thinking> this project is doomed :(

Windows - how can someone possible get something done?

I gave up and are now installing windows for my son so he can install a game that only exists under windows.

Did a clean install, no network drivers found. Looked under device manager and tried to find out what network card there is on his computer. Unknown device :@

Finally found the manufactures dvd, ofcourse we get some bloatware, killer network manager.

Tried to uninstall it, the drivers was also uninstalled. :O Had to install it again and do some googling and finally found some pure drivers. Uninstalled the f*** Killer software again, and then installed the pure drivers. It works :)

Then I tried the speakers ... :@

Thank god my son is in school and can't hear my language right now.

!dev

Before I bought a couch, I thought I had to get a couch because when I have a girl at my place, she will definitely think I'm a serial killer who's going to murder her.

Now that I have my couch, yeah I still don't have any girls over.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

How is coupling backend + frontend as a single nextjs app a good idea? What the fuck is this?

What if you have to create new replica sets of a backend because of high load pressure? What about load balancers?? What if i want my backend to be a microservice? How do i unit test the backend if its cluttered with frontend? WTF IS THIS

WHY DID NEXTJS THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY DO SO MANY DEVS LOVE THIS IDEA AND GLORIFY NEXTJS?

Nextjs seems like the type of framework that was built by a frontend web developer who just refuses to learn backend technology at all costs.

---

its been a few hours and the concept of nextjs is bending my mind rn. I thought nextjs is just another frontend framework. A react killer. Only to find out its both a backend + frontend framework.

Cluttering backend stuff into frontend is gonna get messy no matter how much you try to modularize the code. Am i lost or am i right???

---

Scratching my head over nextjs. Looks like a great framework for small-mid project but definitely not large project. The more shit the project needs the more messy shit become. Angular has modularized all of this in separate folders -- components services guards interceptors (now new stuff coming called Signals) etc. All of it is separated in individual folders and kept frontend-only. Simple enough. No backend clutter

---

Can i even use nextjs strictly as a frontend framework while it uses my custom backend built in java spring boot? For example use nextjs /api/ folder to handle custom routes built outside of nextjs framework?

Am i insane here

How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:

Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.

Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.

But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.

Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.

I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.

To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.

Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

So in my company there few small teams all with lead devs. One team is leaded by a girl who changed her profession. She's good at architecture/Dev stuff. But one thing she's terrible at is her leading role. She won't confront any bad behavior, she won't ask about any problem with the tasks. She won't ask her tram how long will the tasks take, so she puts her own valuations.

But the killer is she's whining everyday to the management about her team members. That they didn't do their tasks/don't want to cooperate. Never looking in the eyes even when she whines about a person in the same room.

Another thing is that our CTO is always doing her leading job, confronting team members, giving them reprimends. She lost all her authority by this. Nobody respects her. And after a slight note about her behavior you just gonna get a big talk with CTO and nothing will change.

Another thing is that, she Nevers connect with her team. Don't talk together, won't go with them for the coffee, never at the integration parties.

That CTO connection is another topic...

Oh and I'm by the next month I'm gonna be throwed into her team, so wish me luck...

"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions … It’s gonna take awhile … You’ve just gotta fight your way through." - Ira Glass

Alright fellow sweaty programmers, mama Kiki is here to teach you the basics of hygiene.

TEETH
- If you have a toothpaste prescription, use it.
- Every single whitening toothpaste is a scam. Don’t use them.
- Every single over-the-counter toothpaste that decreases sensitivity does work. If your teeth are sensitive, use it.
- Otherwise, buy the cheapest name-brand toothpaste.
- Use dental floss. As long as it’s flat and waxed, the cheapest one will do.
- When flossing, never move the floss back and forth as if you try to saw through your gums. Just put the floss in, then out. Repeat if necessary.
- Don’t put your toothpaste on your toothbrush. Put a small amount of it directly in your mouth with a bit of water. Close your mouth and spread toothpaste all over your teeth using a rinsing motion, as if it was mouthwash. Now your teeth are completely covered.
- When brushing teeth, don’t use -90°/0°/90° angles. Use -35°/35°. This way you will spend less time while getting better cleansing. Bristle ends should touch where your teeth meet your gums.
- Get yourself a tongue scrubber. Scrub your tongue until what comes off of it is clean. Dirty tongue is why your breath smells bad, not dirty teeth.
- After you’re done, don’t rinse! Spit the toothpaste out, but let its residue stay there. The remineralization process is now started. If you follow the routine, you don’t need mouthwash at all.
- Drinking/eating sugary things, not washing your teeth and going straight to bed is the best way to get cavities ASAP. In your mouth, sugar quickly turns into the kind of acid that we use for soldering. It can strip the oxide layer off of copper. Do you know how after you drink Coke, your teeth become almost squeaky clean? That’s this. If you like sugary drinks, carefully drink them using a straw. Rinse immediately after you’re done drinking & eating.

SHAVING
- Get yourself an old-school safety T-razor, the one that takes suicide blades. It will last a lifetime. Mühle and Merkur are good manufacturers (not affiliated). Once you have it, for the rest of your life, you will only buy blades. This is the most environmentally friendly way to get a clean, close shave. Electric razors save water, but they often contain batteries.
- Because of how violently electric razor’s blades hit hair while cutting it, they chip your hair. This leads to your freshly grown hair being sharp, rough and unpleasant to the touch. The manual razor, on the other hand, produce clean edges. When your hair grows back, it will be softer than what you get with an electric razor.
- Feather brand blades (not affiliated) are the sharpest in the world. The sharper the blade, the less traumatic it is. Watch T-razor tutorials on YouTube. There are different shaving techniques that will get you a killer shave.
- T-razor blades last considerably longer than their modern soyboy single-use counterparts.
- Because of a single blade construction, T-razor almost never leaves irritation.
- Basically, modern single-use plastic blades are horrible for the environment, and they’re almost a scam for how much you get for your money. They’re only rivaled by printer ink. Use them only for intimate shaving, as they’re considerably handier down there.
- Always shave after hot shower.
- Before shaving, dry the skin surface. Apply shaving foam on dry skin only, as it contains chemicals that make your hair softer. When diluted, they’re not as effective, and shaving unsoftened hair is almost always unpleasant and dangerous.
- After applying the foam, wait about a minute for the foam to work. If the skin gets irritated, don’t wait for as long, or perhaps try a different foam brand.
- Before shaving, thoroughly clean your razor with hand sanitizer or ethanol. Ideally, it should be sterile. Using boiling hot water is also a good option, just be careful with it.
- After shaving, rinse off foam, immediately dry your skin with a clean towel, then apply aftershave. After applying it, don’t touch your skin until it completely dries. If you follow this routine, your skin won’t get any pimples, guaranteed.
- Scrubs won’t help you. Don’t use them.

More in the comments!

Guys,

I'm in kind of crappy situation. We are in dire needs of some improvements to our infrastructure. I've told that to the person who is responsible for it several times to get it improved. But because of his incompetency or laziness he just do some hacky solutions which gonna blow up on the the very next day and makes things worse.
I've raised my concern to my supervisor several times. He is also kinda slow in pushing things.
These infrastructure changes are for testing purposes so it doesn't have an immediate impact on their business. But it is kinda productivity killer for all.

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Had a definite week from hell... a bunch of prod issues that only I could fix (that's a whole other rant for another day!)... a piece of code totally kicking my ass for days... a hosting environment that was unstable seemingly every time I needed to do something in it (and that killer piece of code could ONLY be properly tested there, naturally!)... a service that my app depends on flaking out with no indication what the problem was and another team responsible for it that is based off-shore so aren't responsive when I need them to be... a metric shit-ton of procedural bullshit dropped on my head... an immense amount of stress due to the lead-up to a prod rollout next month that absolutely CANNOT fail without huge ramifications for the business but not enough help to ensure it gets done.

But, with all that said, I DID manage to get that killer piece of code working late on Friday after slamming my head against the wall for over a week on it (and ultimately re-writing it from the ground-up on Thursday and Friday)... so, the week of hell ended on a high note at least, which is always a Very Good Thing(tm)!

What do you think about psychometric tests? I doubt a test can define the type of person you are nor your characteristics. I think it's ambigous, unprecise and extremely subjective. Today I was rejected from a job offer because "the psychometric department didn't give their vote of approval". This is the first time I get rejected for that reason, in the past nobody complained about the results of my tests. I don't know if psychometry is useful, but this company is looking for someone different, or maybe psychometry is, in fact, subjective and any fool can interpret your results however he feels like: "Oh, so he likes kittens over puppies, he's a potential serial killer, let's reject him"