So apparently devRant is a problem in my life. As those of you who've read any of my stuff here know I work at Victoria's Secret. So two of my friends come in just before I was ending my shift to see what the plans were for tonight. The usual - hit the club, crash at one of our houses.

Thing is, I was scrolling through devRant when they walked up. (the below is paraphrased)

Friend1: Ugh, you're still on that thing?

Friend2: Is she really? <looks over my shoulder>

Me: <eyeroll>

Friend2: I don't get it. <pokes me in the left tit> You barely post on Instagram and you don't tweet anymore. And you haven't commented on any of my posts in like days. Wtf bitch?

Disclaimer: Yes, we are those girls who talk like that and go clubbing and dress up and makeup and all that shit. Don't judge me because I don't give a fuck. Anyway...

Friend1: Seriously.

Me: Really? We're doing this? Because I haven't posted on fucking Instagram? I talk to you every day. I see you every other day. I like coding. I like tech. This place is awesome and the people are cool. If I want to see your ass or your outfit, I can just look at you. I don't need to be on Instagram 24/7.

Friend2: Jeez bitch. Need a tampon

<we all laugh>

Me: This is my thing. It doesn't mean we aren't friend and we won't chill, but my future is in development and technology. So deal hoes.

Friend1: Ugh you're such a nerd.

Friend2: <laughing>

Me: And you're both like totally vapid sluts. But I love you.

Friend2: Jelly

Friend1: Totes jelly. Girl you need some vitamin D

Me: I'm sayin'. But that doesn't mean I won't spend my free time coding.

Friend2: Ugh alright we don't give a fuck. Code or whatever. Just be ready at 11.

We all flip each other the bird and they leave. I guess if that's the level of acceptance I can get from my wonderful, gorgeous, annoying, amazing, asshole best friends, I'll take it. I am not changing my path.

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

The ultimate "I am vegan" guy will be arch linux user, vegan, trans, crossfitter and cryptocurrency investor. I've just met guy like this in my job. He did not shut up for a while. I am not sure whats he doing and whats his job but my guess is that hes paid for spreading cancer, sucidal toughts and eatig your will to live and talk with people...

R - retard
M - me

R: Hey CopyPasteCode I found this bug, it does 'this' insted of 'this'. *spreads arms to see his "muscles"*
M: *headphones off* Ok, I will look into it... *headphones back on*
R: Btw you invested something in the crypto, didnt you? Ive invested... ...bitcoin... ...crypto... ...litecoin..., do you think that... ...something... ...bla bla bla?
M: *tries not to kill myself after his 5 minutes of monolog* Ye sure
R: By the way Ive found this awesome vegan restaurant that accepts litecoin, would you like to come sometime?
M: *10 minutes monolog about vegan food and shit. At this point I want to die* Ok, I will now work on that back, see you later.
R: ye sure bro (wtf, "bro"?)... *looks like hes walking away* *teleports on my otger side touching my monitor*
WOW you are also a Limux user? 😮 Ivr installed arch linux this weekand and its so awesome, *another 6 minutes of monolog*
M: *smiling and preparing to kill him or myself* Nice, awesome *fake smile*
R: Anyway, I gotta go (FINALLY!!!), btw, I am going to the *name of local trans and gay club*, wanna go with me?
M: *after a month after a breakup with my GF (because she was cheating on me) which everyone in the office knew...)* Not really *trying to thing how to say "fuck off" without having meeting with HR*, I cant, I already have somethimg.
R: Oh, ok. Btw, you are rly cool bro (again), we should hang. We should hangout more often...

I hope someone is paying me for loosing 27 minutes with this guy.

What the fuck!!!!!

Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.

But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.

2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.

Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.

It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.

What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.

Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.

I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.

One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.

For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

the more i learn about web dev, the more i realise the reason for its mess up . There are 2 major problems in it : the people who create various important concepts and tools for web dev were 1) working on it without any collaboration and agreements on the philosophy and 2) were too stubborn on their ideology i guess.

There is no limitation to anything's functionalities, and the limits that are "defined" are badshit crazy. for eg:

====================================
HTML creator : "I am gonna make a language that would provide a skeleton to web page. it will just have the text and basic markers to let the scripting and styling engines/languages know which text is supposed to be rendered and how.
It won't provide any click or loading functionality.

someone: "So i guess opening a page or loading an image would be handled by JS or other programming language? also, bold , italic or division would be added via CSS?"

HTMLguy : Nah, my html engine would ALSO do that.

someone : what , why? won't that just be stupid and against your philosophy?
HTMLguy : WHAT? am too awesome, can't hear you
w3c , 50 yrs later : sorry can't change this, gotta support the 50 yrs of web dev and billion sites

=================================

CSS guy: I am gonna make the world's best beautifying stylesheet language to provide colors, styling, fonts and backgrounds to a page. every loadings and clicks would be handled somewhere else

Some1: cool, then clicks, hover and running of animation would be handled by JS only

CSSguy :Umm, i guess i could handle those.

Some1 wha-?

CSSguy : Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for the nobel price!

====================================

JS guy : I am gonna make a god web programming language! It can do everything: add/remove html tags, add styling, control animations, control browser, handle clicks , perform operations, everything!

some1: cool! you must be making very large programming language with lots of modules.

JS guy: No! i am gonna keep it small. no built in classes and file imports! just use the functions directly. if someone wants the additional lib functionality, install them on your server

some1 : innovative! what's typeof NaN ?

JSguy :shut up.

A new way appeared in my life.
Everything related to cars, metal and motor engines.
I may or may not have to dissapoint some people with it, but I am not going to be a dev I guess.
It was all fun and chill. Do not worry. I am not going to leave this awesome place haha, just felt like mentioning it. :)

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

I am getting my first apartment next Saturday, and it's awesome. And I was thinking of buying a great desktop computer because my laptop is getting old and I want a real desk with a real modern computer, also as a symbol of my new life coming. It would have costs me around 1300€, but guess what, I just spent that yesterday to pay the real estate agency, the deposit, and the first rent for that apartment 😭 I guess I'll have to wait again for that new pc...

Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..

I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...

Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..

Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.

I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.

On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.

Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.

Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.

And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.

I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.

And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.

For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.

This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.

I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.

1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution

2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.

3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory

4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.

I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.

This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).

Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.

Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.

For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.

I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.

LOVE YOU ALL :)

Sometimes i feel being bad and wrong is better than being good. At least people will not demean you.

Case A : the bad guy
F : Hey man how are you doing?
Me : nothing man just smoking weed and being high all day
F : ugh . Ok i have to go

Case B : the good giy
F :hey man how are you doing?

Me : Awesome man! I have been learning and making apps for last 2 years, recently released this very nice ui notes app with unique notification capability. Took me a month but am so proud of it.

F1 : just the notes app? I made a tiktok clone in 1 month after learning android
Me : :'(

F2 : notes app? I made this awesome *small butunique app idea* app that got 50k installs
Me: :''(

F3 : 2 years? In 2 years i have learned so much that i can now make this puny notes app in ios Android website all synced up in 5 different frameworks with 10 additional features.
Me- ;''(

F4 : cool app. So now can you make this *random idea* app for me? Here are the designs and resources You seem experienced,How long would it take you?
Me : umm i guess so.. idea seems plausible, but i haven't worked on some things that are needed to complete it. So... x days?
F4 : X DAYS?!! wtf man ? Don't you know how to code? Does this looks like a task of x days? You even an engineer bro? Make it in 3 days
Me :

(Ps : replace F with friends , managers , ... Everyone :/)