We will no longer be accepting contracts which have an internet explorer or edge support requirement.

All of the front end devs are going hysterical and celebrating 😂 🎉🎉

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

Oh the project is almost finished?

Here's another feature the client requires before it can be released.

Me: Okay this will take another 2 weeks to implement. Is the client happy with that time frame?

PM: You have 3 days and there's no test time, so test as you go.

Me: .....*quits*

True story, was the last straw.

So after learning to code myself for about 9 months.

A local agency CEO reached out and offered me a junior position!

Happy days!

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

I grinded out 8k lines of code in four weeks, but don't consiter myself a programmer.

I can sit down at a computer and in under five minutes have all of the passwords saved to a USB, and the OS is rendered unusable, but I don't consiter myself a hacker.

I can make great high quality artwork, but don't call myself an artist.

I got 2k ++ in 16 days, but have yet to order my stickers because I don't feel like i've earned them.

But most impressively of all, I can fool everyone around me into thinking I'm happy. Even though I'm unsure I can even feel it.

..Bit of a darker rant, but some things need to be said.

Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

Co-worker has been sick for two days now (the guy that mainly helps me).

This has forced me to do nearly every ticket myself without asking questions.

It's going really great! I'm very happy about it tbh 😊

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

when i worked in IT, some coworkers told me to install some stuff in the "happy" and delete some files from the "surprised". I spend several days confused, until they explained me... Idk if they are idiots or geniuses.

happy disk (C:)
surprised disk (D:)

maybe they were both.

Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.

Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.

Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.

Didn't know jackshit about twilio.

Meeting with client:

Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*

Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.

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

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

In our office, everyone is placed so that we have a wall behind us. Initially, there was enough room behind us so that we can walk just fine.

Everything was fine till our manager didn't start making us some random visits and standing behind us just looking at our screens and making us feel unpleasant.

So one day we moved the tables so there is almost no room behind us. And we are aligned in a row with no space between the tables. Now if the manager decided to do it again he would have to struggle his way behind us.

Few days passed by and our manager finally showed he saw what we did, didn't say anything. It was clear that he wasn't happy about it. He tried to lean himself over the monitors to take a look but that was just not so as "good" as standing behind us...

A time passed and one day when we came to work we saw the tables moved forward some 15-20cm just enough to be able to move behind. Almost immediately we pulled them back as they were before.

We moved back and forward already few times and are currently playing cat and mouse with our manager.

Noone is saying anything just the tables are moving every 2-3 days or so. Let's see who is going to give up first hahaha

Happy day! 🎉🎉🎉

It's me, in my hacktoberfest t-shirt, sitting on my gaming chair with gaming keyboard and mouse, working 12 hours per day for 7 days, coding and pushing bits to server so a client can be happy.

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Yeees! Got my contract for the time after my apprenticeship. 4 days/week and a shitload of 💰, from my point of view. 36k € per year.

Additionally I got the position I wanted, I'm responsible for the whole infrastructure and the conversion of our app from Winforms to WPF.

I'M HAPPY AS F*** xD

Give a man a program and he's happy for a few days.

Learn a man to program and ruin his life 😈

How stackoverflow works(for me):

- First some guru will downvote it & someone comments saying it is duplicate/easy/stupid/should be somewhere else.
- Then a very generous person comes in, says its a valid question, answers & upvotes it.
- After few hours/days, other people come looking for the same question & then they upvote it.

This is called a true happy ending.

A late rise up *check*
A good cup of tea *check*
A nice breakfast *check*
A rainy day today *check*
A bunch of time for reading
a book and playing with
python and elixir *check
Nobody seeks me for
tech support *check*

Did I die and go to heaven?

!rant

So, I found this community when I browsed the android app store this evening because I was bored.
Got immediately hooked and registered my own account. Reading here for multiple hours now.

Result of the evening:
- It is nearly 12:30AM now and I have to get up at 5:00AM and I still can't/don't want to sleep.
- Woke my wife multiple times when laughing about stuff posted here.
- I finally found a community on the web I can relate to

I think this was the best decision I made in days.
Thank you all already for the great time.

Happy to be here

(Addition at the next morning: sending this just now because I was not allowed to send already another rant when I wrote this earlier the night)

Small update on my UWP File Explorer:

Got some nice work done on the Navigation Box. A right click (Or long tap on touch displays) gives a context menu with subfolders, as opposed to the Classic application which had a drop-down button (This is not as friendly for touch, in my opinion)

A left click navigates to that folder.

Been a bit sick from my surgery, so not much progress these past few days, but I'm still happy with this.

!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.

As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.

So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.

Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...

The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Hot take: PHP is pretty good nowadays.

I'm a Laravel dev right now and things just get done so quickly. Every language has its problems but the meme of PHP hate seems to be made more out of ignorance these days. You could find just as many problems with any other language.

For those that say I'm biased because I work through the framework more than the language, I'd ask don't you do the same? ASP.NET, Java EE, the millions of JS frameworks, all these also make your life easier within their languages.

In the end, work with what makes you happy and productive and be done with it.

One asshat quit, one more to go and we'll be quite a good team.

2AM and a birthday party of my BELOVED mother that I have to attend tomorrow in the middle of bumfuck. And I'm not sleeping, oh no.. because "family obligations" require me to get her a present on 2 days notice. I'm making her something very simple, some LED's displaying her new age, powered by a lithium cell and some charge-boost-protection controller. So I need to make a mesh to place the LED's to make those characters.

Measuring the size of the project box, cut it out.. started drawing the numbers on it. Not satisfied and ain't nobody got time for that. Guess I'll just print something out. Drew a little image with some text on my tablet, sent it to the printer. Black apparently doesn't want to print anymore even though it's still fucking full.

HP YOU CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!! How fucking difficult can it be to make a printer and make it into something that doesn't shit on me every fucking time I want to use it?! Why do I have to deal with your shit, on top of my mother's?! WHY?!!!!

Fuck me. Happy birthday to my mother, and silently I wish that it's her last one. The bitch wouldn't - no she didn't - piss on me even when I was on fire!! Where were you "dear family member" when I was homeless, huh?! WHERE WERE YOU, WHEN I STOOD ON TOP OF A BRIDGE, READY TO END MY LIFE AND BEGGED TO YOU TO ALLOW ME TO STAY IN YOUR HOME FOR THE NIGHT?! Mother my fucking ass. A blood bond that I wish I never had! And that I have to work for now, because you fucking bitch can't even possibly think as far into the future as to invite your peers for a birthday party.. I dunno, maybe a week in advance, like a sensible human being would? At least she's improving, my little sister's and brother's birthdays she just invited me for the day before. And I also had to get a present ready for, in the middle of the fucking night. Fucking hell!!!

Best current career choice:
Quit to become a Freelancer.

OH BOY did I sleep bad directly after that decision - no contracts, no sales running.

Oh BOY do I now 2 days later sleep like a dam relaxed, happy baby :) - My network for the win!

The days before handing in my resignation I really looked forward to just leaving, but the actual task again was scary. Why? Cause until then future for me was bound to income, job=stable income = happy me, happy wife, happy child.

Now? Just 4 days later, If all goes to plan I'm already overbooked twice. Truth told!: Couldn't have done it without the network that I built over the years where I was employed. Let's see how this works out :)

I stand up with a huge smile each morning: Just a great feeling!

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I have no words to describe how I'm feeling these days. I have to do a C project for uni.

After a couple of years dealing with web dev, javascript, typescript, angular and stuff, for the first time I have a project where I have to deal with only two problems:

1) my code
2) my machine

No tools, no bloated libraries, no webpack, no json configurations, no tutorials.

It's just me, vim, gcc (actually nvcc, it's a cuda based project, but still) and the cuda manual.

I feel I'm actually building something.

Plus, the guy I'm doing the project with is cool with this stuff and most important he's open minded.

I'm happy

I got an email a couple days ago about a tweet a made about how web developers are unanimously very happy that Microsoft is dropping IE. I got a very angry email from someone who really loved Internet Explorer, apparently 🤔, saying that my tweet was, and I quote "offensive to those who used it loyally for years". That was hysterical for me to read.

Client: hey ***, happy birthday can you help me fixing....
Me thinking: hell no, i deal with yall fuckers 364 days a fucking year and yall can't leave me the hell alone for one cocksucking day. I need this one damn day a year not dealing with yall assholes where i don't snap and drive 300 fucking miles to not drive a nail in a broomstick and drive it up your fucking asdls

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

This is more of a rant about myself and what a prick I am. Last week I left my brand new Kindle at a hotel, just forgot about it because my brain is mush.

I don't even bother calling the hotel for days thinking and knowing full well the staff would have taken it (this stupid thing is worth a week's worth of wages here). I decide to call anyway and ask. "Yes sir, Mr. Matt, your Kindle is safe and sound in our hotel's main safe in a soft case awaiting your pickup or we will be happy to courier it to you".

I drove back to Varna and the super nice hotel guy apologized he didn't have my number otherwise he would have called (I don't have a phone number in BG).

I hate being the cynical asshole-dick I've always been.

Fuck.

I'm getting drunk now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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? 😂🍻

How devrant changes me #1:
I'm a little bit more active on devrant since about a week. Improvement so far:
1. I spent only 20% of the time on Facebook i usually do
2. I really enjoy the nice community
3. I even more enjoy that i notice there are more "dudes like me" :D i mean.. I'm tired of telling my "normal" friends how happy i am because i wrote some awesome code and just get a "eeeh.. Nice." back because they dont understand and often dont even try to understand whats so special for me.
4. Even if my english is still kinda bad, i notice that i get better with every rant i post. I mean.. That post cost me about 3 min. I swear 7 days ago it would have cost me minimum 7 minutes to get this lines down :)

Thanks devrant :)

it's not a happy new year when you realize:

You are becoming old

Another JavaScript frameworks is out and employers want 5 years experience in that.

You have to return to work from holiday in 2-3 days

I've dealt with dusty computers, REALLY dusty computers, computers owned by smokers.

I've seen dead beetles and earwigs and spiders with their cobwebs in computers and dealt with them.

I've even seen live moth larvae wriggling about in a computer.

But never, have I ever had to deal with fluids. Until today.

I had to take apart a laptop that had been used as a toilet by a cat. It was still wet, but not warm.

And I had to try to get data off of it. But no, the urine was not compliant.

So, already pissed off customer was less happy about the fact that her data would still be a few days away from recovery to a new computer.

At least her frustration wasn't at us.

I as the "coffeedrinker" stopped drinking coffee and energy drinks. I do not want to be anyone's boss but if you think you can live without them, do it. I am fairly young and after a long period of frequent consumption ( 1 coffee or drink per day), I was waking up at nights or struggling during the days from constant heart pains. Now 2 months later this phenomenon happens seldom and I feel better and more refreshed after my sleeping. I know this is irrelevant but I know fellow devs that overconsume these kind of drinks. At least if you can limit your dose! :) I just want everyone to be healthy and happy! Have a nice day! ♥

Was on edge..
Had no job, no money, got kicked out by my family(what left of it) depression kicking in, desperately trying to do anything to hold on
Had studies, in automation and robotics and other software skills, but no time to find a company to work..
Decided to try working at burger King, I mean, was that or selling myself, so I got called passed the interview, ( quick info - 60% of young people in my country can't get a job, have to lie on their cv because they have too much skills (there's still that wrong idea that studies get you a job))
Have too much studies for the job, I have to sign a contract saying that I accept being underpaid (by the law I have to be paid under the minimal wage for my skills)
This triggers an alert on social employment center and I started to work for another company two days after as a front end developer and it dude.
Refused the bk, yup they weren't happy about it, but I mean who really wants to do a 1 year trainee flipping burgers...

Spent two days debugging my algo to figure it was a problem with the colors they picked and my logic was fucking flawless!

Sweetest feeling ever :D

I'm sort of color blind so I never check colors and I'm really straight about it with everyone: I don't pick colors.

Its a rant with a happy ending :)

Not really a rant but I'm just happy so I must share it.

Two days ago I uploaded a new project on github and today when I woke up I saw it on github trending! Only the C# section though, but still.

Feels weird as I'm usually not upload anything and the ones I have usually sit around 5-20 stars forever.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Fuck ISP. Just moved to nz. Explain to this company im working at home on the internet. Need it fast.

Takes 8 days to get the 📦 in a country of 5 million people. Wtf.

Box does not contain all default connections for box to work in a default house hold.

Call them. Tells me i have to go get it myself because i didnt request it. Fuck you or did you just fuck me.

Pay 100 dollars (this is in new zealand even though it feels like afghanistan. Not trying to offenecse any on here btw) a month for unlimited internet and phoneline.

They forget to put on the phone line.

Pay their fucking stupid 4 dollar cable insurance because new zealand has houses built for fucking cave people with 0 insolation and prone to dampness.

First day connections dont work. Well is that not fucking beautiful. I actually payed 4 worthy dollars.

WRONG YOU MOTHER FUCKER.

They tell me i didnt take the insurance.i go mayhem tell them how useless they are. So they send some one 8am the next mornin while activating the insurance. Ho yeah they also told me they forgot to include landline in my account.

Now 2 days in everything works im happy. Wake up to “your account has been suspended because you went over the max 200$ of your credit. You owe us 250$ before you can re-activate your account....

Inside boiling. Rudness and caps just won`t help.... I need some blood.... Some ISP blood....

My manager is so cool at work that he doesn't care if I sleep during office hours or even skip working for a couple of days as long as I meet the deadlines. All he cares about is getting the work done and keeping his team happy.
I abso-frigging-lutely respect him very much and like him as a person.
Unlike my friends' managers in other departments, he wouldn't assign me more work if I finished a project before the deadline.
I wish all the managers in all the companies realise work-life balance is important and act like him.

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

Not really a dev habit, but a habit many devs have.
My beyond fucked up sleep schedule.
SLEEP CAN
SUCK
MY
ASS

I've woken up at 8 and went to sleep at 12 for two days, and I'm beyond happy with the purely accidental progress I've made, really hope to not fuck it up this time like always.

Spent the last 3.5 days developing none stop for a client. Met all their additional deadlines and requirements.

It's been worrying me for for a month.

I'm now seriously happy and relieved.

!rant

I'm so so happy to have joined devRant: it gave me lots of motivation to work on my personal projects. In the last two days I worked more on an old dream/project than I did in the last year. TWO. DAYS.

Don't know for how long this motivation will last, but - for now - thank you so much, people :')

Attach the debugger - software runs
Remove the debugger - software doesn’t run
Happy Debugging...
debugging without being able to attach a debugger?! Sounds like a long day, if not even days...

I'm 4 days into my new job, and so far I am absolutely loving it. Here's my setup. Yes, they gave me 3 monitors plus a laptop, so my setup has 5 screens! Now I can die happy :D

Definitely worth noting as well, since it caught me by surprise - the company-supplied laptop is a powerhouse. High-end i7 CPU, mid-to-high-end NVIDIA GPU, tons of ports, 1TB HD, 4K display, and 48 GB RAM. Yes, 48 GB. I am truly blessed, starting off my career with this. ^_^

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

happy birthday to me
dad is dead
mom is dead
have been for years
who knows about my siblings and everyone is crazy and i'm not completely sure how old i am except that i have obviously visibly aged and a photo of me snuck into my older photos shows me as I actually looked at 40 ish.
yay.
some days i wish i was dead.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Slack Boss: hey, could you check work of dev that is okey, we want this update fast.

Me: hey, just tell him to open PR and assign me, I will check and merge changes.

Slack notification: Dev: Hey, could you please merge Pull request on the project ?

Me thinking, hmm weird, I didn't get email.
Checking github, 0 pull request.

Me: hey, I don't see any pull request open, and when you make pr, just assign me I will merge it right away.

Dev: takes half a day

Dev: Makes pr and assign correctly me.

Dev on slack: HERE is PR open now @me.

I get 3 notification to see this PR, sure at least it is there.

I check this PR, 50 commits, X conflicts, cannot merge this.

Me: Hey, @dev please fix conflicts in your PR.

DEV: takes another 2 days to respond.

Boss in the meantime: hey, have you pushed those new changes ?
Me: I am waiting for conflicts to resolve.

Dev: I fixed the conflicts @me.
I check the PR conflicts are there.

Me: are you sure you pushed your changes @dev ? I don't see them resolved

Dev: takes another day and pushes changes to resolve conflicts.

Me: merges PR to master becaus he based it on master, I will sync the developer branch myself.

All good, everybody happy.

I write to dev: Next time base your changes on develop branch and resolve conflicts before making PR.

Two weeks later new PR From this dev.

Based on Master, conflicts everywhere.

Some days before my graduation me and my roommate were invited for an interview. We arrived at mutually agreed time.
The interviewer asked nothing about our coding knowledge. just some personal questions. after a brief conversation he started to explain the job responsibility to us. It seemed we were both hired. We were happy that we are getting full time jobs before graduation. And then he asked us if we can commit to stay in the company for year. We both agreed if the terms are good.

After that he tried to hire us for
$125 USD per month.
we did not spent another minute bargaining with him. We just left saying that we will let you know.
We were shocked.

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So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Two days ago...

I was happy, building out the network in a new lokation.

Suddenly my phone just doesn't want to stop ringing, from all the other lokation calling in that they can't connect to HQ.
Then HQ calls, we don't have internet, nothing works. The one guy on location who has access to the server room enters and finds all the servers offline and a couple of breakers blown.
Turn on breakers, servers won't boot properly.
Me in a taxi and hurry to HQ, to help boot the servers.

Afterwards I find out that one of the bosses spilled a cup of coffee on his desk, shorting the circuit.
Apparently he is on the same breaker group as the servers!?! What the actual fuck!

At least now the other bosses are like; yeah, we need to do something about that

Me: Hey boss, if you ever need someone to get into doing DevOps related tasks for the team, I'd be more than happy to take that on.

Boss: We don't really need any dedicated person to work on that, but if we do in the future, I'll let you know.

Fast forward a few days: I am now unable to deploy bug fixes to our testing environment, now in the cloud, because all access has been blocked for everyone except the two numbskulls who thought it'd be a great idea to move EVERYTHING over (apps, configuration manager, proxies, etc) first.

Oh, and this bug is affecting production.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

I (and many devs might too) need some advice.

Well, I'm happy and sad at the same time :) :(
I'm so happy because finally I can put a floor pet on my avatar. I put my yellow favorite cat (its name is "Güero/Blondie"). On the other hand, I'm so sad because last week, my stupid and drug addict neighbor poisoned my cat :'( (not the yellow one, it was a gray cat. I'm 90% sure that he did it, he tried to do it last year). I know that it was only a cat, but I felt terribly all the past week, I couldn't even think or code. Fortunately it was the ending of the sprint and my code was successfully tested, so I didn't have to code, only trying not to cry at the office.

What would you do in this situation? I mean, those days when you feel like sh*t but you need to go to work and finish the code.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

I remember making a product for my customer that was using a db
When I tested the product before showing it to the client, everything was good and fast and clean.
When I gave it to my customer, he was very happy, after few days he emails me about the product was very slow, I checked the database and it had a lot of *testing* shit made by him and when I asked my customer why the db has so much useless things he told me that he was learning how to it. I had no words, can't you just create a database MongoDB, MySQL or whatever you want to learn locally and play with it? Then he emails me later about a fucking refund because HE fucked up with the permissions of the db

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

A month ago, I moved to Germany for work from Taiwan. People here are mostly nice and firendly. But if you don't speak German, there will still be lots of problems especially for official paper works.

But most importantly I got really cool and talented colleagues and a challenging job. Which makes me happy at least in work days.

On days like this I am very happy I chose to be an engineer and not tried my luck at being an Instagram influencer. I'm also quite relieved I don't work at Facebook or any of its metastases.

Client : I am unable to download data from your sever for last 10 days.

Me : Sir, we are sorry to hear that. We are doing some maintenances on our server from this morning today. We request you to call back us in next 4 hours.

Client : But i am facing this problem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, i heard you. As maintenance is going on it will not be possible to download data this time.

Client: From when this maintenance is going on?

Me: from this morning sir.

Client : but i am facing this probolem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, you are not understanding it, or may be i am failing to describe the situation to you...

Client: Listen, you guys are incapable. Only knows to make excuse.

Me: Sir..

Client: Sorry to say, i am not Happy with your support. Let me talk to your senior tech guy.

Me : Sir, your problem will be solved in next 4 hours. We will call you as soon as our server went online.

Client: *.....*

It took me 20 minutes to finally make him understand the situation.

Client: Why did not you said that earlier? You guys will have all the time but i do not. Anyway.

He hangs the phone.

My ears are burning man...

After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!

I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.

I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!

Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!

Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.

I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.

So...much... rage!!!

In the middle of a big project, many demands from the biggest client of yhe company, he left the country and called the boss after 2 days tellinf him he's not coming.
boss is angry,
client is angry,
I am happy.. because client is a piece of shit liar asshole

Rant PART 2 [FINAL-inspirational]

In my previous rant I posted what was happening in my life. And now I want to share how it all unfolded.

To remember some things, I was doing a mobile project for school and it was a group assignment. My group was so disperse that I ended up doing all by myself. And in the middle of this my gf and I were fighting.

I spent the last two days coding all day during work (I do coding internship for the college I go to, so my boss was cool about me doing the project during work) and I ended up forgetting what day it was today (today is a holyday, I thought I had to go to work because I forgot). It was such an intense two days that while coding I was forgetting variable names, table row names (I literally spent half an hour on my API trying to find a solution, when the solution was that I was using `seller_fk` on the API, but in the database was `seller_id`) and my mind was imploding. I asked my boss for help on the database (he's really good at it) and my teachers to help me. But everything paid off.

Yesterday I started coding at 8am and ended up finishing the project at 9:28 pm (the day before yesterday was the same thing), 2 minutes before the class of the project to start! I was able to finish the project, finally! But what really remarked me was that from all the groups that were in like 4-5 people, I was the only one who delivered the project that day. All other groups are going to have to deliver the project next week with reduced project grade, while I got 100% of the grade because I delivered on the date.

God is good!

Also my gf and I are good now. We are kinda still recovering emotionally, but are now more respectfull to each other, so I guess something good can comeout of bad things.

Happy coding everyone and never give up!
If I made it out of this whole mess so can you! :)

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

Today I found an error in how we handle credit on invoices in our software.

This is the first time my boss has ever made a legit pull request for me to review of his.

Damn I feel proud!

I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.

Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.

*doing the happy dance*

🕺💃🕺🎶🕺💃🕺🎶🎶🕺💃🕺

IT WORKS!! It finally WORKS!!! For the first time. AND IT WORKS!!!

```
^s^s^s^s^s^s^s
git add .
git commit -m 'IT WORKS!!!!'
git push origin
git push backup1
git push backup2
```

*continues with the dance*

A lot of online games (mainstream) tend to make me kind of angry or stressed. Lots of either blatantly stupid or negative players kill the fun.

A few days ago I've startet to see videos about "Among Us". It's on a big hype right now and their machmaking servers must be glowing.
Well, this game is fucking awesome and it makes me really happy! 😊
Nothing beats a 30 minute game of lying, betrayal, teamwork and good old 30'000 IQ big-brain detective work.
I think it's a great execise for remembering stuff.
You remember colors, who's said what and who faked or did which task. And the hardest part is, even if you fucking saw the killer, you have to present the facts in a way that people believe you.
Each round is unique and full of riddles.

Yeah, I just wanted to say: Fucking great game 😄

I have some good, no, great news I forgot to share yesterday:

Drum roll 🥁🥁🥁🥁

I just got my first job as an intern!!!

I'll be developing their product from scratch along with a few other devs, it's gonna be awesome. My primary occupation will be as a backend dev, but I'm also gonna help a bit on the frontend.

They also said they won't micro manage me, they just want me to deliver their tasks, so I can work whenever I want and not necessarily 6 hours a day. I'm a bit skeptical here because that sounds like they're gonna overwork me, but they also said they don't want to get in the way of my studies in college, so idk. It seems like a really nice place.

It's going to be remote work and the pay is also very good for an internship.

All of it seems way too good to be true, there has to be a catch... I'll find out in time, just let me be happy for getting my first actual job ever ok? Just for a few days.

Anyways, I'm just so fucking happy with this and wanted to share it with ya :)

It's my first birthday!!!!

~$ uptime
11:06:55 up 365 days, 3:02, 86 users, load average: 1,20, 1,33, 1,22

Happy birthday to you, lappyyyyyyy......
Happy birthday toooooooo yyooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.

We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.

After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.

So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.

And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.

So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.

So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.

Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)

!rant

Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.

The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.

Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.

The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)

Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.

He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.

What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.

He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.

He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.

.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office

As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.

I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.

Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.

I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.

=====

What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.

Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.

At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.

Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.

Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.

Happy birthday devRant!

I miss those early days which had more rants but still, to the best dev community ever 🍺 🍻🍻🍻

Day 1: depressing
Day 2: blissful

OR

Day 1: blissful
Day 2: depressing

I noticed this pattern to repeat EVERY TIME IN MY LIFE.

When something is extremely good one day, I actually try to reduce the happiness because the depression will kick in the next day twice as much.... So even when i get hit by happy days, i am forcefully trying to become depressed in order to avoid being depressed twice as much tomorrow, CAn you Fucking believe me this ? Hhh
Hhhh

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

i

i dont have energy to live

So you warn the agency that the client is going to eat into the Dev time with their constant design change requests. Warned them repeatedly for a good month, I should add, asking them to better manage the client's expectations and push back for a later launch date. Come time for development and they act all surprised that we can't build the entire site, that we outlined in the timeline will take 4 to 5 weeks of Dev time, in less than 2 weeks!! ... It gets worse! They say the client is happy to compromise as long as we launch "something" by this date. We list out what can be done, and the fact that there's no time for the client to do QC and we won't be able to do a full QA phase on the site until after launch and only when we finalise all the features. Agency says client agrees and within 3 days into development, they want to QC the site and add more features....... still wanting all this in 2 weeks. This site has now been in development for 3 months.

I got stuck with a small task for days, today I just have the courage to ask for help and a senior literally gave me the code for the problem! I'm not sure if I should be happy for finishing the task or embarrassed for couldn't solve the problem by myself. 😄😥

Rainy morning days are the best days to code 😍

I don't know if I should be sad or be happy...
It's a few days left until I get back to college from my IT internship. The team was awesome. Literally awesome. The chief wanted to hire me as a developer. He asked me if I would accept his apprenticeship offer. I got stuck and couldn't answer :D
I would accept it, but I can't rn. Still want to study...

Handed in my notice today
New job next month
3 days off to play Watch dogs 2
Happy times

So, my crush told me how she lost her 800+ bookmarks related to her very crucial project (She isn't into computers). I told her she could recover them and I'll help her with the steps. She was so paranoid about losing the rest of the project if something were to go wrong while recovering.
Bookmarks got recovered. She's happy.( I just took the bookmarks.bak file from the chrome folder and converted it to an html doc.)

4 days later-
Her: dude, what the fuck did you do. The whole system has been reset. The whole project is gone. Fucking know-it-all. She thinks I'm responsible for the system restore.
- - - - - -

She's going to HATE me for life 😭. What did i ever do to you, you Microsoft Developers 😔. Why you do this.

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

After some hardcore coding days I notice: Wait a minute.. I had no coffee. How was that fucking possible? I mean the tests ran green. The client was happy and..

.. and then I woke up.

So those of you who have seen some of my previous rants will know that the past 2 years, I've been "employementally" challenged. I am now very happy to report that I've gotten a contract renewal at my current job. The terms are exactly the same but 3 extra days of anual leave and a 7% raise!

Should I care about privacy anymore ?

I had to switch to windows from Ubuntu in my laptop because of driver related issues.
Everytime I use Windows , I feel uneasy because of the data it collects but at the same time I am happy that I can play a couple of video games , my battery life is better and my display is better.

I own an Android phone , and no matter how many add ons I use , or VPN , I know that Google gets sufficient amount of data to know a lot about me.

It's getting harder and harder to keep my data private and it's becoming inconvenient as well.

In my country almost everyone I talk to uses Whatsapp. I removed my Whatsapp account for a few days and I barely talked to anyone and it was not a good feeling.

My point is , is fighting for privacy worth it ? How much inconvenience are we ready to accept ? Can I do anything to keep my data private and still use convenient services ? Please enlighten me .

Been really depressed at work for the last two years. To the point where myself and colleagues would constantly petition our boss to work with us to change our internal process.

After being constantly ignored / seeing no really impact ( he literally renamed a step in our process and said he fixed it forgoing all the recommendations that we suggested and refusing to discuss anything with us );

I decided to resign before I say or do anything to completely burn the bridge.

Two days later one of my colleagues also resigned ( the only other device at the company ) now my boss is frantically looking for our replacements while also trying to maintain that he holds all the cards.. he offered my colleague less than he is on now to freelance for him. And will likely attempt the same with me in my exit interview today.

But I'm working on a web app which I find interesting. Problem is that I'm not as hopeful as the others working on it with me that it will ever make any money. (It seems like a money pit if anything)

I think I may be in for a couple of rough months. But at least I'm not working for a company that made me so depressed that all I would ever think about is how to convince the boss to improve things.

I'm worried but for the first time in 2 years I feel happy.

After 8 days sleeping 1 to 3 hours a night and not eating, today I slept 12h straight...
Oh man, I feel another... Even the electricity behind my eyes stopped. Me happy

Just commited to my repo ; last commit was 6 days ago. I'm happy, finally decided what algorithm i'll use and implemented it !! :)

Looking back on my Christmas holidays while waiting for my train to come.
I wrote my last exam on the 22, took the train home on 23, spent Christmas and the 25 with my family, searched for a new apartment for 3 days, had two days left to do an assignment due to the 30, was packing till 3 in the morning today and will have my first day of work tomorrow. (Yeah, I spend new year's Eve home alone and completely sober...)
I wonder when I will have an entire meltdown and become some Joker level psychopath... Also happy new year everybody 😁

That's true with me in older days I am happy when my code runs without error on first time...but now it seems like borring and error make me happy.😂😂

## Building my own router

IT HAS ALREADY PAID OFF!!!!!

So I (with my fam) have evacuated from the capital of Lithuania into a distant place - much smaller, where average age is prolly >30 or even >40 years. I live in a village now. In a house with very good neighbours. In fact these neighbours own that house :D

Back to the point.

So these neighbours used to share their wifi (w/ internet) between the two houses. They have the line, the mian router has quite a strong antenna and that other house has 2 repeaters: 1 on the outside wall and another one -- indoors. Sepeaters are connected sequentially, i.e. the indoors one is repeating the outdoors one. ikr....?

The first day was alright. We settled in, got everything set up wifi-wise. Peachy.

The second day repeaters refused to issue a DHCP IP. That's something, right? Alright, nvm - I don't mind setting up static IPs. In fact I prefer them over the DHCP magic!

And by the noon both repeaters were connectable but neither of them could provide internet connection... We that sucks! I restarted both of them a few times, neighbours restarted their main router -- still no luck.

Here comes my router [God am I happy with this purchase and the whole idea of a customized router!!! Thanks @hakx20!].

I brought it outside, plugged it in. Connected to it through it's hotspot, used nmcli to connect to neighbours' main router with an internal wifi card (that shitty mPCIe operating in USB mode. yes, the same one, manufactured in 2003. Yes, in g mode.). A couple of iptables rules for traffic forwarding et voila! I have built my own repeater! And tomorrow I can WFH w/o any issues.

Yes, hardware routers are faster and easier to maintain. Yes, hardware routers are cheaper and usually have nicer bells and whistles. But when hardware fails you and the last thing you want is going to the public (shop), soldering rod won't help you. A software solution becomes the easiest to set up, considering you know how to.

Boi am I so happy about my purchase! CentOS router FTW!

P.S. even though we've fled the city we are responsible citizens and we've self-quarantined ourselves for the 14 days period. No local person any closer than 10 meters for the whole period until we're cleared. Being away from the city gives us sooo much freedom! Especialy now, when cities are shitting bricks in fear.

Fuck Java and its related build tools.

Decided to throw caution to the wind and actually try to build a Java project, from scratch.

Install intellij, except it keeps complaining about the missing JDK, openjdk is installed but it doesn't like it.

Ok, whatever, I read that it's supposed to come with its own and so I point at that, no dice.

Ultimately I stumbled upon a stackoverflow post saying to just download the tgz JDK and just use that, I knew I could do that, but I wanted to use the tools the P environment suggested, but gave up.

Ok, so now I've got intellij and JDK installed, and I want to start my automatically generated project.

Except I now need gradle, fine, whatever, and now gradle complains it can't find the JDK...

Fucks sake... I was happy using Lein and Clojure, I didn't realise how fucking complicated it is to set up a Java IDE these days...

Boss : we have to do 'task', come up with ideas.
Me: cool

Few days later...

B: we will do 'A' to accomplish the task.
M: but I have few ideas that are better.
B: Nevermind, we are doing 'A'
M: but 'A' is impossible to scale.
B: doesn't matter its only POC
M: I have better non scalable solution, which is easier and faster to Implement.
B: yeah whatever, we are doing 'A'.
B: also I am on leave next week, so take care of completing 'A'.

WTF.

P. S. Was happy for few months, didn't need devrant, guess I will need vent out again.

I guess the job I’m at now? I’ve been paid for 8 months and I’ve produced nothing, they’re happy about it and I was given a pay rise. It has taken me months to make deployments and I feel like some days I might’ve well of had a day off. If I had a sick day I still get paid for a full day even if it was for a whole week. How did I get this job and wtf do I even do? 😂💃🏻💃🏻 <= that’s me dancing

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

So back in November I wanted to get a new smartphone, after years and years of middle class stuff I decided "let's get the newest high-end shit out there!" so I bought the Huawei Mate20 pro.

I was SO DAMN HAPPY when it arrived 2 days later. I quickly switched to the new one and SUDDENLY after a few hours it started to get a hint of a green border arou d the display.. and yes it got FUCKING WORSE! Now after a few months it got worse and worse, I talked to my provider and they said I have to call Huawei so I called Huawei and guess what? The want me to send it in, which will take around TWO WEEKS! It's not even my fault and now they want me to have no phone for two damn weeks? Why? This sucks.. and only because I wanted to have a nice new shiny high-end piece of technology 😭

Right, that's fucking it. Enough. I'm all for learning new technologies, frameworks, and development protocols, but my time on this earth is limited and at the end of the day if I'm having to spend DAYS AND FUCKING DAYS just scouring through obscure forum posts because the documentation is shit and just hitting ONE FUCKING PROBLEM AFTER ANOTHER then there comes a point at which the time investment simply isn't worth it. I HATE throwing in the towel because some FUCKING CUNT code problem has got the better of me, but fucking sense must prevail here.

Laravel fucking Mix. Do any any of you use this shit on Windows? Because I take my fucking hat off to you. I'm done with it.

Oh, so your server uses 'public_html' instead of 'public' does it? Well, of course you can just set

mix.setPublicPath('public_html'); then can't you?

No, you can't. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Not only do you have to hard-code your fucking public directory into each specified path, additionally you have to set

mix.setPublicPath('./');

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. It took me the best part of two days to discover that little nugget of information, buried at the bottom of some obscure corner of the internet in a random github issue thread. Fuck off.

Onto next problem. Another 5 hours invested to extract some patchy solution that I'm not at all happy with.

Rinse, repeat.

Make it work with BrowserSync by wrapping your assets like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ mix('/build/css/main.css') }}">

Oh oh oh but "The Mix manifest does not exist"... despite a fresh install of Laravel 5.6 and all relevant node modules installed... follow some other random Github thread with a back and forth of time-consuming suggestions for avenues of experimentation, with no clear solution.

Er no, fuck off. I'm going back to Grunt and maybe I'll try Webpack/Mix in another year or two when there's actually some clear answers, but as it stands this a wild goose chase into a fucking black-hole and I've got better things to do with my precious time. Go die.

First job was coding voice alarm s Systems (1998) primarily using Delphi and programming act microcontrollers using avrco pascal and act assembler.

They were happy days

There is nothing more fulfilling than working you ass off 2 days, learning a new technology, and getting it to finally work as per the requirements and then ...

getting told that the absolute cunt of a client forgot the release date, announced its release 2 days early and decided to casually ask why there is no app on the released URL (it's a tiny Agonizing Reality [AR] app meant as a gimmick on the invitation cards for an upcoming convention).
My boss told me, the thing I worked on is now being scrapped and will not be released.

Yes, I wish the clients could slowly die in agony by a tree growing out of their appendix. Nature shall reclaim their corpses and feed a happy pig which I would happily have a feast of. 🤗

For the first time that I can remember I see ordinary people everywhere are unhappy with windows. In XP through win8 days I'd see people complaining about one crash here or there, but most of the times you had to be more experienced to notice why windows sucks.

Now, this week I already heard three complaints of people wanting to back to windows 7.

And I feel so happy... I feel waves of joy growing in me, as I burst in a sarcastic, obscure laughter.

Why do?

Because somewhere deep inside I hate windows.

Not becausebthe great amounts of frustration I used to have with it. But because it's so crazy I don't even consider it an OS, but rather a patchwork.

Microsoft's code base must be so fucked up they don't even know what to it with anymore.

That's my idea at least.

Buy it's good to see ordinary people are getting fed up of windows. This might be a way one of my dreams will come true, the day which Microsoft will not be able to maintain Windows anymore, and I think it's not more than ten years until we reach this day.

As a final result, if one day windows really gets to die, I want to be present, but not unnarmed, so I can shoot it at least 15 times, just to make sure this piece of crap is already dead.

Bye

Not 100% of dev nature:

- Got an informal interview a few days ago: Got me super happy.
- Another 2 recruiters on LinkedIn showed interest: Made me happy.
- Psychometric & technical tests popped today: Feel like failed them completely.
- 2 more career days coming up: Not all hope is lost.
- Lack of portofolio and job experience: Brain is stuck and emotionally being meh. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a dev. :-/

I've just wanted to let it out of my system. Thanks for reading it. :-)

introductory rant

So I am new here, hi! :)

So the devRant android app does not seem to support this mail format:
user+devrant@domain
(the important part being the "+devrant" thing)

Now I waited 2 days for a confirmation mail that wouldn't arrive and was greeted with the "please confirm your fucking mail" popup every damn time.

"Okay, let's just change my mail to user@domain and deal with it", I thought. Guess what: You can't!

So I contacted the devrant team via e-mail.
And I waited.
2 days.
No answer.

Okay.

Delete account, recreate with other mail, be happy.

Don't worry, I'm not mad. It's just really fucking ironic.

Looking forward to a great community! :)

My father used to beat the living shit outta me for getting low marks during my school days. Happy Father’s Day lol

I used to think my first relationship was awful. I went through so much and rather it served as a trigger for my childhood trauma as well.

Little did I know that it would be the best the thing that could happen to me. I grew so much and every next woman I met, I realised how fucking amazing my ex is. God I miss her terribly.

But what happened with my recent fuck up, I am devastated. This toxic women brought out the worst in me. I have never been so hateful against myself or anyone else in the world.

I was love bombed and walked into a trap. I quit as soon as I realised what it was.

My values were comprised. My integrity was put to test. My trust was intentionally broken. During the initial days, she tactically identified my vulnerabilities and insecurities. Then used to sadistically trigger me as often as she can and sit there and watch me in suffer pain.

It led me to self harm and being suicidal.

I am so badly wounded that even after few weeks, I am still discovering all the wounds. It will surely take some time along with external support to build a healing environment for myself and overcome this damage.

I am very angry, terribly hurt, lost and confused. This shit developed a phobia in me. I cannot trust anyone anymore. I constantly live in fear of being hurt (physical, mental, and emotional). I am paranoid of that stalker.

I don't think I'll ever be able to start and build a healthy relationship with anyone. I used to be sooooo fucking strong emotionally and mentally. But now not only my trauma relapsed but I got more issues within me.

I really want to live a free, healthy, happy and a fulfilled life. I don't know when time will heal this but right now, I am in terrible pain and hate myself a lot.

You know you are frontend when it took you 30 min to make it pretty and 4 days to make your Customer happy

I feel really happy on days when i get to use scala

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

!rant this is just a shoutout, how fucking happy I am. Clean code valued over fast but hacky push of features!

Backstory. I work for a startup. Long story short a guy with an idea needed a developer. I've worked for about a year without pay but now since we're live I get paid. Recently a new field of bussiness came up. I told tge guy with the idea (a.k.a. my boss) that we either could just "hack" the current code to just make it "fit" well kind of... Or refactor our main code base, as requirements where changing at least monthly and we just built on top of the monolith.
Don't get me wrong. It still isn't perfect. However I was able to refactor the main business logic for the last few days, as he understood, it's an investment into the future.
Good guy!

P.S. On another note: happiness or happyness? :O

sales: we will need a sponsored blog for client XY, can you start working on it?
me: I am really busy I can't do it as soon as next wednesday.
sales: but I promised it will be ready for this tuesday (yes, two days ago)
me: do you have any specification?
sales: what is a specification?

---- Happy Birthday for me ----

Happy International Worker's/Labour/May Day! Let us all remember those that fought and died for our rights and got us weekends, 8 hour work days etc.

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.

$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"

$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"

$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"

Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.

Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"

$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*

I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).

I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.

"Hmm"

Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.

"Hmm"

So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.

I hope the bug's priority was wrong.

Reverse engineering an applications internal object model and creating an database model for it...

The reason: Several versions of application exist, each deliver flat data by rest. The data is a complete potpourri of several different entities. *yaaaay*

Eg. an example fictional call (real call and data would get me in trouble I think....)

get_fiscal_report returning the fiscal data for _several_ companies, the companies _subsidiaries_ and the respective _segments_ for a _year_ with a key value enumeration.

So it's an happy fuck up of N:N associative data that usually would be a hierarchical relationship...

Year - Company
Each Company has subsidiaries
Each Company subsidiary has segments
Each segment has a fixed enumeration of keys
Each key has then the monetary value (e.g. 'operating_income' - 155_000 US-$)

Example is made up, but my data contains exactly such a lovely nested hierarchical data flattened and misnamed to a point where it's close to garbage.

Yaaaay.

I had now 6 days of untucking this mess to a usable database representation...

Sprinkling Unique Keys everywhere...

Running persist script...

Getting exceptions...

Changing associations...

Running persist script...

Screaming.

Changing associations...

Violently cursing.

Running persist script.

Starting sacrificing interns...

6 days.

I need a new brain and a format of my soul.

-.-

Reverse engineering proprietary software is really an morbid adventure.

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

My killer PR:
I made a small feature and it was to be merged in my senior's branch.
So I made it, resolved all the conflicts and when it got merged it broke my senior's branch.
This is nothing new and it happens, so me and him sat down and got it working. After two days, his branch got merged and broke it's parent 😂, after investigation my code was the reason, got fixed and merged.
Same thing happened 3 more times, and every time my code was the culprit.
Now for staging we thoroughly tested everything and deployed it, after running for 2 hours the piece of shit broke again 😂😂😂.
A meeting was arranged for scolding the team, and after the meeting the architect comes to me and say "how did you manage to fuck things on so many levels, literally?". I handled it like a pro with an awkward laugh.

We exhaustively checked it for production. Deployed, it did not broke, we were happy. After a month of successful run, I just joked about the above incident while we were working on next release on morning coffee. That cursed thing broke on the same evening. I was like 😮

I was once asked to create a fully secure chat system prototype (the ui didn't matter) in 2 days. We ended up building a client in python (which I wrote) and it kinda worked and a c# backend that didn't really work.

1 hour before we had to present the project to some high up management we decided that we couldn't fix the bugs in the system.

So I came up with a cool idea. Why not use ssh?
So I set up a bash script that writes to a file and tail -f that reads from the file. That way you could chat securely with another person.
I made it 15 minutes before the presentation with no Internet working :) they said it was hacky but a cool solution they saw that day :p I felt happy and that I had to thank Linux for being there for me

My first rant for ages

I'm working on a new project at a new company. We ha e a bunch of front end clients talking to an api.

I suggested that the api only communicate in terms of view models in order to bring some kind of standardisation to the project since at the time the gets and posts were either dB entities, view models, or just whatever the dev at the time decided.

I got a no, but that we could do posts and gets just with database entities. OK better than nothing..

I'm the front end angular app I implemented a generic form component and a generic data table component. The models given to these to build the components need to implement a view model interface.

Now we have a problem of the api giving us not view models and the front end needing view models so I put together a way to handle this in the front end.

My colleague with 8 years experience asks for my help and I'm happy to oblige. It turns out a model should have multiple child models in the database but the database entity models don't reflect this and therefore there is no way to build the view models. The data just isn't there from the api... Still I show him what the front end model should look like and write all the front end code for him to handle that.

2 days later he asks for my help again. It's exactly the same problem. Instead of fixing the backend and setting up the one to many relationship he has ignore the problem, retrieved a one to one relationship model and is just trying to force it to work - even though the data isn't there. He has also commented or removed all the code I helped him write and overwritten a file of typescript models that get autogenerated for us to be in sync with the backend...

I actually felt bad afterwards but I got frustrated as hell and he could tell...

So it's friday and I'm almost done with all my work and suddenly manager comes in and asks me that client wants to talk to you. I agree and we move into meeting room here is how conversation goes
(C)lient-There is some new feature we want to add -/Describes his feature which is somewhat like an existing feature we have. The feature needs many images which area already present/-
(M)e-Ohkay this can be done. How much time is allotted.
C- You can take a month or two -/I have fucking happy fucking over the moon beacuse i knew it wouldn't take more than 2 days-/
M-Sure
C- Yeah make sure the images are rotated manually.
M-*In Shock* Manually? You mean like i have to right click and then select rotate -/in which ever direction you mother is getting fucked?-/
C-Yeah..
M- But there is a tool which can do the same thing!
C-No the tool maybe wrong we want 100 percent accuracy.
M-*For a while like this -_-* I can start the tool and then manually check if any image is wrongly rotated.
C-No you can be wrong sometimes. .
-/Meanwhile the manager is giving me a stern look like/-
M-If i can be wrong after running tool why i can't BE WRONG WHEN I HAVE TO ROTATE THE IMAGE 10000 TIMESSSSS
C- do it manually.
*He cuts the call!*
I have no fucking option now! THESE FUCKING CLIENT'S AND THEIR BALL LICKING MANAGER FUCK MY LIFE FUCK MY JOB
I'LL DO IT BY SCRIPT ONLY FIRE ME YOU FUCKING MORONS
ASSHOLLESSS

Holy fuck !!! I don't know how but I just changed my username again. Few days ago I had changed my username for some reason and thought I won't be able to change it again in future for 6 months. But booya, I got my old one back 👍, never felt so happy finding a bug.

When I was in my final year of B.Tech.
There we had to do one major project so me and my friend both decided to build QUERA project for college. So as planned we informed to our superior and we got clean chit.
But later on we didn't know what to do??
That time my friend also didn't have programming awareness so days were going on. And the final month came and till then no progress.
My F was suggesting for purchase.
I was little bit worried too.
Then I had decided to build.
So me alone started building without any copying of templates from web(Actually at that time I didn't know that we can copy templates from web) so stupidly I was building templates using HTML and CSS. Parallely I was doing with php and phpmyadmin(SQL queries).
Seriously it was in PHP.
So this was running for approximately 14 days.
And believe me in that 14 days I was just doing project with all this stuff (obviously eating & 5 hrs sleep).

So, here the fun came

I was near to completion of my project but on last day I was not feeling well so I went to medical for some tablets.

And you know what, I was applying CSS in my mind on that tablet cover which was in rectangular shape.

Literally I was applying :D

Finally, I submitted project and got A+ for that.
Happy ending!

Hi guys, I'm back!
I spent some time not using DevRant, I got a new phone and thought it would be better not to install it for some days. I had to do a lot of stuff for school these days and didn't want to geht distracted by amazing devs posting cool rants. So here I am, happy to see you all again. (Or at least your avatars)

!rant !dev
Finished side project last month. It was hell of a ride, about 300-350 hours of programming and solving problems per month for over half a year, including my regular remote job.

Side project was 1 hour commute time from my house.

There were days where I was working over 16 hours per day.

During this roller coaster I also changed my diet to keto and lost about 12kg / 26 lbs.
Kept my regular remote job where I am the only backend developer.
Donated to eff.
Started listen to audiobooks and exercise to keep my mind clear and focused.
Finally I discovered devrant.

It was all crazy shit and I feel happy I did it because now 5 days after I finished this side project I started to think that my life is not so fucked up I thought it is. This gave me my confidence back.

Now it’s time to rest before some new crazy shit would hit my life.
Peace

>>Struck on a stupid concept with very little documentation.
>>Searched for days, finally frustrated and fucked up.
>>Started searching for libraries,found a decent one with good documentation and even a sample usecase.
>> library handles my application completely fine, me happy and motivated again :D
>>opened the library's source code, that was again very nice and simple.
>>Now learnt the concept and implementing it in my app natively . Even opened some issues in the creator's library
>>thank you github :)

Don't you just love customers?

It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually

They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours

So it was made

A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses

Sounded like logical so it was made

Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain

I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted

So they got what they wanted

A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality

Again our management said, yes

We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image

Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it

(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)

So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)

But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination

But I digress...

A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...

I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK

Could we all just agree that Mac is a piece of shit in terms of performance? Specially with those lousy animations and that stupid dock?

Got Archlinux running on my Macbook. Happy days again.

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

!rant + !story

I hate every human on the planet that says WFH is just people pretending to work or are slackers looking for an easy way out.

Now the story bit.

In 2021, I joined a company (I really wish I could name-drop the company), where the micromanagement was OFF THE CHARTS.

The company got a client who pitched a product they wanted built and gave us a super reasonable 3 months to complete it. I was really happy about the timeline and kept working under keystroke monitoring, which I didn't really mind at the time.

3 days into the development, the client informed us that they are pulling the funding i.e. they don't have money to pay us.

So at that point the client gave us two choices:

1. Stop the development right away and get paid for the time that we put in already.
2. Finish the project under 9 days. We would still get paid for the 12 days total, mind you. Not the original budget set.

So the motherfucking boss chose the second option and then the chaos ensued.

Devs screaming at each other on calls/slack. The boss yelled at us all the time about the completion. It was wild.

I had to wake up at 7:30 AM and start coding and log off at 11 PM for literally the next 9 days including Saturday and Sunday. No holidays allowed for the timeline. This was all at a WFH job.

So fuck anyone that says WFH is easy and just for slackers.

My JS app can crash IE11. Totally reproducable.

Had a fun debugging session to find out how this is triggered. Happens inside a deeply recursive call in a library I'm using which redraws the DOM.

Found a hacky workaround to avoid that as I see no real solution. It's not like I'm responsible for fixing IE. These are the days where I'm happy I'm mainly a backend dev...

- have a look at the project
- brake it down into smaller stories
- estimate the time
- multipy it with 1.5
- add 1-3 days of testing
- add 15% project management
- add a 2 days buffer

= be happy with being done in 2 weeks, present it in 4

I am gonna toot my own horn a little in here and say that the best mentorship experience I've had comes from me being the mentor.

I have trained interns at work, and they both said that I was able to teach them more than all their programming teachers combined. I was a TA at uni and got the same remarks and i help friends in their uni level courses at a local uni all the time. The remarks are always the same.

I like teaching. And don't know why some people hate it so much yet still decide to take in a paycheck. I want this industry to get better, I want my city to get better(because I loathe it) and I really get a good feeling from seeing other people succeed and be happy.

I really want to teach. Thinking about getting more years under my belt, earn a master's degree and then I would really want to teach professionally.

My biggest issue, here in the U.S education is ridiculously expensive. Teachers that don't give their best and yet make that paycheck are a disgrace to our industry. I want to show passion to others and if possible transfer a lil bit of it.

I just want to teach man. Already work at a school and I want to make that transition one of these days.

In 2020 I want to achieve:
- develop a proper custom deployment tool (for job)
- get my boss to finally approve of me doing code reviews (we have 0 reviews 🙄, tiny company)
- never have to work on WordPress ever again
- develop or set up a company internal package repo (alt. to NPM)
- get a new contract
- get 3 open side projects done

(non-dev)
- buy some more furniture and make the appartment finally cozy and a happy place to live
- finally get over the negative thoughts of that antisocial ex
- go indoor climbing 3 days of the week, to get rid of those developer fat cushions... 😅

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

its time to back to university. these days were so relaxed. walk around on a different city,talked with my friends.and take many beautiful photos.😏a little tired , but happy.

Mornings. Not just the run of the mill “I’m not a morning person” but I legitimately would be more productive if I could work night shift. It’s easier to think at night, and easier to sleep during the day. Not just a night owl, but it’s hard to breathe laying down at night sometimes. Sometimes I randomly can’t sleep. I’ve never had this trouble during the day during the occasions I get to sleep for long periods during the day. The morning is prime sleeping time IMO. Not wanting to wake up is one reason, but the changing weather helps and it just feels right.

I also don’t feel awake til the afternoon usually. Even if I get enough sleep and coffee. Code churns slow in the a.m.

I dream of night time being work time with long, restful naps durning the day. I feel more creative at night, and it’s easier to focus. There’s less thought of “oh it’s a nice day I should do x”

Just sucks that it’s not largely accepted and there’s not enough other night hawks to hang out with on my off days. And my work won’t let me do such a schedule. Everyone is an insufferable morning person.

Early to bed early to rise is a load of shit. We should be allowed to sleep at times it makes us happy.