Finally got a job. The process was quick af! Hired in like a hour.

At least now I can't be homeless.

But I'm getting married Saturday, so this means one thing:

I'm a have to work while on honeymoon hahahah

My girl gonna be pissed but glad that I'm not broke

I was messaged on LinkedIn by a recruiter while I was in the UK for my honeymoon. When we got back home to Colorado I called him back and everything went well enough that a tech screen call was set up between four or five guys on the team, and me.

I was expecting to be grilled about various Linux, networking, video transcoding, database, and transaction handling questions and problems, as that was the bulk of the job's description. But instead they just gushed that they'd used software I'd written at previous jobs and loved it.

It was very friendly and they never challenged me (not being arrogant here-- they literally never tested me) and we wound up just talking about, "the job," and about how the work sucked without the tools and apps I'd written.

I got an offer for $30k more than what I asked, the next day.

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued in comments...

What the fuck!!!!!

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

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

This is probably my last post for a while! I’m leaving for my honeymoon and we are going on a cruise and I ain’t gettin the WiFi! Hell naw!! Not taking any laptop, not answering phone!! Feels sooooo gooooood!! Especially after this shit week. I’ll be away from it all for 9 days!!!!!!!

We are going a day early so I might lurk a bit here and there but not much. 86 everything and everyone’s bs! Just me and my beautiful wife!

Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with me.

Thankfully, one of the most important skills that I learned is active listening. I am less vocal about my silly thoughts and shitty opinions these days.

I don't feel dumb. Instead, I realise that I AM dumb.

The people in my new org are exceptionally smart and talented. Each everyone is a hand picked gem. This isn't a coincidence. Rather it's evident that they hire folks very carefully.

In my previous org, I used to be the one driving everything. Like the smartest guy in the room.

But here, I am just quiet in every meeting and I enjoy working 12 hours a day. I am the dumbest guy in the room surrounded by people who are brilliant and humble.

I truly feel fortunate and grateful to be part of such an amazing org and wonderful team. One of the best decisions I made in my career and life.

Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.

Algorithms real life implementation

On the way to your college canteen? -> A* search

Waiting in line in the canteen? -> Queue

Notice that girl standing in front? -> Linear search

Searching for her dad in the phone book? -> Binary search

Stupid! Google it! -> Trie

Search for her on Facebook! -> Depth-first search

Found her! Friend request? Accepted! Send a Hi! -> Graph

Writing her a secret love letter? -> Caesar cipher

Uploading your first date pic on fb? -> Image compression algorithms

Looking through her Whatsapp messages? -> KMP algorithm

She found out and had your first fight? -> Start over with some gifts! Backtracking

Got her list of items to buy? -> Array

Too many items! Low on cash, maybe? -> Priority queue

Making her play treasure hunt for her gifts? -> Linked list

Wait! Go back! Is that a ring? -> Stack

Girl’s family not agreeing to your proposal? -> Divide and conquer

Got married? Congrats! Going for your honeymoon? -> Travelling salesman problem

Your mom packing luggage for you? -> 0/1 Knapsack problem

She packed your favorite pickles? -> Hash table

Driving to the airport? -> Breadth-first search

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

I am currently under a desperate crunch at work, trying to get things wrapped up before my honeymoon.

Of course, this is when My Greatest User decides he will come to my office no fewer than five times today. Not once was it for an actual, legitimate issue that he had not created himself. Here were the top three for today:

#3
MGU: "The scroll wheel on my mouse isn't working. I used to be able to scroll stuff with it but now I can't."
ME: *Looks at his mouse. All looks well.*
ME: "Show me what you're trying to do."
MGU: "I'm trying to scroll this Word document. See? It won't scroll!"
ME: ..."That's because there is nothing to scroll... The entire document is on your screen..."

#2
MGU: "I can't move my mouse off the edge of my screen! I used to be able to move it from my monitor to my laptop screen and I can't do it anymore!"
ME: "Did you move your laptop?"
MGU: "Yeah I moved it to the other side of the monitor. That shouldn't make a difference, should it?"

#1
MGU: "You know the DOS commands?"
ME: *Does a triple take.* ... ... "Huh?"
MGU: "The DOS commands. You know how you can use DOS commands to make the computer do stuff. Like Ctrl+M."
ME: "Ah. You're talking about keyboard shortcuts."
MGU (ignoring me): *Goes on a long, confusing explanation of something he's trying to do in Outlook and wants to know a keyboard shortcut for instead of clicking.*
ME: "I don't know what the shortcut for that would be and honestly I don't have time to look right now. I really need to keep working on this project."
MGU: "You don't know?"
ME: "Nope."
MGU: "Oh... I'd have thought that with being a programmer you'd have gotten into the DOS commands."

I have never been so tempted to quit.

This year, Lord willing...
* get married
* take a one week honeymoon without a single frantic phone call/email/IM from work or clients. Way way harder than getting married!

A LPT I read on Reddit which I really found effective, sharing with the community here:

Using following naming convention really helps to keep file system sorted

YYYY - MM - DD - Name

Example:
2022-12-31-Christmas trip to Amsterdam
2022-02-28-Honeymoon to Maldives
2021-09-15-Banged Christina

Your folders, will always be sorted in order making it easier for you to locate them.

Update to interview that I had, it went well, I'm starting a 3 month contract 30th May, (soon after my honeymoon). When that's over we'll have a discussion and hopefully I'll be the right fit for the company.

They said do freelancing, you can work from wherever you want. But, I haven't left my house even once in last 7 months.

They said do freelancing, you get to take off days whenever you want. But, I haven't taken even a single day off, after starting freelancing.

They said do freelancing, you will have better work-life balance. But I feel like, I just code and go to the gym and sometimes make YouTube videos.

They said do freelancing, it's better security-wise. But, every month I'm fucking petrified thinking if I even will survive and pay my bills next month.

They said do freelancing, you can work and travel at the same time. But, I've been married 7 months now and haven't taken my wife to honeymoon trip yet.

Am I doing freelancing wrong?

Does every software organisation call probation period as honeymoon period??

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.

Ok. The honeymoon with Windows 10 is clearly over and so the gloves are off.

About to lose my mind with both Windows and Visual Studio updates. If A+B, everything goes smoothly but on the other hand if A+B, everything goes to hell.

And when trying to add components to Visual Studio, it fails 9 times out of ten due to some goddamn /NoWeb switch. What/where the hell is this switch and why everything works without issues that one time out of ten!?

About to burn everything with fire!

A manager is remote working for 2-3 months and had a wedding in a different country (including his honeymoon so PTO). After his PTO, today, the HR wanted to do a welcome-back breakfast for him but he is still in a different country for multiple weeks.

How did they not ask him when he is back

The moment you realise the team you have joined has just finished a brittle implementation: "Wish I was here to stop this."