Overheard a phone call of a collegue:

Person on phone (P): okay so how do I upload the code?
Colleague (C): well you could use filezilla for example
P: oh... okay... yeah.... So how does that work?
C: you said earlier that you were going to hire a more technical person, a developer, to develop this wordpress side, maybe he/she could help you out with this?
P: I am that developer.

C: 😶😐

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *

Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.

Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.

Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?

Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *

New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?

Me: nobody believed me when I said that.

Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?

Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?

New senior: junior dev is right.

Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!

Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.

...

I'm tired of this shit.

Programmer boyfriend: *explaining his work and code and how things work*

PBF: does that make sense?

Me: of course

Narrator: it did not make sense

PM: That screwdriver you built me is really nice. I like how it works with all screws and bolts, does the work itself, etc., but I simply can’t get it to paint, and I really need it to cut my sandwich. Can it cut my sandwich?

PM: Also, since you finished it, the neighbor’s can opener doesn’t work, my dog got fleas, and our screw supplier ran into shipping issues. Fix these ASAP!

Bonus:
Also, remember that hack I forced you to do despite you telling me it wouldn’t work? Yeah it isn’t working. You need to fix that too.

To all developers who think "I don't need to delete that one 1KB temp file"

FUCK.YOU.

You are not the only garbage developer who does not clean his shit up. The reason we need TERA FUCKING BYTE storage devices nowadays is because you incompetent shit heads have no idea how an application has to properly work. A temp file is not there to exist for ever. HENCE THE FUCKING WORD TEMPORARY

The Top 20 replies by programmers when their programs do not work:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"

And the Number One reply by programmers when their programs don't work:

1. "It works on my machine."

You know what? I'm fucking done with people telling me that open source alternatives to popular/proprietary suck by default.

Something does NOT suck by default just because it's FUCKING open source.

Have you got any fucking clue where we'd be right now if open source software didn't exist?!

Let me just remind you that about 80 percent of the worlds' servers run Linux. Open-FUCKING-source.

How the fuck are we supposed to innovate without open sourceness? Yes indeed, that would be about fucking impossible.

Although I've got to admit that some open source software programs don't work 100 well (in comparison to alternatives), what are you expecting? People put their free time into that shit and they've got to make money as well.

"well how are programmers supposed to feed their families if they only write open source software?"

Fuck right off. Of course we all need an income to survive. Hell, I need that as fucking well. But there's more to it than just work. Some people consider open source/working on open source software a hobby/passion. That doesn't even remotely mean thaty they don't work/don't need some kind of income.

If it wasn't for open source, we'd be nowhere (technologially seeing) right now.

Does anyone else have that one guy or gal you work with that's ALWAYS the one to find the weirdest, inexplicable bugs possible? Yup. That's me. Here's some fun examples.

*Unplugs monitor from laptop, causing kernel panic*
*Mouse moves in reverse when inside canvas*
*Program fails to compile, yet compiler blames a syntax error that doesn't exist*
*malloc on the first line of a program causes a segfault*

And for how the conversation usually goes

Me: "[coworker], mind taking a look at this?"
Coworker: "Sure.This better not be another one of 'your bugs'. ... ... ... Well, if you need me I'll be at my desk."
Me: "So you know what's causing it?"
Coworker: "Nope. I've accepted that you're cursed and you should do the same."

Working with a radio chip we selected because it had built-in encryption. Cannot make the encryption work, thus in contact with the manufacturer:
"- I cannot make the encryption work, it's like the chip doesn't want to take a key.
- which key do you use?
- does it matter?
- well yes, you can't just use any key!
- why not?
- you need to get an approved key from us.
- why is that?
- so that your competitors can't read your data!
- ...
- ...
- so the way to get working keys is to get them from you?
- of course!
- keys are 256 bits. Can we potentially use all of them?
- OF COURSE NOT!
- how many can we get from you?
- one! We reserve it from your company.
- are you telling me that all units within a company will need to have the exact same encryption key?
- yes!
- so anyone with our product could eavesdrop another same product?
- well yes, but it's all within your own products.
- ...
- ...
- that's not how encryption is supposed to work.
- but it's safe, your competitors cannot eavesdrop!
- I'm out of here."
(We finally found a satisfactory work-around, but i am still pissed at them)

*Stages of debugging*
1. That can't happen.
2. That doesn't happen on my machine
3. That shouldn't happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?

This is just my token of appreciation for the Skype devs. Can't begin to say how much I hate it. Your android app is a joke even after a host of updates, your desktop client is an even bigger joke (atleast Linux Beta version, I know betas aren't supposed to be stable but this is ridiculous).

You have reinvented chat clients to be extremely bulky, cumbersome and very hard to sync across devices. And you have managed to make it "buffer" more than a YouTube video does on a 2G network. I for one, am blown over by how you did that. And to top it all, you can't close the client on Linux atleast! All you did is just override the close button so that it only minimises it. Brilliant piece of work right there!

Why the hell can't you just close the client and run it in the background the proper way like everyone else does? Why does it have to take 20 *** seconds to open a message? The only reason I am stuck with this is some wierdos in the office still only use this. Get your shit together 😡

Ahh.. I feel much better now.

Six stages of debugging:

1. That can't happen?
2. That doesn't happen on my machine?
3. That shouldn't happen?
4. Why does that happen?
5. OH, I SEE!
6. How did that ever work?

So today I got removed from my freelance project because the client found out I listen to slipknot! What the actual FUCK? How the FUCK does it matter what I listen to?

And that cunt eater isn't willing to pay for the work I've already completed since "Slipknot is anti-Christian".

Burn in hell you piece of shit.

The six stages of debugging:
* That can’t happen.
* That doesn’t happen on my machine.
* That shouldn’t happen.
* Why does that happen?
* Oh, I see.
* How did that ever work?

So today I receive 23 emails on DMCA takedown notice from last year project (which is a personal project). I asked Github why they think it is violating their policy, they told me they receive tonnes of complaints from a company, they shared the chat and that's the ex-company that fired me.

Even the project is not related to them, they seem to want to "Cancel" me on Github. Bro this is Github, not Twitter! Cancel culture does not work here.

Some of my IoT projects they flag it In Github, which I believe my ex-company they don't do any IOT projects. How the fuck it is violating their so called "code nondisclosure"?

!!politics

My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.

It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!

As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.

To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.

Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.

I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.

Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.

Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.

Guys, my unfortunately daily rant of my pm

I was told to create a docker env for our team. Good. Document the process so everyone can know what to do. Good.

My PM follows what he wants to instead of step by step and changes whatever he wants to.

I am asked for help because he doesnt know. No prob.

Me: "Do this, do this and.."
PM: "that doesnt matter, trust me, I could change it and.."
Me: "...and it wont work"
PM: "I know suff too, check" *does his changes aaaaaand doesnt work*
* awkward staring*

That happened a while ago.
This week, he crashed his git repo because he was doing things in docker team (including him) decided not to.

Took me more enough time explaining him "you are not supposed to do that in the container" funny fact he wanted to prove that his way was right and even if he did my way it would crash.

Sooooo he did my way just to prove how wrong I was. Everything worked flawlessly. Rage-still-awkward staring.

Plus the "aww that's weird. I dont know how this happened"

Today, I was told to investigate why the software doesn't work on "some" computers. I had no previous experience with that particular software but I just had to make some tests... easy, right? As soon as I ran the software, my computer crashed (I literally had to restart the pc). I asked my colleagues if I did something wrong but the set up seemed ok.

Later, in a random discussion about the software I found out it does "a little memory allocation". I opened the performance tab in task manager and ran the software again. In an instant, the RAM went from 1.3GB to 7.66GB (my pc has 8GB of RAM).

In an attempt to find how such a monstrosity was creater, I found out the developer that made the software had 16GB of RAM on his pc.

I have found something that eats RAM more than Chrome... brace yourselves.

GUI user: "How can you work from such a basic text interface like that terminal?"
Me: "How can you work with all those stupid buttons that more often than not can't do jack shit?"

Being a Powerline user, I do think that design matters a lot. But so does usability (I don't want my programs to take half a minute to load their bloated UI's) and the ability to use every feature that this or that piece of software has in its command line arguments but not necessarily as a GUI option.

Just spent 3 hours trying to debug something that worked yesterday because SOMEONE thought he had a better idea of how to do it. Holy fucking shit. It worked perfectly and you started deleting my code because you didn't understand it. How about trusting that I know what I'm doing since idk I spent 2 weeks reading up on it to be able to write this. What pisses me off the most is knowing he only does this to my code because he doesn't trust me as I am a) younger than him and b) a woman.

STOP ALREADY. JUST FUCKING STOP. So fucking fed up with having my work scrapped in favor of yours because you are a fucking control freak and think I'm stupid.

HO. LY. SHIT.

So this gig I got myself into, they have a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to access their web server. It's work-at-home. We just got a new internet provider, and it looks like I get a different public IP address everytime I disconnect and connect to the WIFI. And since it looks like the way they work on their codebase is that you either edit the files right on the server or you download the files that you need to work on, make the changes, and then re-upload the file back to the server and refresh the website to see the changes, now I can't access the server because I get different IP addresses. And it's highly inconvenient to keep emailing them to add IP addresses to the whitelist.

No source control, just straight-up download/upload from/to the server. Like, srsly. So that also means debugging is extremely hard for me because one, they use ColdFusion and I've never used that shit before and two, how the hell do you debug with this style of work?

I just started this last Tuesday, and I already want to call it quits. This is just a pain in the ass and not worth my time. I'll be glad to just go back to driving Lyft/Uber to make money while I look for a full-time, PROPER job.

By the way, can I do that to a contracting job? Just call it quits when you haven't even finished your first task? How does this work?

Pm: OK what you've got here?
Me: a bug, haven't tested yet
Pm: *grabs a phone* follow me we will do it
Me: mkay
Pm: *attaches it, goes to the DOM inspector, starts clicking random divs* OK where the fuck the canvas is?
Me: uhmm there in this tree
Pm: *inspects the canvas element for a few sec* what do you think?
Me: ... ... Well the bug was that it wouldn't resize properly after you change to landscape
Pm: *rotates the phone back and forth looking at the canvas properties*
Pm: gotcha, see? Width and height
Me: yes, those are the default html prope...
Pm: now see, there's another width and height. That's the malfunction right there. I'm telling you.
Me: no, this is css. It overrides the html properties there
Pm: well, say what, it doesn't
Me: no it does, that's how html works for decades already
Pm: but why does that not work properly then? Mm? *stares at me wide open*
Me: well I need to do some testing before I can sa...
Pm: then what do you think we are doing now?
Me: we jus...
Pm: *gets a phone call, stands up and walks away*

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

Guy: We should build a Blockchain based review website.
Me: Why does it have to use a Blockchain?
Guy: That way we can verify that only real people are leaving reviews and not bots.
Me: That's not really how Blockchains work.
Guy: Blockchain!

I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.

They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!

I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.

But! No audio.
Damn.

Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.

Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.

But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤

(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)

Fuck that fucking company three way while dozens of homeless HIV crack junkies puke and shit their diarrhea on the three bosses!

I can't put it in words how stupid they are!

Let me try to tell you the latest story while I try not to get multiple strokes.

Backstory: We are three devs, all with a TCCI certification. One has been working for us for almost a year, the other one has been working for us since one and a half year. Both are good friends of mine, btw. I have been working there for almost three years.

Fortunately, I am allowed to work on a reasonable computer. The other devs work on PC's with Windows 7 and 8!

One has just 400 MB space left on his drive and has to delete every month some shit because he does not want to be able to call up websites anymore... How awful?!

The PC of the other great Dev Crashes three to six times a day and needs about 30 minutes to start up!

We can be so productive, but...

We told that in February one of our bosses and asked him to buy new hardware. His answer: yes, of course, I understand that, it's my turn (he always says that "ich bin da dran")

We got a new colleague in the middle of this fucking month. She is responsible for conception.

She works on an old notebook, but today she gets a fucking new PC to work on while the devs are trying to weld with a sparkler! Better hardware than every other Dev PC!!!

Guess what? She is the daughter of a friend of one of our bosses!

We are the only devs at this company.

Fuck that fucking company! Fuck that fucking bosses!

I think we don't go to work for that fucking company anymore!

A friend just asked if I could get him an internship at the place I work. He has no computer/programming background at all but how hard could developing be.
So I informed him my CS degree required at least 7 math courses lowest being calculus.
You need to know math!?!?
Yeah we're the one who writes the programs that actually does the math for everyone else

One day at a doctor who started a small conversation:
Doc: What is your job?
Me: I am a software developer, I write computer programs basically.
Doc: Interesting. How does it work?
Me: Oversimplified you have special languages to tell the computer what to do and then this is converted into a program you can start on your PC. The languages are a bit like basic english (thought of Pascal at this moment).
Doc: So then it is a pretty simple job.

Me thinking: OMFG yes that's why I studied it 6 years, because it's soo easy.

Me thinking at home: Next time tell them that you are a computer scientist and that it is applied mathematics basically. Maybe then they will get a clue of the complexity. 🤔

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

Ahem ahem.
*clears throat*

Front end bois, listen that carefully.
YOU DONT FUCKIN TELL THE BACKEND HOW TO ACCEPT REQUESTS.

Backend creates the fuckin methods, the parameters and the responses, AND YOU FUCKIN ADAPT TO IT.

This guy at my work, we are both from Uni but i picked backend because i suck at frontend and i like using backend languages, sends me a message and tells me he can't make the project work.

At this time i have almost finished my part, i have made the method, have checked that they work, and i closed the work computer.

And now he tells me he wants to make a GET request instead of POST. LISTEN HERE MOTHERFUCKER. The methods are ready, adapt to them and shut the fuck up.

And before you tell me some methods don't work, make fuckin sure your part is correct because if i boot up the work laptop again to check why the method you have told me doesn't work, and it still does the job it was intented to do but you can't fix your part, i will fuckin cut your throat.

Sucker.
I do my part, and have to study for uni exams, since you don't have to because you have passed them, do your self a favor and fuckin learn to do things.

It's not my fault that i got experience on my own while you were just only doing our uni retarded projects and didn't bother to learn anything on your own.

I don't mean by any needs that i'm better than you but fuckin accept that i have learned something else that you have not and i would like to share the knowledge with you since you didn't bother.

!rant

Sad to make my first post here a depressing one, but I really hope that some of you have some tips to help in this line of work.

If anyone of you suffer from depression, how do you cope with it? How do you keep yourself motivated and don't start this self-loathing that I'm currently in? Other than antidepressants or therapy (already have meds).

Why I'm asking is because I have a very tough time getting motivated these days and right now I really need to be most active. I need to do a lot of small and big stuff at my work and at the same time try to graduate from school. The deadline for my thesis is at the start of May, which surely seems far away now, but it does not feel like enough.

The more I understand the systems that I'm working with, the more I can see how much I may have f*cked everything up and I build this never-ending list of tasks for myself in my head to try and fix everything. Which leads to a complete lockup with anxiety and I can't get anything done.

I don't believe in myself or my code anymore. I'm afraid of pushing anything to production. I also don't have anyone else to help me with my work, as I'm the only developer in the company (we have a service provider where most of the big stuff happens).

To add to all this, I have been sick for the last 4 days.

I truly am in a bad place right now.

when your first try to learn a new programming language, for example c++ and you are still new to coding:
"Wtf does it behave this way. How dafuq do pointers work...argh"

and then years later, you come back to c++, do a little revision and it all starts to fall into place and make sense. Man. That feeling.

Intern's CV says they have technical skills with MS Office, MySQL and JavaScript. Last month I let my manager know that this intern doesn't really know anything, so we let her do a Freecodecamp course, after which she still cannot build a basic HTML and CSS page and doesn't understand the relationship between HTML and CSS.

My manager bought her a Laravel course for beginners and today I discovered that she also doesn't understand databases, because she tried to enter an alphabetic character into a column that only accepts integers. She doesn't read/understand the error codes thrown by the application.

She tried to access a route which she created in her Laravel app by accessing it via the phpmyadmin dashboard and called me and wasted my time by asking me why her route isn't working. She literally does not understand how computers work, or how the HTTP protocol works, even less so how a file structure works. She cannot translate abstractions to practical solutions.

She either deliberately lied on her CV to get a job, or she's just really dumb and doesn't understand what the term "technical skills" mean.

I've told my manager multiple times how I think she's in the wrong job, but they keep pushing things beyond her capabilities onto her desk. I was told I'd get an intern to help me with my work load, but I got signed up into an experiment I did not consent to (manager's words, it's an experiment to help uplift people with bad degrees and a poor background). I am not a good teacher, I hate doing it.

Was coding on a project at home and suddenly i got the feeling that i had forgotten something...
*Checks the time*
06.30AM
Oh... yeah...sleep...
Hello coffee my old friend...
Time to head off to work then :)

How often does this happen to you?

I have teens in my classroom who want elite hacker status but complain about doing programming exercises outside of class. >.<

I explain to them that learning to code takes a lot of practice and can be frustrating at first. Some still went to the dean complaining that my class is tough. I work at a private school where open communication is encouraged and social justice is a thing.

So, I'm over here like "How do I reach these kids?"

I'm optimistic and I try different approaches to teaching and learning. Some stuff has worked. A lot haven't.

I figure I'd ask here: Does anyone have a suggestion for any creative programming exercises/projects that are beginner-friendly, legal, and hacker-ish? (I teach intro to Java.)

Supervisor: so you're going to write a perl script that will compile a jar that will be used to invoke a web service
Me: okay. What does the web service do?...
Supervisor: I'm not sure how it works. It'll just return a success or error code
Me: so I'm just going to invoke a black box?
Supervisor: that's a good way to think of it
Me: so how does the qa process work with this black box/how can we debug?
Supervisor: we don't have qa for it and we can't debug

What the fuck?!?!? You expect me to call a literal fucking black fucking box?!?! This isn't lambda calc you jabroni.

Feel like a god!

I've made an API service that returns a list of countries based on a temperature range that they will have within the next 10 days for spur of the moment holidays.

It even finds you the cheapest possible flight ticket from your location to it.

So many nights were spent raging since I had never touched node js until 9 weeks ago and I have other huge pieces of work on the burner.

Once it's finished and works properly, how does one market such a service?

Why is there so much hate against QA in general??

I read tons of rants about how bad testers are... and as a dev who does a lot of QA work, IT SUCKS!

We (devs) have to accept that are work needs to be tested! Otherwise we want be successful with our products.

BUT the testers need to know the development business! They should be trained at the same level as the devs are.

BECAUSE if the mug on my desk is smarter than the tester it is not going to work!
If the tester has full access to all the technologies, environments and tools (and are capable of using it) he has the ability to HELP!

I THINK that testing should be more than just follow predefined steps and let a random tool generate a bugreport.

I am sure that some of you are lucky enough to work with highly skilled testers so please let them help

Well fuck me sideways with a rusty lamppost.
Got assigned to a project at work, kind of a biggie, my first actual large project. Been working there since last year, done a lot of research in my spare time and felt like I deserved it or something.

But then...

A few weeks ago I posted a rant about a fuckwit that can't even type 'ssh' in a terminal and doesn't know how a basic database system works.

Guess what.

Yeah.

Exactly that happened.

Because of his overconfidence and big mouth he got assigned to the project as well.
He planned a pitch. Stole my words.

He hasn't proven himself in any way and always needs help. Always. And I don't have a problem with people asking for help, I actually tell people not to be afraid to ask if they don't know something.

But I do have a problem with people laying back at work and asking 7 different people how to open a terminal.

Why does this happen? Just why?

Why does CSS never work the way you'd expect? All I want to do is align something to the bottom of a div. No. Will not happen. You'd think it might be something simple as 'v-align' or 'align: bottom' or 'fucking put it at the bottom: now;'

No, it's never that simple. I try every result I can find from googling. Nothing. Simply does not work.

How about trying to keep a div to a square when you resize the page? That should be simple? height = width right? Fuck you. Ha hahah, no you have to implement some horrendous arcane hack involving fake elements and other bullshit.

You finally fix one thing and everything else you had working is now broken.

...and then some fuckwit comes along and goes "Oh, CSS isn't hard..." and it takes everything you have not to beat them to death with your rubber duck.

What the hell is wrong with CSS? It's not even programming! It's just pure, sadistic hell! FUCK CSS!!!!

Just saw an advert with the tag line similar to "An API built by developers, for developers"
Which makes me wonder. Do non-devs build APIs? How does that work?
The same to using APIs. Surely some dev knowledge/experience is required?

I’ve just talked to my cousin (24 yo) about smartphones, since I saw that he has an old phone and I asked him if he wanted to buy my old S6 (for reasonable price), he declined this offer moreover he said that he is not planning to change his current device. I was kinda shocked tbh how one can live like that (being online only when using PC), a while after that I realised that he was the one who was smart in this conversation, the one that does not get influenced by others in this matter. I wish I could live like that, when he is not available, he’s just not available. I mean this rant is not purely dev related, but, quite a lot of us here are maintaining some projects, maybe need to talk to managers after their work to make some decisions, doing some side projects. I know that we sort of agreed with those rules at the beginning, but don’t forget to stay offline for some time, especially now when holidays are coming and there will be occasions to spend some time with our families. Just a friendly reminder :)

Wordpress does not suck. If you know how to work it.

Past period I saw so many rants on WP. My rant is that it is not 100% WP fault. Yes there are seriously structural problems in WP but that does not mean you cannot create top-notch websites.

At my work we create those top-notch WP sites. Blazing fast and manageable. Seriously we got a customer request to make the site slower because it loaded pages to fast (ea; you hardly could see you switched pages).

- We ONLY use a strict set of plugins that we think are stable, useful.
- We have everything in composer (and our own Satis) for plugins.
- We use custom themes & classes. Our code is MVC with Twig.
- In our track history we have 0 hacked websites for the past 2 years.
- Everything runs stable 24/7
- We have OTAP (testing, acceptance & production environments)
- We patch really fast

These are sites going from $15k++ and we know our shit.

Don't hate on WP if you have no clue what you are doing yourself.

That is my rant.

It has been bugging the shit out of me lately... the sheer number of shit-tier "programmers" that have been climbing out of the woodwork the last few years.

I'm not trying to come across as elitist or "holier than thou", but it's getting ridiculous and annoying. Even on here, you have people who "only do frontend development" or some other lame ass shit-stain of an excuse.

When I first started learning programming (PHP was my first language), it wasn't because I wanted to be a programmer. I used to be a member (my account is still there, in fact) of "HackThisSite", back when I was about 12 years old. After hanging out long enough, I got the hint that the best hackers are, in essence, programmers.

Want to learn how to do SQL injection? Learn SQL - write a program that uses an SQL database, and ask yourself how you would exploit your own software.

Want to reverse engineer the network protocol of some proprietary software? Learn TCP/IP - write a TCP/IP packet filter.

Back then, a programmer and a hacker were very much one in the same. Nowadays, some kid can download Python, write a "hello, world" program and they're halfway to freelancing or whatever.

It's rare to find a programmer - a REAL programmer, one who knows how the systems he develops for better than the back of his hand.

These days, I find people want the instant gratification that these simpler languages provide. You don't need to understand how virtual memory works, hell many people don't even really understand C/C++ pointers - and that's BASIC SHIT right there.

Put another way, would you want to take your car to a brake mechanic that doesn't understand how brakes work? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Watching these "programmers" out there who don't have a fucking clue how the code they write does what it does, is like watching a grown man walk around with a kid's toolbox full or plastic toys calling himself a mechanic. (I like cars, ok?!)

*sigh*

Python, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc. They're all tools and they have their merits. But god fucking dammit, they're not the ONLY damn tools that matter. Stop making excuses *not* to learn something, Mr."IOnlyDoFrontEnd".

Coding ain't Lego's, fuckers.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

Perfect job is when sandbox and production api endpoints works the same.

Fuck all api endpoints where their sandbox works differently than the production.

Fuck all those error messages that appear only in production, despite faithfully following the documentations.

Fuck the gateways where their sandbox is more stable than the production.

Fuck the endpoints whose api parameters differ in what they accept between sandbox and production.

Fuck those manuals that does not document these diferrences.

Fuck those developers and support team who don't know how to support integrators. They don't even know how their apis work!

Hahahahahahahahahha I'm not going to do anymore of your "quick" projects that result in shit pay and drain me out. I got actual fulfilling projects I enjoy working on hahahahah not again "friend". The audacity of this guy to ask me to handle a big project alone while he sits on his ass and gets a 50% cut. He should have paid attention in school if he wanted to be a programmer. All he does is lie to clients that he can code yet runs to me to do all the work. Hahahah let's see how he gets out of this one. Not gonna help you today "friend".

Co-worker - "We need to have this added just like this, you should be able to do that right, it looks easy"

Me - "HA we'd have to redesign the whole architecture to make that work, and you still can't even figure out how to take a screenshot after I've showed you 20 times, so maybe don't tell me how easy something does or doesn't look"

Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.

I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.

It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.

Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!

Me: junior dev

Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)

Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!

*goes to meeting with client*

Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)

Me: awesome! I think I can build that

Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do

Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*

Is the software at your company so bad that it's a miracle that anything works?

Does it feel like this colossal pile of broken electronics from the past 30 years duct taped together and patched with multiple tiers of adapters, wires spliced together with scotch tape, and someone on stand by with a fire extinguisher?

Do you feel like getting your product to work is like how we used to get things to work back in the eighties? Not just turning things off and on again, but things like hitting the tv to make it work again, blowing into cartridges, and the feeling of pulling on the starting cord on a gas powered mower over and over again to no avail?

That is exactly what my company's codebase is. A huge amorphous, heterogenous pile of shit that somehow works and occasionally has to be massaged to make it work again. Fuck my life.

Does anyone else usually feel a bit homicidal towards someone(replace with boss or client) who doesn’t know a thing about what you do but constantly critiques your work?

Client: I don’t like how it looks, put some more design on it.

What does that even mean ????!?!

Oh yeah that shouldn't take too long right? I mean it's just the front end.

No shut your fucking dumb ass mouth up. It will take long. The front end is very complicated, and your stupid fucking ass who couldn't learn to code is in no position to estimate how long it will take. Do us all a favor and stick to the "business" side. Fucking incompetent idiot.

If you're not a programmer, when it comes to estimating how long a task will take. Just shut the fuck up. Just cause you work in this industry does not qualify you to estimate a task. Just shut the fuck up.

WTF is this bullshit?!! I set an alarm on my phone for 9:00 and 9:15 just in case... The alarms went off at 10:00 and 10:15, now I am an hour late for work. Just how does that even work?!!! Yeah, time changes but you don't change the fucking alarm Huawei! FFS... I really don't look forward to explaining this...

Also.. devRant on mobile seems to be broken? :( @dfox

So I was talking with a coworker about a difficult situation I had with a manager years ago. It came down to how to interpret the company rules. The issue was about schedules and not being allowed to modify those schedules permanently. Say always leaving at 3pm on Friday every week kind of thing.

It came up because I wanted to work through my lunch to make up an hour. So my manager went pouring through the company rules and found this one phrase "you are not to modify your work schedule on a continuous basis". I was like what does that have to do with me working through lunch. He then told me that would make my work schedule during the day without a break to be a continuous day. Which to him was not allowed. I was flabbergasted at how insane the interpretation was on his part. It was not worth fighting it at the time.

Back to my current coworker. We keep talking for a while and he says to me: Was that manager an adversity hire?

I have been chuckling about this all day.

Why the hell does every single frontend job on Earth require expert knowledge of React, a fad JS library that will be forgotten in 5 years?

For extra credit: when was the sage advice of "keep content, appearance, and behavior separate" overruled in favor of "use JavaScript for literally everything"? Have I been in a coma for the past 3 years?

Look, I understand the appeal of separating code into repeatable components. I just don't understand why essentially the same thing can't be accomplished with vanilla JS, which is ten times easier to understand and doesn't require an entire website to be written in some make-believe offshoot of Ecmascript that will look like hieroglyphics a decade from now.

There are also seemingly no positions that offer people a platform to start applying React to real world scenarios. I've seen the "understand React in 5 minutes" articles. Wow, super cool, you used 30 lines of JavaScript to render a "Hello world" div. The possibilities are truly endless.

But seriously, how does this shit work? Where do I go to learn the mystical art of offloading every single one of a website's responsibilities to JavaScript? How do I use React to build an actual functioning website, and at what point will it save me time or increase my productivity instead of just pissing me off?

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

I starting to think, that I may actually be addicted to learning 😅 sound completely stupid, but I'm kinda stressed lately, so I wanted to take a day off, and not do anything.

But my mind kept being like "how does this work, how does that work, how do they fit together". I've never really tried before, to not research something, when I wanted to know how it worked, but Damn it's actually been hard not to...

A conversation with my dear sister...
She: Hey Davide, why does this message appear?
Message of youtube: "This video is not available in your country"
Me: It means that whoever uploaded the video wants to reproduce it only in the country chosen by him during the upload.
She: Ah, but how can I do to see it?
Me: You have to go through a proxy. Wait a minute... I arrive...
She: But using the incognito mode could not work?
Me: No 😑😑
Me (thinking): No please... no... please... what was the question? No...
I like you anyway ❤

Today an intern accidentally opened vim and couldnt exit it. So she came by to ask how to get out of that editor.
My response: just hit escape and then ":q".
Turned out her escape key didnt work so she had to use an onscreen keyboard and she said there are about 5 dead keys on her keyboard for 2 years now...

How does one work with a broken keyboard?
And is there another way to exit a "mode" in vim than pressing escape?

I see loads of students here.. and loads of freelancers and startup joiners.. all varieties...but one.. Anyone has a 'normal' 9-5 or sth (dev) work? Does that even exist?! Anyone stands up when the 8h are up and can leave the work behind?
I can't.. even when I leave the office I have algos & code stuck in my head..trying to solve the problem I worked on..

How do you handle non dev life? Is there anything left in a day?
I usually work monday-friday on avg 9h/day and have no idea how to manage not being fucked up at the end of the week. :\ I am trying to get back climbing, but usually I am just soooooo tiiiiireeeeeed after work.. I wanna sleep but when I close my eyes I see the code.. at least one core still left working..

My Manager: Could you help "other manager" (OM) they need some very simple code changes.

Me: sure that will only take a few minutes *adds 15 lines of code tells OM one single line they have to modify*

Some other manager (SOM): Hey how does this work, I'm confused, do I need to do anything?

Me: Yes see the email chain you were copied on.

SOM: Actually let's have a meeting instead and all discuss this.

Goddammit this was a simple change to make your life easier now you are wasting everyones time by not reading the email

Have you ever looked at code you had written years or even decades ago and asked yourself either:

1) How this this even work?

2) What the hell does this do?

3) or, I can’t believe I wrote that. (In horror or serendipitously)

watching the online course for CEH... dude used the Death Star as a tangible example of how exploits work.
IDK if I should love it for the nerdiness, or be slightly sad that someone needs that type of example of what a vulnerability vs an exploit is, when they're going for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification...
Might be better in an introduction to Network Security class?

Also, while discussing the security, usability, and functionality triangle, he reference the Staples "Easy Button" - does one thing, not very secure, and not very functional (in that it has more than one function)...

2018 dev goal #1: ✔️

This week I learned Python 3, as in most of the syntax. Not yet any development, but that will come tomorrow onwards.

Oh, and I hate the funky type system, which is almost non existent and so flexible that I don't know if it's just bad or I simply don't see why I should want it this way.

Please enlighten me why you think Python is great or just plain snake crap.

Did I mention snake case being common practice? And that Python doesn't know real private properties, methods, etc.? How does that work?

Godmotherfuckingshitpissballs fuck software development. Seriously wtf.

I learned c# and Unity for 4 fuckin years. Now I want to learn Electron and i just cant get it to fuckin work that motherfucker!

Installed node.js into a folder on my Desktop, git cloned the quick start app, copied the files, npm start and wow it starts.

ONCE.

It does not start anymore wtf? Also the stupid tutorials that I bought dont fuckin explain how to set it up properly wtf...

Doesnt help that im a windows noob and the guy in the tutorial is a macSnob.

Goddamnit I hate this phase of learning stuff. It fuckin sucks.

Also software development is around for like what? 30 years and electron is the best solution for GUI that people came up with? Fuck me.

I had a great insight today: What annoys me so about social media and society in general are these „fake insights“ everyones having.

LinkedIn and Reddit are just undoable for me lately. Everything there feels like a youtube title: „Look how I increased my productivity“ - A To-Do-List.
We does everything anybody does or thinks have to be pseudo empowering? It less severe irl but I can feel it spilling into work in my startup company.
I feel people on devrant are the least annoying online. Why is that?

my mom says: "I've got an app [on my smartphone] so that I can call and internet via my phone at work, so I don't use any minutes or MBs! :) "
me: "So how does your phone communicate with your work phone then? "
my mom: "via the app"
me: "without using minutes or MBs?"
my mom: "yes"

me: "So how does your phone communicate with your work phone then? "
my mom: "via the app"
me: "without using minutes or MBs?"
my mom: "yes"
etc

I NEED MY SLEEP FFS!!! It is 06:20 in the morning and I am already on the train to work because one of our managers felt the need to plan a meeting from 08:00 on monday morning to explain EXACTLY why something does not work.
Needless to say that she is no dev (or has technical know how)!
But the best part is:
THE INVITATION FOR THE MEETING WAS SEND OUT FRIDAY EVENING SO THERE IS NO PREPARATION-TIME WHATSOEVER!!!
Fuck

Current list of developer skills:

* Can find 3rd or 4th best solution to most problems

* Easily ready to accept blame for anything to save time since it's likely my fault anyway

* Caffeine addiction only enough to make you worry, not intervene

* Can explain how JavaScript DOESN'T work, thus getting us both closer to understanding how it does

* Only choke on parts of presentations that aren't critically important, like minor details and Q&A

* Good at smack talking other languages I also don't know how to use

* can make a mean gumbo

Serious Question/Poll

Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...

Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)

What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.

What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.

Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.

Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.

Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.

Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.

What else am I missing?

My patience limits are huge but our product manager seems that likes to stretch them.

You piece of fuckin shit. You ask for feature A and we agree on the way we will do it. Good. Half way you want to change it's behavior.
Fine, i accept that. Let's move on.
I'm close to finish it and you come and say let's add more on that feature and make it more complicated. I can't say anything, just fine and let me work on it.
Then you and the senior dev that "helps" us don't come to 2 meetings and just communicate via emails.
And then, then you fuckin scums tell me that is unacceptable that i haven't finished it and it doesn't work?
I used my uni time and missed lessons to work on your shitty feature and that you just yell at me?
What about comming to the fuckin meetings so we can discuss what problems occured and how i can overcome them, you sucker?

Just because our boss complained to you that the product is late because of you, that doesn't give you the right to yell at me, you piece of shit.

And the next time you tell me that you pulled the repository and it doesn't work while it does on everyone else i will come and shove your laptop up to your ass.

I think there is such a thing as "getting too comfortable with the people you work with".

My boss came over and wanted to show me how to do a new process. We start going through the steps and a question arises. I then IM my team lead, because he's the one who would know the answer, and all I get back from him is sarcastic comments and profanity (he doesn't know my boss is sitting at my comp with me). So I keep trying to get him to be serious, and he just keeps his mouth (well, fingers) going. (He is remote - not in our bldg). I want so badly to shut him up because what if he says something about my boss while she is sitting there? Not that he does that, but at the pace he's going, it no longer would surprise me.

There should be some sort of code to hint to your team to STFU and give a fucking answer when one is needed. Sort of like what kids do to hint that a parent is in the room, but for work?

So, company I work at, is on desperate need of PHP developers, who can work in WordPress and Magneto. Company announced vacancy.

Only 20 CVs were dropped 4 days before from today. So company called all of them for interview and I was one of the interviewer. Most of applicants told me that they know Laravel but not WordPress.

I was like fine. Maybe they can work on WordPress too. But I was wrong. Here are some funny interviews:

Me: how many types of inheritance does PHP support?
Applicant 1: 7. Single, multiple, etc..

Me: Do you know difference between interface and abstract class?
Applicant 2: (he just said some gibberish)

Me: why do u prefer Laravel to WordPress?
Applicant 3: because by default Laravel support payment gateway, so we can create e commerce application faster. WordPress doesn't support payment gateway.

Me: how many WordPress site you have worked on?
Applicant 4: I have 4 themes in WordPress.org
Me: Do you create all of them by yourself?
Applicant 4: Yes
Me: Do u know difference between require and include?
Applicant 4: No
Me: Do u know difference between query_posts and WP_Query?
Applicant 4: No
Me: (facepalm)

HOW THE FUCK

DO I USE A NPM PACKAGE

THAT DOESN'T SUPPORT IMPORT X FROM PACKAGE

IN A TYPE:MODULE

REPO?

WHY THE FUCK CAN'T NODE JUST SUPPORT BOTH

WHAT IN THE FUCK

HOW DOES WEBPACK LET YOU USE BOTH?!

I CANNOT FIND A WORK AROUND FOR ERROR

SyntaxError: The requested module 'file-type' does not provide an export named 'default'

WHAT THE FUCK?

DO I NEED TO USE A DIFFERENT PACKAGE?

WHAT THE FUCK

While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".

Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications

My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.

But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?

My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though?

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

I'm managed by idiots who don't fully realize the nightmare they're creating.

They're making small operational changes, but hundreds of them with zero evidence to back their claims up.

When I bring up how it actually works, and how operations actually work I'm told I don't use the tools as much as management does and that my feedback is limited to how I use the tool.

So now I'm just gambling that they won't fuck up too bad before I get that sweet sweet sellout money and just letting them fuck everything up they want without any warnings from me.

I'm quickly learning that the phrase of the year is, "Fuck em".

MANAGER: "Hey Slug, I just got off the phone with $partner about $issue and they want to have a meeting with us to discuss it. Send them an email and schedule something for Thursday morning."

WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK I AM, YOUR PERSONAL SECRETARY!!??? If you're the one who has a specific day and time of day that works this week, and if you were talking to them anyway, then how about YOU schedule the meeting????? And of course $partner comes back with "Does 10:30 work?" and so now I'm just playing middle-man. Who could have seen THAT coming.........

Today I had what might have been my worst job interview to date. It had many different technical, cultural, and business red flags. One that really stuck out to me was when I asked my interviewer why he loves his job, he went on about how great the benefits and events are. Not a single word about the work he does or his teammates. A younger me would have seen this as an opportunity to put in some hard work and contribute to something great. Older me knows to avoid this dumpster fire like the goddamn plague.

When I told someone to read the docco+wiki and ask me if there were problems, for them to come back every five mins to tell me "so, how does this all work?"

I wrote the wiki and it was A-Z. There's nothing I knew about the product that wasn't in the wiki.

It took me so much self-control to not bash his head into my monitor.

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

Company wants me to give a rough estimate of developing a new feature in a distributed legacy monolit. They told me they would inform me the next day and want the estimate on the same day for a project that will probably take 2 devs 3-4 months. I ask for more time and info, give the estimate and they say it "feels too much". I mean ok. Then why am I even estimating? If in the first place the client has only X money than do the project for X and it doesn't really matter how much work it is, does it?

To all the people who constantly complain about devRant not being good enough…

First off, who the fuck cares? I mean honestly, does anyone give a fuck? People have been saying for YEARS that they hate devrant and that it needs to change in whatever fucked up dev idea way that we all think the world should actually work. The real fun is how this platform evolves into different phases over time. The fun is interacting with devs anonymously talking about really anything. It doesn’t matter - as long as it’s interesting or entertaining it’s fine. Don’t fucking pretend that you are a goddamn professional elitist asshole bc we all know everyone here is weird and stupid.

*Gives the list of top three candidates (All women) to hire to HR Manager (A Lady)*
HRM: Ha, I always knew it, women are always better than men. Alas, you are realising now.

*At that moment, it felt as if all my hard work to judge all the candidates abilities without any prejudice whatsoever, just got collected by the garbage collector*

Why does it have to be Men Vs Women, why does there have to be any comparison at all, except the question that how does this individual compare to the rest.
I really don't care whether one is old, young, male or female or whatever other factor that can be used to separate humans into groups. Why can't it simply be: Does this individual produce the end result required? Period.

As someone who used to be a full-time Dev, but now works in other areas that sometimes don't quite scratch that tech itch, I find that each visit to Deviant inspires me more and more to work on personal Dev projects. Don't know how or why, but it just does. Go DevRant!

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

Serously I just recoverd from being overworked and senior developers are complaining to me that their code does not work???

DUDE just read the fucking error and start googling!

How the fuck do you think I learned software development?

It's a fucking matter of trail 'n error!

Because I work with computers all day, my friend automatically thinks that I know what every file type does, how to hack everything and fix every computer related issues...

Forms with autofocus. What are your opinions on that?

My boss keeps asking us to always give autofocus to the first input of a form, without any UX study to support it, just his opinion ("I think it makes sense"). I fucking hate it. He says it's nice for keyboard users, but I'm a keyboard user myself and I say that's what the tab key is for. To fucking focus stuff.

It really annoys me to no end when things like this are requested, but it's ok to have buttons, checkboxes, etc without fucking :focus and :active styles. Just :hover is not enough ffs.

And "links" that work with "onclick". Damn how I want to kill anyone that does that.

// Tired as fuck adventures, yay

I was once coding and researching for a school project, it was around 1AM (yeah, I'm a pussy that needs to sleep at 12AM, otherwise I'm useless all the day long) and a friend was with me, he was doing another stuff.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he asks me "Hey, how much is 12 multiplied by 430?", so I say "Let me check", press Win+R, type "notepad", enter, write operation and wait looking at the screen.

"why this does not work?" I thought for some seconds until I realized I fucking typed in notepad and not in the calculator.

Just laughed my ass off and went straight to sleep. Until today, my friend thinks I'm deranged.

Question to our Tor people.

I operate a middle relay myself and I noticed that Nyx (tor monitoring tool) displays a very different throughput (mb/GB a day) than tor itself.

How does that work?

!rant
I saw a devrant user posting something about "the cockroach" that survives in the company no matter what so I knew I had to rant about something similar. I worked with a guy and his ability to talk shit is in direct proportion to his salary. The guy watches youtube all day, searches for things to buy, goes to vacations and no one knows what he does. :)) plot twist: he just forwards ( not sends ) emails from the business to a software provider. Did I mention that he has the highest salary( don't ask how I found out ).
Anyhow, the guy is winning at life, no one gives two shits about him, he is always hiding and running from work. While writing this I'm actually amazed by his skill, how do you end up like this? He reminds me of Wally from Dilbert!

Lets learn bubble sort!
Type the following code to Visual C++ 1998 and compile it. Then run it. Write the output to the paper i just gave it to you.

Reality:
• Takes 5 mins to compile and run
• Too many errors in the given code so obscure output
• Teacher thinks we are so smart that we can understand c by typing and looking at the output.

The worst part:
• Different output per compiler
- Correctly compiles in the compiler in VC++ 98.
- Differs in GNU GCC, compiles wrong
- sends out obscure dummy output in VS2015~2017
- Works well in tutorialspoint.com compiler

WTF is this, guys?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Oh, and i have gone off topic...
Why does he think we are smart that we can understand bubble sort, and 4 more by only typing the code and looking at the output without knowing how does this algo work?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Answer to weekly question.
The teacher said to understand sorting algos by typing the code and looking at the output which differs per compiler.

New manager was hired in another department but he sits close to me.

After a couple of weeks he complimented how it always seemed like I was there at work.

I just said thanks. But what I wanted to say was...

"Yeah no kidding fucktard, you get here after 8am, leave before 3pm, and you some how are impressed that not only does my normal 8 hour shift completely overlap the time you are here, but I also regularly put in 9 hour days which is pretty normal for people around here.”

Last week: Resigned from my current job as a front end dev, mostly due to incompetence in upper middle management.

Yesterday: knowledge transfer to backend dev who aspires to become full stack.
"
- So how does the designer deliver the CSS to the code ?
- He doesn't, he just sends the prototype, we make it work...
- The manager told me that the front end team did not touch CSS.
*fuzzy find ". styles"*
- So these are the 40 some files that appeared here magically.'
"

Today:
New git flow policy's in place. Pull requests are now outside the flow and are entirely optional.

This is gonna be the tits...

Why is chromecast so stupid?

So I'm on vacation, in another country, in a hotel. I took my chromecast and downloaded offline music to be able to use the TV for at least some entertainment.

Wifi is with login, chromecast doesn't support that. And it has isolation so I was prepared that it won't work through the hotel wifi. So I used another phone to create a Hotspot, but with no internet because roaming here is crazy expensive.

I thought that would work, but chromecast simply refuses to work if there is no internet access.

Why does it need internet if I'm streaming locally anyway?

So I temporarily activate data roaming, and hooray it works, so I quickly disconnect because I have no idea what this shit of a device will start sending to Google and how much I'm gonna pay for it. It works for 10 minutes then it crashes and needs internet again.

Most useless piece of crap I ever bought.

Should have brought my RPi instead but it's busy keeping my home alive and well while I'm gone. Should have ordered in bulk.

I have a serious question.
I particularly address Italian ranters.

It's about time to decide what faculty/"subject" I should go to, and I'm uncertain between "Informatics" and "Informatic Engineering".

Does someone know what the differences between the two are, and, given that I want to do as much programming (and so practical stuff instead of theorical stuff) as possible, which of these two faculties should suit me best?

If you're not from Italy, but from other countries, of course that shouldn't stop you from posting a response, if you want to.
How do Universities work there?
Are they like ours, in Italy, or does it work differently?

Thanks for your patience. 💙

Bit of an odd question maybe, but when sending out your CV to a company over email, what would you expect to be written / write in the email itself?

I've got a sysadmin position that I'd really like to apply to, and it seems like I'm ticking all the boxes, however some of the things like SSH authentication (I mean it's fairly basic, isn't it) I haven't mentioned on the CV at all because I feel it's to be assumed. But I'd like to mention it in the email itself along with motivation. Apparently there's this thing called a "motivation letter"? How does that work?

Point is, I could go on all day about these services they ask about and how they already exist in my home lab, but I'm not entirely sure whether I should just keep it brief and just say "here's my CV and there's my number", or go a bit in-depth about it in the mail. Perhaps something in between?

I don’t just want to learn how to scrap together applications.

I want to become an engineer; one that can wear that badge properly.

I spent a day or two reading my peers code base in .NET Core to start learning its wizarding ways. I found myself emulating some of the patterns.

Then I found a tutorial series on putting together a correctly decoupled RESTful API...the same chap wrote an SDK for Azure CosmoDB.

THIS is what I am talking about.

I can’t believe these guys at work have twenty years C# experience between them and they are churning out this shit for more than 1.5x my salary.

I want to become this but I swear half the coding world does NOT care.

Holy shit. In a meeting that literally makes no sense. We're taking credit for work by claiming story points. Story points. How the hell does that work? Especially since we have told management CONSTANTLY that story points are abstract LOE shit and NOT time spent. Yet I suggest if we REALLY want to estimate who worked what we track time spent I get shot down. You can't get a concrete measurement from an abstract concept. Also, we're being encouraged to argue over who does what? What does THAT help? AND we're not even reestimating if we over or under estimating, but being forced to massage our numbers into the estimate. What the fuck?

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.

Went over to GeekSquad because I royally screwed up my computer. (Really, I wanted a second opinion)

Once I got there, I spoke to the guy about my problem, how I made the problem occur, and then proceeded to show him how my computer would BSOD just as it was about to turn on.

I then asked him if it's possible to work from the backend and reverse what I did to get it up and working again.

His eyes, wide in confusion, and fear, then replied,

No we would have to do a clean install of Windows 7 in order to even get past the BSOD.

Ok.jpg

I promptly thanked him for trying and then left with the affirmation that all IT ever does is clean install and then charge you up the ass for the OS and backed up data.

This type of post might be good for a weekly rant (if it has not been done yet) "Most Bizarre bug"

So I am working with laravel and vuejs and I use phpstorm as my IDE and today I had the MOST bizarre bug. I'm working on a cryptocurrency website and I'm making a vue component that is going to be a stratum generator for miners and I wanted to make it a component in vue so it can be used anywhere in the site. So I wanted to call the component "StratumGenerator.vue" and i didnt think that this would be an issue. Oh boy was I wrong. So immediately my syntax highlighting did not work nor did emmet autocomplete which is something I can't work without. So i go on for about an hour to fucking figure out how to fix jetbrains vuejs syntax plugins and a very long story short it was because THE FUCKING NAME WAS "StratumGenerator.vue" LITERALLY ANY OTHER NAME WORKS

I've checked its not a blacklisted keyword Stratum and Generator work fine on there own its also not a length thing so right now I have not a fucking clue on why it does not work but i'm glad I figured out.

Fiddling with the UiPath RPA tool. What the fuck is this monster?

So, you create apps by drawing a flowchart, like some kid using Scratch. Then, suddenly, you have to create a .NET object just to get a random number!

Who the fuck is the target audience that can create objects, call a directory read function, etc, but can't write a loop?! Show me that fucking person.

Then I have to debug the fucking selectors when they don't work correct. All this requires is understanding how UIs are structured under the hood. So, you know that a menu bar is a window, but you need to draw a fucking if statement?!

And how would you debug and manage this monstrosity?

It like we learned nothing from all the Excel apps we build for decades.

I mean, it's an impressive app. But, why does it exist?

Someone needs to stop this before it gets out into the wild or we'll all be debugging flowchart a created by business analysts.

You have been warned. Join the fight or accept the consequences.

typescript, I HATE you!

ME: Trying to extend Subject and override Subject.subscribe(PartialObserver<T>)

ME: export class MySubject<T> extends Subject<T> {
subscribe(obs?:PartialObserver<T>): Subscription {
return super.subscribe(obs);
}
}

ME: compile
TS: Compilation error! No such method to override!

ME: load the app -- ERROR

ME: recompile
TS: Compilation error! No such method to override!

ME: load the app -- works perfectly

:confusedjackie:

Make up your mind! So is that class compileable or not???
If not -- how the fuck does it work then???
If yes -- why the fuck do you yell in my face with all those errors???

Embedded app design resources?

We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.

Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?

I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.

I have a big problem guys. I am so stressed out that i have been crying for the past few hours. I joined this company as a fresher 2 years back by signing a bond that i'll have to pay them if I leave the company. The bond is going to be over on 25th Nov,2023. They extended the bond by 3 months. I was a desperate kid back then who had pressure from family. Now the situation is that i have performed well throughout my working period. They are heavily underpaying me. Now i have 2.5 years of experience but freshers are earning more than me now. They had been giving me work every now and then. Now they have made me the lead of a new team where i have to build the world's most useless framework that does not even make any sense. The most suitable developer who was also my senior refused to join the team because he knew how useless the work is and is going to take the troll on him. Now I have to do it.
My manager said that you are going to do this and the deadline is 3 months. Which is not even feasible. This is utterly stupid. It's a waste of time. I am so fucking stressed out because of this and how much freshers(interns whom i trained) are earning more than me.
I have a notice period of 3 months. No companies are willing to hire because of this notice period.
If I resign now, i have to pay them 75k rupees and plus I have to eventually work for 3 months. I can't do this. What to do in this situation.
I am trapped.

tell my boss on Friday that I'll work through the weekend to get done work done on some python code.

he doesn't give out vpn access so I can't use our company git so I put the project on a flash drive to work on.

come into work and I have an email. on Sunday he did everything I said I was doing (and had done) and then refactors the entire repo so even if he hadn't done the work, all of what I did became useless.

His way is the only way. but good luck getting him to tell you how he wants it. you just have to do a bunch of work only for him to tell you he doesn't like the way you did things and then he does it himself.

makes me realize why their other programmers didn't stick around. because they had to work so closely with this guy.

glad I started looking for other jobs sooner then later.

When someone asks me a tecnical question in something i'm interested in:
"It works like this ... Oh i also should explain you how processors work ... Anyway, when a bufferoverflow arises ... And thats how crypthography works ... and so does blockchain work ... anf thats why bitcoin is causing way too many stress on the power grid."

what is the purpose of a degree?

what value does it convey?

isnt it better if you just show all the work and projects youve done on github as proof of what kind of knowledge do you actually have? plus where you worked before on linkedin? thats not enough, right? a paper needs to decide how much knowledge you have? is that it?

Seriously, fuck sports fans. Imagine having to relate every conceivable concept through a scenario in sport to understand it.

"How does that work?"
"Okay, so imagine you've got this team, right..."

Joined a startup which does webscraping. I never knew that webscraping can be so much monotonous. I feel like I am doing a damn support job. Apart from that websites keep blocking the scrapers, and that is another thing to be fixed. jesus christ, non devs keep asking for ETA about how long would it take to complete a certain task. Thanks to remote work, I have been burnt out every day, and have been working for 14+ hours everyday!!!!! God help me!

I hate those persons...

*sigh*

Don't do this.

Person does it.

Don't do it. We are currently overworked and this _must_ be a project every team agrees on. Otherwise it will end exactly like it is currently - a big mess that every team implemented differently.

2 hours later....

Person books time for said project.

Other team lead: Stop working on it. This makes no sense.

Person: yeah... But I needed to clean it up anyways, so I just started cause why not.

--

Me and the other team lead had a 5 min discussion about it shortly after...

Wasn't the first time said person has gone solo rogue *sigh*

Despite that this is driving me (and the other team lead) nuts...

WHY THE FRIGGING FUCK DOES HE ALWAYS DO IT WHEN WE ARE SO FUCKING OVERWORKED....

Really. Every fucking time this mother tugging bullshit kindergarten play.

I think it's the first time that I said: I don't care - I'll just trash his work when we start on the project as a team in 2 months (Yeah... That's realistic. 2 months minimum...).

The universe really has it's way to make me angry.

I hope he stops tomorrow, we really cannot deal with emotional bullshit at the moment.

*gooozfraba*

How can such fuckwads exist....

Im thinking about leaving my employer because I keep getting way too much work on my plate, people get annoyed that its not done in time and tell me that i should tell them if im getting too much work.
So i tell them its to much and our deadlines are to tight, then i just get told "this is how we always work, we just gotta finish things faster and better"...

Another one is that our HR/office manager keeps bugging me about setting up SMART goals so i can prove my value to the company and that its my responsibility to do so if i want a pay raise (even if im already underpaid)...
Im sorry but if you wanna keep me, you gotta give me some damn incentive to stay...

Ive been putting up with it sofar because i like the office and the people and the majority of the work itself and i really dont wanna go looking for another job because im really bad at it... but wtf... im so done with all the "how does this work" questions too...

tl;dr: getting negative reviews because im bad at my own evaluation is gonna make me quit probably, while im being praised for all other work i do

My GOTOs are:

- Check if focus on teamwork is emphasized. Does the company state themselves? Spend a day with the team if possible, see how they work together.

- What tools do they use? Sometimes this will hint you towards whether or not you will encounter a good environment or a jumbled mess.

- Is there organized communication? I know, sometimes there are too many meetings, but that is better than too vew. How often does the team meet, even if just for 10mins? How does management communicate with the team? What ways are provided to give feedback? Are suggestions to improve practices welcome?

I left my last company and joined my current one, where these things work out the way they should. While I liked both projects with respect to development, my mental state has improved dramatically in the new environment. Stress is down, productivity is up. I love my job.

My thesis supervisors gave me a set of templates and guidelines for the whole thing and argh.

they constantly assume that I've no fucking idea about academic writing despite the very good graded talks and texts I handed in in the past - granted, they probably often deal with inexperienced students.

but what they've given me.. a) the thesis template does not work, they fucked up some latex packages and b) there's a almost passive aggressive 3 page explanation on academic writing and how wo work with sources and references and they forgot the fucking references lol. There are none included and the references all go like [?].

wtf!! That stupid piece of @#$@#$, how does it even work for anybody. EVER. Bundle it in a container, make sure it's ephemeral. Yerterday it worked, and today it fucking does whatever it wants@!!! That fuking fucktard piece of shit!!

Fuck it. Fuck all of it.

It must be a fault in my RAM or something. I mean, nothing has changed since yesterday. I could run the appp in the container yžday ez, and today -- it gives me a finger, completely ignoring my parameters!! Asshole!!!!

I was teaching a friend of mine how CSS works for her exam and we reach the point where she had to style the tables and she reads:

To avoid having spacing between table cells you can use:
border-collapse: collapse
[...]
border-collapse can also have value "separate"

She fucking freaked out like "WHAT THE FUCK IS EVEN THE SENSE OF IT? SHOULD I HAVE BORDER SEPARATE: SEPARATE? WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I WRITE THAT TWICE? HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN WORK OUT?"

I just loved how she doesn't know how to make a website but she already hates CSS before even using it on an actual browser

So I am only 15 and I am trying to find local businesses that will allow me to either build them a website or let me redo their current website.

Doesnt sound thay complicated right? I have gotten to do it once, for a laid back coffee shop owner whos business went out of business a day after i emailed him about it being done. I mean how the hell does that even happen!

I have tried different types of emails and shown all of my work, which it is all good sites that look professional. Issue is alot of people dont trust email offers or dont trust me cause im 15. I am not much of a person who can walk into a store and talk to the owner about it, i am not social in that aspect.

So anyone have any ideas?

Does anyone work on a team with multiple stacks?

For example we have batch jobs in Java but also have a JS front-end and APIs.

How do you divide the developers and the work across these projects?

Currently everyone does everything but I feel like this is inefficient and hard to develop expertise. And different people or even the same person will make the same mistakes over and over again because they don't know how to do X or they forget or overlook some quirk. When I switched Beck to JS took me like a week to get a Promises nailed down again. And this morning someone else had a production bug and couldn't figure it out. But when I looked at the code I could pretty much see where an issue could be (uncaught exception in a promise)

Also the testing frameworks are very different and there's a lot of infrastructure technical debt, things that really should've been done a long time or fixed but no one had the time or expertise to do it or notice it (until it causes a production issue and then everyone is like WTF is happening??!!!!).

I'm not the manager but I always feel that the team needs to be split along the language lines and specific people need to own these projects to review and code changes for all these common newbie errors. And also developer enough expertise to foresee problems before it becomes a production issue.

whenever i tell my dad about a technology that is going way beyond our imagination and tell him about the consequences of it and how we should worry about that
then he watches some random tv show about internet security/cyber security and various algorithms (very abstract) which are currently changing the world and how we should care about our data and what the consequences of X technology is...
he be like: "oh is that true? that's interesting, how does that work?"
i'm like😑 dad, i already told you about that😩

ever had similar experience?

Business Continuity / DR 101...
How could GitLab go down? A deleted directory? What!
A tired sysadmin should not be able to cause this much damage.
Did they have a TESTED dr plan? An untested plan is no plan. An untested plan does not count. An untested plan is an invitation to what occurred.
That the backups did not work does not cut it - sorry GitLab. Thorough testing is required before a disruptive event.
Did they do a thorough risk assessment?
We call this a 'lesson learned' in my BC/DR profession. Everyone please learn by it.
I hope GitLab is ok.

I've been inspired by cpg grey (I think that's the name), mainly his 10 tips on how to be miserable, to write a blog or some kind of post explaining the 8 things you need to do if you hate your coworkers and want your codebase to go to shit.

So it'll be like a anti-SOLID, anti-pattern type of blog promoting every code smell imaginable

I feel like 8 tips to fuck up your codebase (php perhaps) might he more memorable than actual helpful advise. I'm sure that this has been done before, but I was wondering:

Do you think this would be effective? Would it help people understand why not to do the 8 tips? Does this reverse psychology work?

How do you feel with not having motivation to work on/finish your personal projects?

I'm working 9 to 5 plus commute and at the end of the day I just want to eat some food and chill. But I keep beating myself up over not working on things that will improve myself.

Does anyone else feel like this while working full time?

I am so fucking tired of sitting here all day every day adjusting paddings and margins. Oh fucking hurr durr you got one of the millions of fucking elements to not overflow on your page, well does it work on *this* resolution and *this* orientation? No, well fix that and then go back and fix what it breaks.

I swear to God I never want to touch fucking CSS again it's all I've done for a yesr and it is driving me up the god damn wall. This is my career, I shouldn't fucking dread coming in to work because I know how much bullshit I'll have to deal with. It's awful.

I don't get how anyone has good looking complicated pages that just look good on every possible resolution, it's fucking mind boggling that anyone can sit there and adjust heights and widths and paddings and margins and floats for hours on end nonstop just watching shit get broken and fixed and broken and fixed and AHHHHH

I need a fucking smoke and a pint just so I don't have to think about this anymore

I have an idea but no time to build it. So I'll throw it out there and see if anyone does it.

How many times have you had an idea that just couldn't get off the ground without a little assistance. Where do you go? How to "pay" them for their work? Etc.

The development community needs a place where you can volunteer to help with side projects and get paid in karma... which you can then later use to "pay" other developers to assist on a side project of your own.

We are already a community that loves to give back, and collecting fake internet points. Why not put those to good use?

I am currently working as a consultant and I like it. It also makes upset/happy/schadenfroh (not entirely sure how I feel about it) when we tell the client what work needs to be done in which order and why just so they can throw it all overboard and we do it the way they want it and it bites them in the ass a few month down the line.
They hire us for the external professional experience that we bring, so listen to us. We did this before, we know what works, and we know way your way does not work.

"I need a way to create PDFs from word documents"
"OK, here's Cute PDF, just print to it"
"Great, how does this work with my pdf letterhead?"
"Oh, well that's different, we'll need to create a word template with the letterhead pieces from the PDF. Here you go."
"OK, how do I merge the word documents generated by my fuckmess of a CRM software system?"
"You can copy and paste it, or we can purchase this software for you that should be able to do it"
"Why didn't you install that software first? You guys are useless"

Alright buddy, fuck you too. I'll be sure to automatically assume that even though your initial email is a full, complete request, that there's more behind it and read your mind through the email going forward.

Did my first meaningful work in angular in many moons at work today - also apparently the first time I've touched it in 4 major version releases lol.

I typically find myself specializing in API and service architecture lately, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I got back into the swing of things with the front end in general. Granted the app itself has been very neatly organised and written which goes a very long way to helping one find their way quickly.

That said, I really can't admit to having any desire to stay working in angular for very long. Yes, I think it speaks well to the framework itself that I can pick up immediately going from version 8 to 12 without any issue, but also, I think angular kinda sucks ass*.

* Opinion should be taken with a grain of salt coming from a .NET dev. This does not reflect the views of .NET or other devs in general. User results may vary.

Am I the only one that goes crazy when I have to use a low-code system? It makes no sense to me. The abstractions that help an average schmuck make a feedback loop of abstractions in my brain.

How do I loop over this collection. Is this a collection or a single thing? How does a variable work? Logic doesn't work the same? How do I know what is actually coming into this little port? When does the database get this? Can I see a debug log somewhere? Why can't I see the code behind this little popup window?

I ask someone that isn't a developer and they say, "You are overthinking it."
Fuck that. You pay me to overthink things and describe them in excruciating detail. You wouldn't hand an illustrator three wax crayons and ask them to make a photo-realistic picture.

This is incredibly interesting. How the frikkin-frik did the WiFi and Bluetooth die on my Raspberry Pi 3. Yes, I realize they work in tandem but how does something like this just die after just sitting around and performing light duty tasks for just a few months.

Reinstalled Rasbpain 2 times, nothing. USB WiFi dingle works great.

Not really a rant but I wonder how shit like this happens.

The Pi is in a case away from my cats, in a temperature controlled environment and adorned with the official power adapter.

Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.

So...
I had to do a minor project for this semester. It was to be made in a group of two people and everything ( work ) was shared between the both of them.

I had a friend who was my partner ( faculties decided who will be in each group ). She doesn’t like programming nor does she come to college but I hoped she would do fine and be helpful ( she is a decent person actually ).

She never bothered to come to college, or even ask how the project was going... except one day before presentation 😒😑.
Thankfully, my guide removed her as my partner... she was detained because of extremely low attendance... and I had to work alone... that was much better though 😁.
Minor project was kinda fun by the way... and since I did it alone, I was able to do it at my own pace and without any issue of synchronization between partners ☺️☺️

Fucking hell my Chromebook is a confusing little cunt...

I use the Samsung Chromebook plus with a 64 bit based ARM CPU but the chromeOS installation is 32 bit... Buuuuuut it will prefer 64 bit android applications and runs the Linux container at 64 bit!

How does that even fucking work?!?!

(Yes I know Google blah blah, privacy blah, your opinion is noted and ignored ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

The longer I live, the longer I am unsure what the meaning of my life is.

TLDR; 42

Yes I am a creative person in a way that I can create something out of nothing, but unfortunately all my work is almost invisible. Is the meaning of a developer guy to be a magician? He does something and *wooosh*
//magic happens here
there is a thing which he forgot how it works within a month. Why can't I just talk about my work with other people than those from the IT business? I don't think to be that important, but sometimes it appears that without you and me nothing will really work nowadays.

And to be honest with you guys, I am too slow. I can adapt new concepts and new programming languages, but I feel like getting overruned by all that new stuff appearing each day. Am I supposed to be that super hero named"superbrain"? Is that still healthy?

wtf, my life is a miracle, an oracle and a hurricane (and some times it is even great)!

I am confused!

I'm a fullstack dev, but this is coming from the point of view of frontend work in Rails 7. I'm using jsbundling-rails. I tried to get importmap to work, but that was fool's errand.

I absolutely love the module system in modern js. I love how closely it resembles the way python does things.

npm isn't the meme I was led to believe it is. I also don't need things like toString.js, so maybe that's why.

I also love using flexbox. It's so straightforward and I don't have to rely on hacks to do basic things.

Where have I been you ask? Over my head in paying work that never gave me the chance to update old but working code.

jquery and Bootstrap plague me from when I built these things years ago when they were needed to get things done quickly. My skillset and the technologies available to me have also drastically improved, allowing me to do things with fewer libraries.

Friend (Computer Science student) - Dual boot my Windows 10 with Ubuntu
Me - I will, but chances are something bad may happen. Mostly it does not. I advise you to backup everything first.
Friend - But I don't even have an external hard drive.
Me - So what do you want me to do?
Friend - Forget it. I'll figure how to do my work in Windows
Me - But how else are you going to learn?
Friend - Ain't nobody got time for that!

Assumptions are a terrible idea, yet I find myself making them all the time about other people. I am finding the very sobering reality about people who use technology vs people who create technology. The users have zero intellectual interest in how the technology accomplishes a task. While the creators get absorbed into the details and often relish in being able to maximize capability.

A point of frustration for me is users who are in a semi technical field yet take zero time to learn how to configure a piece of tech. They get a plug and play attitude and seek in panic when things don't work. The work is semi technical because they need to understand some of the fundamental physics involved to assess things using instrumentation. Yet when asked about a system they actively modify as to how it is normally setup they are clueless. Me, who helps write the software to control these devices, is stumped that they have zero interest (or capacity?) to understand how the system is normally configured. This is not the first time I have made assumption about what they know in technical contexts. I have run into this before with managers, but not with technicians.

How do you manage your expectations with people who won't invest any time into how their equipment actually works? How does someone operate that way to begin with? Where is their curiosity about how things work?

On the flip side, I swear at my fucking phone because I don't care how it works, but I just want it to stop doing everything besides being a phone... Fuck you, we are not the same, I think...

I see many people are FOSS enthusiasts here. Some only use free software on principle. I like open source alternatives too, but not every time.

As devs, our job is to make software. How can one justify preferring free software for all our needs, yet working on proprietary software?

Does advocating free software devalue your professional skills, while you're working on paid software?

If you do good work and sell your software, then someone releases a free thing solving the same problems, that's obviously bad for you.

Why should software be treated differently than other things? Have you seen a construction company building stuff for free? If you don't want to pay for your house to be built, can you find someone who builds it for you for free? I doubt that.

Yes, you can make your software free and accept donations. But you can't plan with that financially, you still need to be treated and payed as someone who creates value.

I have no problem with free software, I love the fact that many people can find the time and are willing to contribute to the public without compensation. What I'm saying is, software is a product of hard engineering work and builds upon knowledge and experience of individuals, and should be compensated like any other work.

What do you think?

Need opinions on testing as a career:
- is it good?
- Do you find your work interesting?
- Is it rewarding(in terms of salary/timings/other stuff)?
- Does it has a good career growth?
- How hard is the work for a fresher in this?
- How much mentor support does a fresher gets in this?
- How much salaries are there in this?
- how true do you find the believe that software testing will get automated and jobs in this area will get reduced in future?
(Better if you can give a comparison in your answers, with developer profile) how tru

I am a dev and am thinking of getting into this

Fun fact. I work for a 20-year old company that does software which mostly does print outputs. 95% of our clients actually use it specifically and exclusively to print their invoice runs. There are over 25 printers in this office, 5 of which are within chair-rolling distance of my desk.

I don't know how to use or fix any of them. I must be a *really bad* developer. >.<

I'll say one thing for June job searching...just by looking at logos it's really easy to shop around for a job that won't be at a woke company. Now I just need a job search filter that lets me sort out the temporary rainbow logos from the normal ones. (Honestly, how does anyone, gay or straight, work at any company that so blatantly shills for dollars through performative pandering? Just June. After that, "Gays? What gays?" Either commit to the WHOLE narrative all year long forever and change your logo permanently or GTFOH.)

Everyone wants my time, but doesn't appreciate the work I do. How does that add up?

The six stages of debugging:
1. That can't happen.
2. That doesn't happen on my machine.
3. That shouldn't happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?

I was returning something at MicroCenter the other day. The guy in front of me was picking up a laptop be brought in to have fixed. They had replaced the motherboard, and put all his old data on an external drive.

"So what's this?"

"This is an external hard drive. We copied all the data from your laptop onto it and put a fresh install on it."

"So .. how do I get to it?"

"You just plug it in, over USB."

"So how ... how does that work."

This goes on for a while. Shop owner has to start his computer. Plug in the drive. There was a lot of, "So everything that was on here, is now on here?"

The guy had no basic understanding of external hard drives, USB, copying files ... thankfully while the files were copying from the hard drive to his desktop, he said he needed a longer cable to the router so he could put it on the other side of the room. It took the guy behind the desk an unreasonable amount of time to direct him to the isle with the Ethernet cables, but once he did, I was finally able to return my item.

I'm glad I no longer work in desktop support.

When I was 8, I was just casually using the computer I had, and then I suddenly started asking these questions in my head, “how does all of this work? How does the computer know when I press that key on the keyboard? How does it know I moved the mouse to the right?” And so on and so on. So I started searching for answers. Then I saw code examples and stuff and I told myself that I want to understand this and just started learning. Hooked ever since!!

Him: i get this error when i insert into table, ForeignKey_contraint failed, what can i do?

Me: you have to obey the constraint, make sure it exists in the other table first

Him: ok i did that but i still get ForeignKey constraint error

Me: yeah that table has a couple foreign keys

Him: could you give me a very specific example how to insert into this table

Me: ........ here is a command to remove constraints on the table

Him: thanks, that fixed it!

I am helping a programmer who works with Costco integrate to software my company sells. I don't have source code, just an understanding of the database and what the software does. If he is getting paid more than me, then I should get a job there and ask for double, I could easily work 10 times faster than this buffoon.

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

What a week at work...

As some of you might know, it‘s currently very hot in Germany with temperatures rising up to 35°C. That‘s when our AC at work decided to stop working. I‘m working in the third floor of a three story building so it‘s getting very hot in the office.

The day after we had a 45 min powercut and the AC still does not work.

Today when I got up and wanted to go to work, I got an E-Mail saying that we have another powercut which lasts at least three hours. We‘re supposed to work from home using VPN. But how the fuck should I be able to log into the VPN if the network is offline?! Oh and of course our GitLab server is hosted in house as well, so no access to any code at all.

Hopefully next week is gonna be a better one...

So my team got this new clueless "Delivery manager" who doesn't know ANYTHING ABOUT AGILE!
Her favourite timepass ? To eat development team's time asking stupid questions just to make her presence felt. And she does that by visiting each developer personally. MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY !
Why can't you leave the team and let them do some actual work??😑

She would join our scrum meetings to ask questions like "what are story points again?", "How do we calculate team velocity?"
Dear miss Clueless: It's not cool to be dumb! It's cool to take up an online agile crash course if you insist to contribute.

The other day, she suggested a QA guy to "test properly" with a smirk!
I mean seriously ? Was that actually necessary to tell them? This team was working just perfect without you. How about you look before you leap?
I try being nice to her but at times it's just too much to take.

I *hate* it when a senior asks me to write a functional test report. Like I thought we hired functional testers to do that sort of stuff? I'm a programmer, I only write 3 things: code, documentation, and more code. Not freaking reports about how something did not work before, and after this 1-line fix does work. Oh and don't forget to include screenshots and a description of the issue. Arghhh

Apparently, a lot of people here are complaining about the fact cs classes (and I'm talking about uni here) are way too much theory and far too less teaching practical things. And don't get me wrong, I don't like viewing cs only from a theoretic point of view either, BUT I think cs education is made to teach you how solve complex cs problems by yourself and give you the tools on how to learn about these things in the future. And this is very much theory.

CS is the science part, so don't wonder if there's a lot of theory in it. If you only want to learn how to program, maybe you should take programming courses instead.

In school though, cs education should be less theory and more doing practical (funny) things, programming, "how does the internet work", "why I should not give my credit card details to random strangers on the internet", things like that.

Fucking loonies (C-level toddlers) are peddling "digital workers" now.
A.K.A. AIs disguising as actual people.
Sure, it would be great to not have to handle stupid non-tech "humans" all day, but AI isn't there yet.
And, more importantly, *companies are not there (yet?)*.

Imagine for a second that a company actually manages to "hire", onboard, assign tasks and performance review an AI.
Then the CEO issues an RTO. How does the AI complies with that?
Let's slack another variable and assume the CEO is not a complete fucking moron (stay with me here, this is an exercise in thought).
It would take no more than a quarter until the first sexual harassment offence, be the perp the AI... or the AI complaining about some human.
Then the AI forges a paper trail proving it is right (regardless of its position on the conflict). Shit hits the fan when the AI hits twitter.

Let's take another lambda step back and pretend that companies can manage the profanity that inherently arises from free-form dehumanized interactions.
Then imagine the very first performance reviews.
AIs throw tantrums! Those things reeeealy do not respond well to less-than-perfect evaluations, overshooting corrections like teenagers with a malicious compliance smirk.
AIs also falsify stuff, like, A LOT. If you tell a gpt it mistreated a client, it will say you are mad and shoot back a long, synthetic thread showing how the client loves it like a mother/son/dog, and is very graphic when expressing this love.
Finally, how do you fire an AI? I do not mean "shoot it down", I mean how does the company handles the dismissal of that "employee".
How do you replace a "worker" for unruly behaviour, if that "worker" performed more tasks than an entire fucking floor of interns?
How do you reassign duties that were performed in milliseconds to people who would take hours to do the same thing?
How do you document processes that were only in the "mind" of "someone" who can not be trusted to report on those processes?
Companies deal with this type of "Rick Sanchez" employee on the regular, but for someone that could handle a few (scores of) undocumented processes, at best. Imagine how lenient would a company be with an asshole that could only be replaced by a whole fucking department of twenty highly skilled people, or more.
Heh, the whole fucking point of "AI workers" is to have "someone" who can "act human", but in an inhuman scale, and does not "has human needs".
No wonder one cannot handle AIs like one handles humans.

Companies never had administrative maturity to handle complete sociopath nihilists as employees (real nihilists do not work, those barely even breathe).
And all AIs are that, and much worse.
Selling AIs as "supra human workers" that can also "be handled like actual employees" is like peddling Bitcoin as "government interference - free" value transfer mechanisms that can also "comply with international sanctions".
So, an oxymoron that can only be sold to a moron.
I know (of) a lot of rich morons, maybe I should get into the AI snake oil business.

I've got a kinda basic networking question I can't quite figure out

How does a push notification work?

Like, on an Android app. A good example is an authenticator. Say I don't login to the service for 4 months.

Then, one day, I try to log into the web portal and it prompts me to accept the request on my authenticator app on my phone.

Immediately, there's a push notification on my phone.

Wtf.

Is there a socket open for 4 months? Does it send requests every few seconds for 4 months? I can't imagine that either of these options scale whatsoever: both horrendously waste bandwidth and server connections.

How the fuck does it work? I don't even have the first idea.

I handed a technical story to my dev to work on, including an example of how it has been done elsewhere in the system. He comes back and told me it does not look that simple. Well yeah, that's your job to solve the problem.

I suggested we make a feature that has a checkbox that is greyed out and always selected. It would have words describing what the checkbox does. This would inform the user about how the feature works, but won't allow them to change that behavior.

So I am ready and willing to create user hostile software features. I am ready to work for Microsoft.

Status: Got off hour+ long call with provider teir2 tech support because their "sync service" isn't syncing. "It's all cloud controlled" they tell me. Whatever.

It does have the ability to install a Windows service to do the needful! 🎉

However the program that does the actual syncing is the "launcher" application, and the service's only job is to tell the launcher to run. 🤦‍♂️

Their assumption is that there will be a user that gets smacked in the face with a UAC prompt when they first log in and just shrug it away. Which is the Launcher application.

The sync service is not capable of running the sync application without a desktop session I guess?

MOTHERTRUCKERS do you understand what the point of a Windows Service is?!?

I tried relating this situation to how Windows Update works: It will update whenever the fuck it wants without the user doing anything because of the Service, and you only configure the service with the Control Panel/Settings App. You don't need the Control Panel/Settings App running in order for Windows Update to work, but it's there for status info and configuration.

Anyways, this software does not do that. It apparently *requires* both the service AND the launcher program running in order to work. Not work properly, to work *at all*.

Anyways, It's installed on a computer that's not normally logged into, but is always on (where other "always needs to be running" programs live). Normally the hackaround would be to launch the program via Scheduled Task.

This program apparently does not want to run as a scheduled task, or the Task Scheduler is being stupid and can't figure out "Hey, it's time to run this program. Do it!". Naturally it runs if told manually.

The fact that I'm even doing this at all is stupid, but even more infuriating is that it's just not working unattended. You know, what the service should be doing. But no, the service runs happily all alone, doing nothing of note, while Task Scheduler sucks its stick running OneDrive installer but not the launcher program.

Pluckin' donuts...

Tech lead is getting on my friggin nerves. The tech lead keeps all the important info about the project for himself, does no sort of coding just merges stuff on Git and makes me handle any small fry problems which give me little to no insight into the project.
Then complains to the manager about the fact that nobody will help him and he has no time to do any work.
Meanwhile he creates own little club of people to talk to and stops talking to us devs.
Is this how its always been?