I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:

I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.

TL;DR: I “hacked” my thermostat.

I’m stuck with an annoying roommate in college dorms who apparently always keeps the FUCKING thermostat at 80F. LIKE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH HIM. Every time I change it to like 73F, he changes it back to 80F Heat.
Getting tired of his shit for over a semester, I decided to do something about it. I looked up the thermostat made by HoneyWell and downloaded the product manual of it. Turns out, they have a system override ability to remove the heating mode and change the maximum and minimum values of temperature.
BOOM! I removed the heating mode and changed the minimum value to 70 and max to 74.
It’s 2AM here and I can finally go to sleep without sweating my balls off. I’ll keep you guys updated on his reaction hahahaha.

We used to do this more often - but to kind of bring it back - what is everyone working on this weekend?

I’m working on some new API endpoints for the awesome new devRant web version that @trogus made that we’re releasing soon.

Share your weekend project!

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

I wasn’t even looking for a job, I just went out for drinks with friends and I met this random dude. I complained to him about work wanting us to go back to the office, to which he replied that I should go work for them because they’re remote and looking for people. I had a look at their openings and they had a role with fewer responsibilities and a lot more money, so I applied. It’s been 3 months and I’m so glad I switched.

Manager: THE SERVER IS DOWN THE SERVER IS DOWN!!!!

Dev: Ok I’ll look into it

*5 mins later

Dev: Wow these are really strange logs, it’s like config values are being changed all over the place while I’m looking at it

Manager: Well I figured while you were looking into it I’d go i to the server settings and change everything I could find in order to try and get the server back up again. Two sets of hands are better than one, Is it up yet???

Dev: …No.

Manager: I THOUGT YOU SAID YOU’D LOOK INTO THIS. I NEED ANSWERS NOW. WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG?!?!?

Dev: …

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

Trashy Girl that literally did not talk to me in over five years and even back then only talked to me if she needed something texts me today:

Girl: Hi :) How are you?

Me: *oh fuck no* Hi! Good, how about you?

Girl: Great! You know how to program apps right?

Me: *Fuck you* Yeah, whatcha planning?

Girl: Sooo my boyfriends brother has an idea for an app, it’s basically like instagram and snapchat but it’s actually *insert location based snapchat ripoff idea*

Me: Well sure but that’s quite a long term project and App Development kinda isn’t cheap to outsource!

No answer.

I’m like what did you expect?

Same shit everyday. Sometimes I consider starting a new life in a country where noone knows I can code, work remote and answer with “pleas” when people ask me what I do.

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

Dev: Hey that internal audit you asked me to perform didn’t go so well

Manager: It has too! I’ll get in a lot of trouble if it doesn’t pass.

Dev: Ok well it’s a lot of work to get it to a passing state, we have to dedicate a lot of resources to fix all these findings.

Manager: We don’t have any spare resources, they are all working on new projects! Why did you have to find things??

Dev: ….It’s a lot of hard to miss stuff, like missing signatures on security clearance forms

Manager: Ok can’t you just say that everything is all good? They’ll probably not double check.

Dev: I’m not really comfortable with that…Look all of these findings are all just from one member of the team consistently not doing their job, can’t you just address that with him and I can make a note on the audit that issues were found but corrective action was made? That’s the whole point of audits.

Manager: You don’t get it, if anything is found on the audit I’ll look bad. We have to cover this up. Plus that’s a really good friend of mine! I can’t do that to him. Ok you know what? You are obviously not the right person for this task, I’ll get someone else to do it. Go back to your regular work, I’m never assigning you audits again.

I’m getting fucking tired of having this conversation:

Company “we need x”

Me “ok. In order to deliver x I need y”

Company “we can’t do that”

Me “ok. Then can I have y”

Company “nah ah”

Me “what about Q?”

Company “nope”

Me “okay. Well until you decide to provide me with the resourcing needed, this is getting deprioritized”

Company “wait this needs to be top of mind”

Me “okay. Provide me with y, and I’ll deprioritize other work”

Company “wait we also need that other work”

Me “you’re only getting one. Pick which one you want first”

Company “we’ll get back to you”

Me (muttering) “no you won’t”

Company “what?”

Me “what?”

So I says to the wife, I says, “When you go to Costco tomorrow, I need a new Oral B electric toothbrush. My old one’s battery is no longer able to hold a charge.” I’m picturing her coming back with one that’s pretty similar to the one I had. You turn it on, you brush your teeth, you turn it off.

She comes back with the Oral B Pro 6000. Go on. Look it up. I’ll wait.

So this thing has about 6 modes and Bluetooth that connects you to an app that not only keeps track of how often you brush, but tracks your performance and gives you trophies if you do well at specific tasks and techniques. And there’s a coach to take you on an “oral health journey” depending on your particular goals. There’s even a mount you can buy to attach your phone to your mirror so the app can watch how you brush and give you pointers. I don’t have the mount so I got an 85% on performance because who can hold a phone pointed perfectly at your face while brushing? The final report had what might be the app dev’s attempt at a pun.

It’s 2019 and everyone is judging you. Why not your toothbrush as well?

I’m back at devRant.

I was active few years back.

What made me comeback is me deciding to delete social media apps in my main phone.

The reason for deleting is that some topics/post/feed triggers a painful experience I had this year.

The painful experience is my wife cheated on me.
I’m not here for pity.

I just want to let the married ones know here that it’s not all about coding or work.
You should also try to keep the fire burning with your significant other.

Else someone comes by and will keep that fire lit.

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

Root has standup.

Root: I had no ticket yesterday morning, so I followed up on <TicketA> with <PersonA> and updated it in Jira and linked its related tickets; talked with <PersonB> about <TicketB>, and reviewed code review comments on <TicketC>, and thought about those while looking into the CI spec failure on <TicketD>. I collapsed for 3 hours before fixing it. Halfway through the collapse, I talked with <PersonC> on <TicketC> CR comments and the spec issue in <TicketD>, then went to lay down again. Afterward, I solved the spec issue in <TicketD>, and started on the new ticket <TicketE> before calling it a day. Plans today are to <…>.

Manager, in private: I need you to proactively let me know if you’re taking long breaks and aren’t working as this impacts business flow.

—————

Yeah.

My update was four times longer than the others’ despite her not giving me a ticket to work on. I responded to slack while I was collapsed on the floor and discussed tickets. And, after I recovered, I went back to work to finish my 8h shift. But this isn’t good enough? And I need to let her know in advance when I’m going to collapse and be a bloody mental zombie for hours? It would be amazing if I knew. I barely have a few minutes notice, and that’s only if I’m really paying attention and looking for signs.

And (conjecture) she probably still thinks I’m not performing well enough. “Affecting our business flow” probably means she’s angry I didn’t talk to other people about low-priority <TicketE> yesterday while I was laying on the damned floor.

Goddamn I hate her.

I started at a new company. I met tons of people the first day. Third day on the job a guy comes up to me and says hello. I’m like, “Hey. What’s up. Thanks for welcoming me look forward to working with you and etc. I’m still learning names. Se ya round. I should get back to work.” Totally like I would greet the janitor or anyone else.

He leaves and people tell me that he was the CEO. I kill myself laughing.

Got a call while on vacations, the main server is down.
*holy shit* I thought.
As I opened my MacBook, the phone kept ringing and slack was going crazy.

“What should I do? Where is the problem?”, the voices in my head said..

I opened the terminal and tried to get a ssh connection.
Sweat was dropping down from my forehead.

“Connected” the terminal said.

“Fuck yeah, the server is up, only the app is not responding”, I thought and opened the log files.

Suddenly, “STOP” I shout at the log files that were appended way too fast.

Then I saw it.
TimeOutExceptions..

I added an index to the modification date column,“ kill -9“ed the process, started again and went back to vacation mode 🙂

And of course I was the office hero for a while💪

For the smart asses, I’m aware that it’s a bad idea to -9 the app process in prod, but it was so overloaded that i was not able to kill it any other way. And we needed that server up again.

I’m the embodiment of lazy...

I had turned on the TV in the living room earlier and put on sesame st. for my daughter to watch.

Some time passes, I’m trying to work in the back bedroom, have daughter in my arms and she’s falling asleep. I forgot to turn off the TV in the front room.

Didn’t want to get up from my desk so I just wrote up a powershell script to connect to the computer plugged into the TV and kill chrome. (The Computer sleeps after 10 minutes, and the TV shuts off after 10 more minutes of no display signal).

Script was successful as I heard Elmo laughing, then suddenly all was quiet 🤫

I didn’t realise that SQL Developer was actually secret code for data entry monkey.

I’m sick to the back teeth doing data entry work and not getting any actually fucking development to do

I learned a valuable lesson today about the life of a manager. I’m not a manager, but I am a senior level dev.

Today I was told there wasn’t room on the new team for 1 person, and I had pick that last team member. I had to choose between a friend who really isn’t cut out to be a dev and a non friend who is a better dev.

I talked through my reasoning and ultimately chose to put the friends job in jeopardy. They told me that I had solid leadership traits for being able to separate my emotions from my decision making. But I felt like a piece of shit.

I cried back at my desk. The friend doesn’t know yet and I can’t tell them. Is this what execs feel when they have to let people go?

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

I’m so sick of the programming industry. It’s no longer fun. After 26 years, I’m utterly unable to keep up with all the new BS I’m supposed to know. I’m currently unemployed and every job description I see has a kilometer-long list of dozens of languages and protocols and technologies I’m supposed to have 10 or more years with. Utter bollocks. I’m completely unemployable according to these expectations. Nobody will even consider me for hire. Do these candidates actually exist?

Sure, I could do what everyone suggests and “go back to school”. But with what money? And only to find out that the tech bros have invented 20 new things I should have been learning during my 2-4 years getting on the new stuff. Not to mention all the time I will have lost in not being employed for going to school. And then STILL not having the “10 or more years experience”.

My wife is tapping her foot wondering when we’re gonna be able to stop eating through our savings while I dither around and try to find ways to make money. I’m starting to feel like I’ll never be employed or employable again.

In my last job they required us to turn on a task timer for every little thing. Remembering to do that, and to turn it off, was a royal pain. First I had to look up which task it is, start the timer, stop the timer, find the next task and repeat, then flip back to the first task. Lots of open browser tabs within tab groups to keep track of it all. And if I came up short or went over on budget, there was a “conversation” with management to account for discrepancies. Then I had to go by memory and try to reconstruct the “missing time” accurately enough to be convincing.

Now that I’m freelancing, I try to keep up the habit because it does have merit for tracking estimates and actuals, but now it’s just me to answer to for discrepancies and I can fudge the numbers as I see fit. The time records did, however, save my bacon in a recent dispute.

I’m so happy I finally did this on an old imac! Bye macOS! This feels so smooth. Next: Change that to Mint and learn the commands etc.
It feels so f****ng good! If xcode runs on linux I would change that on my main machine too! It’s just much cleaner, faster,... I would never go back.

First day of a week long vacation and this series of emails comes in (no I didn’t reply to any of these)

Random new QA: “Why does this 5 year old functionality behave this way?”

(10 minutes later)

QA: Okay I saw your out of office message but I really need to know why this behaves this way or else I’m opening a defect because I don’t believe it should behave this way.

Internal me: Heh that’s great kid but you didn’t make the requirements.

(Another 10 minutes pass)

QA: Defect opened, please resolve this before Wednesday.

Oh the joys of enterprise development, I guess if it’s a big enough deal they’ll actually forward it on to the people I put in my away message. I’d love to see that defect holding up the release when I get back on Monday.

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

Ok, I’m over windows. Done with it.

I have been a long time windows, I’ve used most versions since 3.11, and have used Linux for a few years on the side (not as a daily but have needed it for work and servers) but with yesterday’s update, not only have I lost audio for the countless time again, as far as Windows is concerned there’s nothing fucking wrong with it, besides the lack of sound and all.

Drivers are reinstalled, deleted and reinstalled, redownloaded from manufacturer, different drivers installed.
Ran a system restore back to before the update and just dropped the hdd into another laptop (it’s identical model) and still no fucking audio (to exclude the audio chip as failing)

So fuck it, I’m spending my weekend finding a distro that will work, I’m fucking done!

Tired, sick, brain foggy, cold.

I’m trying to finish my last few specs and it totally isn’t going well.

My PM also promised me he would get the change requests for this ticket to me by today so I could work on them — as we’re moving this Friday. He did not. He made the same promise last week. Bloody useless.

Oh well.
I let him know that I wouldn’t be able to finish the feature in time if he didn’t get back to me, so... week off? :D

As if packing and moving and driving is downtime.

I do need to figure out this last spec, though. I rewrote the entire feature, and broke functionality specific to some client, and apparently it’s tricky and extremely fragile. I have no idea how it was working before, and the only person I have to ask is... grumpy and overly busy, and hasn’t looked at any of it in years. Yay!

I might just go to bed.

I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.

Today’s achievement: my phone didn’t autocorrect ‘fucking’ to ‘ducking’.

Clearly it’s as pissed off as I am about receiving shitty emails from the other team manager in my dept giving me and my team work to do and throwing us under the bus when he does jack shit all day except read BBC news and go on Facebook. On the odd occasion he does actually do work, it’s not good work, it’s riddled with bugs because he’s ‘too senior to need a code peer review’. Such a fucktard...

Oh, and the work he’s asked us to do technically sits in his team so I’ll be firing that straight back at him 😁

I’m all for being a team player and helping each other but I’m going to protect my team over helping someone. The gloves are about to come off....

A while back, my little cousin (he’s 5 yo) came to visit me at home doing some coding, he asked me to teach him how to code, he wanted to make games for his friends to play, he is now learning Scratch and I’m planning to teach him Python next.

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

To whoever in the history of this godforsaken app I’m tasked with has commingled PHP with ColdFusion, I have a message for you:

Fuck you...fuck your momma, fuck yo daddy, fuck yo computer, fuck yo keyboard, fuck yo mouse, fuck the clothes on your back, fuck monitors that displayed this shit, fuck your fingers in particular, fuck yo brain, fuck whoever dropped yo on your head as an infant, fuck the car you drove to work in, fuck the servers running this shit, fuck anybody who was involved with your education, and if I see you on the street ima slap the shit out of you.

“I’m a CSS programmer, you should try it too”
Heard this in a forum back ‘12 or ‘13.

Sprint planning meeting, two hours trying to plan what to do with a new feature we wanted to add to one of our systems.

The boss gets out of the meeting room to get a phone number to make a call (we needed to ask something to one of our clients).

5 minutes later, the boss comes back and saw that the lead dev was going to his own desk.

Boss: Where do you think you’re going?
Lead dev: I’m bored :v

😂😂😂😂😂

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

Because I’m a fucking cowboy and a charlatan, and because I hate sleep and despise feeling refreshed and happy, I’m working pretty much full time as a contractor (I’m the full stack dev. I do everything) on a (well funded) startup alongside my day job.

Tonight I had to make some quick (lol “quick”) changes to a core piece of the platform.

Now before continuing please refer back to the first line of this rant.

So instead of writing new functionality, I copied and pasted another section.

I renamed all references of “new_order” to, cleverly “new_order2”.

I know.

I deploy to production...

My phone starts blowing up. In short, everything is fucked.

I’m going over the query, checking the production database. Why is this manifesting like this? It all looks correct.

2 HOURS of broken sales, pissed off customers, pissed off service agents and I see that there was still one reference of “new_order” that should have been “new_order2”.

I am a piece of shit.

Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.

First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.

I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.

Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.

Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.

What a fucking nightmare.

I quit abusive relationship. I quit smoking. I quit vaping salt nicotine, yes, the one that vape bloggers tell you is impossible to quit. I overcame opioid drugs addiction that developed when I recovered after a surgery back in 2015.

My last addiction is sugar. Yesterday night was the night when I ate about 100 grams of it in one take, feeling like I need more and more to take that hunger away. It felt EXACTLY like when I was hitting my 50mg vape literally every 20 seconds no matter the headache and dizziness.

I’m already insulin-resistant. After I’ve eaten all that sugar I felt really thirsty and then it hit me. I don’t want diabetes. I don’t want to inject myself. And I’m already insulin-resistant. It’s not me who crave sugar, it’s my internal animal and it only understands the language of pain and fear of death.

After I quit it, I’m officially a superhuman. Addicted to nothing but self-expression. That’s what I like, that’s who I naturally am.

Switched jobs one month ago.

Used to work overtime on complex features, every engineer was 10x, learned a bunch, worked my ass of everyday. Switch due to overtime and because I wanted more personal time.

Anyways, at the new job I’ve completed two tickets in a month, code is shit, no one cares about the quality, scalability, etc. I’m payed 2x more and I currently work max 3 hours a day. Feels weird AF. I guess I got what I wanted, but didn’t know back then that professionally I’m going to degrade. Didn’t happen yet, but I can see that in the future.

🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve been programming for 20 years now. My friends and family never really understood what I did back in the days. And they still don’t.
All they saw was a kid who was good with computers. Your friendly neighborhood tech guy who would take a look at your computer for free.
I’m sure most of you have been in the same situation.

When people ask me what I do for a living. I’d just say “something with computers”. Because most of the time they will ask me to look at their computers and I’d reply with “oh that’s not what I do”.

When I was younger, I’d try to explain what I actually do for a living. To really tell people the problems we as a programmer solves on a daily basis or the things we create. That’s really hard to explain to “common” people.

So whenever someone asks me what I do for a living? It’s always something with computers ;)

User where I work is convinced someone hacked her iPhone and is remotely changing settings all the time. And it’s not us (the company), the phone isn’t managed and there are no remote profiles installed.

User: I’m telling you. Things are always changing without me doing it!

Me: Alright. Do you have an exemple?

User: Yes. When I swipe here [control center] and tap the WiFi toggle, it always gets back on by itself later.

Me: Yep. That’s actually a “feature”. You don’t have to worry.

User: Alright then, this morning I couldn’t get Google Maps to work.

Me: Well. Since you turned off your cellular and WiFi, it’s normal you couldn’t look up an adress.

User: okay then what about that Bluetooth icon in the top that always appears? I know that means the hacker is on my phone through Bluetooth. See!?

Me: That’s actually just a status indicator. Don’t worry about it. It’ll always come back there it’s normal. You know, your phone can do a lot of stuff by itself.

User: Yeah right. It does it by itself. I’m not stupid you know!! *storms off*

What the hell?

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

People on dating apps say they are very pissed off and frustrated when they’re ghosted.
As a developer you get eager calls from recruiters talking for hours. They say I’ll catch up with you first thing in the morning. An HR manager says I’ll get back to you in 14 hours (in 14 hours?? very precise). Even you get a contract offer from a manager who is rapidly contacts and convinces you.
Than you hear nothing, you are left on read.
“Professionals” communicate in that way. They are also getting paid whilst taking your time. What can you say to random people behind nicknames?
I don’t know what I would feel if they get back and I’m zombied. I really feel like unmatching meh.

"I’m gonna send you the fax now but I need the sheet back, okay?"

Due to working from home I decided a few months back to invest the money I save instead of keeping it all in my bank account.

About 10-20% of it goes to a long term investing account and the rest into the one I manage actively.

The nice thing about homeoffice is that I can have a lunch break an hour later when the market opens and review my shit, then again checking up on it in the late evening before the market closed here.

Have been playing around with trading for years but never did it with patience and discipline.

After 3 months I managed to reach over 16% profit.
My account is small so it’s not a lot of money but I’m focusing on the % rather than the $ at the moment. It’s a start..

Anyway, thought I’ll share my progress with you guys as some of you probably invest as well..

Im exclusively swing trading, so holding my positions between 1-14 days with no leverage.

😬

I’m pissed.
I had previously ranted about being assigned to a very messy project. I spent 3-4 months alone adding features and CLEANING things up.

Recently, there had been talks about a new major development phase on this project. But things lingered and the day before I’m to go on vacation, I get the news that this new phase starts in 2 days. Since I’m going to be on break they’re putting other guys on the project who don’t know anything about it.

Fast forward two weeks later.
I’m back from vacation.

I find out one of the guys has strong opinions about doing things certains ways… but unfortunately they are "ways" of unnecessary complexity, abstraction and verbosity.
After just a couple of weeks I’m already lost in the complexity of his code, which supports features of VERY LOW complexity. Fuck, has he ever heard of KISS? Has anybody heard of it where I work?

Now I have to spend my mental energy trying to make sense of this pile of crap rather than actually spending it getting things done.

Recruiting front end right now… I’m tiered of this BS.
95% of applicants: “hey I don’t understand what you want, but look at my cool, ToDo app in <INSERT ANY framework>”
“Ok, now add a quick search in your todo project”
“Oh wow, it’s like 5 days work lol and should be managed at back end. I Shouldn’t care”.
How HOW these idiots even have a job ?
I’m out of words. I want to scream, pull my own hair and (Weirdly enough) watch a DareDevil movie

I have this side project that I’ve been working on for the past 6 years part time but over the past 2 years just as a sysadmin to keep it running, it’s unpaid work but whatever, dropping in once a month or so doesn’t worry me.

Well the owner of the domain hasn’t been reachable for nearly 9 months and the domain expired a while back, not much I can do about that, so I pushed everything over to work at the IP level while I reach out and wait - that was 2 months ago while I waited for the owner to renew it or for the domain to fall.

Today the domain fell, so I jumped on to buy it back up only to find its already purchased... 😦

so I find the owner, it’s fucking parked on a shitty “buy me” page with a price tag of $4500 USD. Fuck these slimy hoarding domain parking bastards.

I know the site was on its last legs, low membership and traffic but I’ll be fucked if I’m paying that much to reacquire it.

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

Hello there! I’m back from the /dev/null to rant about how my teacher marked the “the new C# syntax” as a mistake.

I’m really sorry, but this “new feature” is a thing since 2015 - back then, iPhone 6s got released, Barack Obama was still the US president and the only Corona people cared about was the beer.

I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.

(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.

**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**

Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.

After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...

Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?

Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.

Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.

Realized I hadn’t subjected you guys to cat photos.

The brown cat is Robert Lazarus (the rescue named him Bob) and the white and brown cat is Dylan Thomas (rescue named him Dylan).

Bobcat died as a kitten (thus his middle name) and was brought back to life, but was blind for a bit as a result. According to legend, Tomcat acted as his seeing eye cat when he wasn’t able to see on his own. Bobcat’s vision’s better now (though he still might have some issues as he’s a little iffy on balance sometimes), but the rescue didn’t want to separate the two of them since they were a bonded pair.

Loads of people wanted Tomcat but didn’t want to take a chance on a zombie cat. Which I’m constantly thankful for because they’re awesome. Even if they steal my keyboard and try to eat my notes and try (and succeed) to jump on me while I’m trying to cook because they want to play with the feather toy that’s been hidden (not so well!) on top of the fridge and know it’s their best shot at getting up there.

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

SUNDAYS ARE THE WORST!!

Normally it’s the weekend but recently it’s just so stressful!

It’s like you can’t even relax because you’re supposed to be preparing for the week ahead!

It doesn’t feel like the weekend anymore!

Why is planning and prioritizing
So MF Hard for me!?!!!!

Why did my brain cope with stress and trauma by simply checking out & spacing out!?

I got so good at it that I find it hard to bring my focus back—it takes soooo much effort to do what i need to do

I’m So Freaking TIRED.

!rant

TLDR; Lost passion after a few years, wasted a year, went on vacation without really any technology, found my passion and am excited as hell for 2019.

After programming for nearly 5 years, I’ve hit the point of not wanting to program anymore. I’ve burnt myself out, and haven’t had a vacation in 8+ years so we’ve finally decided to take one. I’m not going to say it’s a full blown vacation, but a semi-vacation since it’s with my parents also so I do have to do a few things I’d prefer not to such as meeting relatives.

I didn’t have the motivation to work on any new projects, finish any projects I actually enjoyed, I just did a few side projects for friends that took me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes every few weeks. In general this year has been garbage in development terms, I’ve lost passion. It felt like a chore, I didn’t find the entertainment I once did.

I’ve been away from technology for about 2 weeks now, and have less than a week left before I fly back and I’m excited as hell. During this break away from technology (with the exception of browsing devRant once in a while), has me excited to work on many projects and actually start learning and improving my skills. I’ve actually gained the motivation to work on 2 projects that have been planned for nearly 2 years now, I’ve noted down ideas for them, made diagrams, etc, just never had the passion to develop them. 2019 is going to be one hell of a year, since I get back almost at the end of November, and December I have a few business meetings and University exams that I have to prepare for. Excited to see these projects through, one is going to be for the hell of it, just been a passion project I’ve wanted to do for years now. The other project is actually a project for one of my sub-companies that hasn’t officially released since I didn’t have the passion to work on it. (Not going to go into full detail yet about the companies/projects, going to save that for the future)

Alongside that, I’m excited since my main company that is totally unrelated to technology, is set to do some massive moves during 2019 also. Looking forward to that, and being able to launch my dream company (the sub-company I mentioned before).

Time for sleep now, goodnight! (Wrote this after a few drinks and in the middle of the night, hopefully it’s not full blown garbage)

Me: “Hey boss, you assigned these things to me that I’m not qualified for and have no experience in. We should really hire someone with the specialized skills in this”

Boss “I agree. It’s a role I desperately think we should have hired for a long time ago”

Me “Ok so about these tickets the-“

Boss “I need you to write up a justification for this role, what kind of work the person would be doing and what budget implications we will incur”

Me “You’re asking me to write a job description for a class of work I’ve already admitted I have no experience or qualifications doing MYSELF?”

Boss “Correct”

Me “and I’m still responsible in the meantime for getting these other tickets done still aren’t I?”

Boss “Yes”

Me “Very well. I’ll email you a recap of this discussion then so we can come back to it later when we start hiring for the role”

(and so my ass is sufficiently covered when I inevitably bring down prod and people start asking why I broke prod)

Anyone else really struggle with motivation?

Time was back when I was a fresh dev that I couldn’t stop coding, it’s all I ever wanted to do.

I think doing it for a job has sucked the fun out of it, and unless I’m getting paid (and even then), I find actually getting down to it is really difficult.

I’ll start looking into making something, perhaps get as far as opening the IDE and then just nope’ing and bingeing YouTube / gaming / Netflix instead.

*At a dorm gathering*

Me: I think I’m gonna head back to my room, I don’t know what to do here

Friend: Come on, meet people! Socialize!

Me: *sighs* Fine

You know you’re a nerd when...

Me: Ah, just have to finish this one small feature today and this whole massive update is done. Everyone will be off my back, things will calm down. Gonna be great.

Life: hey man, you know what I was thinking? It’s been a really long time since you had one of those vomiting bugs ... you know the gut wrenching, massive headache, can’t do anything but stare at the walls kind of flu’s?

Me: ...... eh I’m ok thanks.

Life: oh buddy you don’t understand ...... RUN!!!

This was about 3 years ago. I’m on vacation and just getting off the plane, when my boss calls me on his cellphone. Apparently the crontab on our main file upload server had gotten nuked, and he was asking if there were any backups.

A word about this server. I work with video, so this thing is doing about a few gigabits of traffic incoming at any moment. The cron jobs are necessary to move and organize these massive files into a sane scheme for processing. Hundreds of drop folders receiving thousands of files resulting in terabytes of data every single day. Our storage vendor tells us we have the third largest deployment they know about.

No cron jobs mean all of this content is just sitting around piling up. I tell him sorry, try contacting $otherAdmin since he’s more familiar with that system.

A few days later, after the vacation, I come back in. $boss and $otherAdmin have reconstructed the crontab from scratch after an all nighter.

I ask how it got deleted.

$boss was training some people how to set up new customers on this file server, and he told the trainees to open the crontab in read-only mode. One of them ran:

crontab -r

Yes, we back up our crontabs now.

Told my advisor that I was not interested in an additional position due to the massive workload I’m already carrying in my back. Lo and behold, I get a message from a colleague congratulating me on the extra position.

Wat?

Our HR guy is a tool. He requested I help him extract some data from our database. Which based on what he requested I supplied he then started trying to bully me because the data I gave him wasn’t what he wanted. Ringing me every 5 mins asking if it was ready, comparing me to another colleague who wrote the system.

When we blew up at him telling him to back off he continued. Anyway he still works here and persists in being a tool. i on the other hand ignore him.

I’m pretty sure that the HR bullying an employee is wrong, not massively worried about it just annoyed

Up until last year I was pre-med. I graduated college with a bachelors in Biology. Took my MCAT, prepped my med school applications for submission, and then realized I didn’t wanna pursue this pseudo-dream I had for so long. I realized the reality of the sacrifice and the lifestyle I was gonna make and began to regret not studying what I truly liked to be doing on my off time which is computers and programming. Long story short, here I am back in school getting a degree in CS, and can whole heartily admit, I’m happy doing/learning what I love.

It’s amazing how life works. Never would I have imagined that I’d make a switch like that, but I know it’s the best decision I’ve made so far.

I got my promotion by forcing it. I work at a fairly large gov organization and have done so for 2.5 years. I had been asking for a pay rise for years but was always told there’s no budget. I was doing work way beyond my pay grade as many senior devs had left. Eventually I got really sick of it so applied to another company, took 5 interview rounds but I had an offer that was a 30% raise on my salary at that time.

I submitted my resignation fully thinking that i’m going to leave, but what do you know, my division not only found the budget but did so in 2 days to come back with a counter offer. It’s funny how when push comes to shove, money that previously didn’t exist just appears out of no where

<senior dev turns around..making some small talk about the weather and such.. then>
Senior Dev: “Yea, I’m wanting to take my hard drive out of my desktop and put it in my laptop”
<I know his personal laptop is an older 13.3” dell>
Me: “You have a 2.5” laptop drive in your desktop computer?”
<gives me a very puzzled look>
Senior Dev: “Um…no.”
<second or two of awkward silence>
Me: “Well, a desktop hard drive isn’t going to fit in your laptop.”
<gives me another very puzzled look with a touch of annoyance>
Senior Dev: “It might work.”
<senior dev turns back around>
Why the –bleep- do people talk to me!? Now the rest of the day all I want to do is take his computer away from him…poor thing…that little guy has no idea what his owner wants to do to him .

My boss and one of my coworkers “touch me”...

I’m usually one of the first ones in the office. When my coworker comes in and walks by, he touches my shoulder from the back in a “hello friend” kinda way.

Especially when I’m trying to ignore him he pokes my shoulder. He could you’d waved his hand in front of my head.

My boss is trying to be the “buddy” I guess. When having lunch and someone says something funny, he literally rests his hand on my shoulder or kinda rams my shoulder with his shoulder..

They think that’s nice and “bonding” but I hate it and it makes me very very uncomfortable. The ONLY ones who are allowed to touch me are my GF (I don’t have one) and other girls i know in a night out after a few drinks.

Not even my best friends touch me cause they know I don’t like that.

Im giving obvious signs that they should stop but they don’t get it..

On the other hand I probably have some serious problems that It makes me that uncomfortable in the first place, but not sure how to fix that.. i don’t even go to the barber shop because they have to touch me to cut my hair. So I cut them myself or my dad does it once in a year.

So, idiot me decided it would be a good idea to never get around to configuring my UPS to gracefully shutdown my server after a powercut lasting more than x duration...

Long story short, we had a powercut that lasted 4 minutes or so longer than the battery in the UPS could keep the server up for...

UPS died, server went pew, and after rebooting itself once the power came back on, my raid array wouldn’t mount anymore...

After Googling around, it seemed like running e2fsck would solve the problem.

Didn’t seem to do the trick... and tired me at 3am decided it would be a good idea to poke around.

Pretty sure I ran a command wrong, or two, because now I can’t even mount the fricken array in read only, and fsck complains with a shit ton errors...

Been researching for hours, and no dice...

Test Disk shows the ext4 partition, but fails to list any files...

I may have destroyed the tables or something... I’m a noob at this point.

I’m able to access files with the RStudio tool, however this doesn’t help with file names and directory structure 😭

Is it all over for my 5 years worth of photos and other bits and pieces that I don’t have any backups of ? 😂😭😭

If any of y’all are pros with data recovery and can help a fellow boi out, I’d be more than happy to pay for ya time !

!rant
Question time for you very few Salesforce devs out there, yea I know there’s some.

Seeing as Google is not my friend today, I’m trying to get SOQL to return null valued fields back to a rest api, something this hunk of shit won’t do, and short of looping back through all the records and injecting these fields back in, I’m at a loss... any advise is welcome 🤯

After working form home for over 18 months now, I start reprioritising things.
I relocated to Ireland almost 3 years ago and I love the people, and country.. but..
The government is a new level of incompetent, selfish (politicians) and clueless. Unlike any other EU government I’ve ever seen.
To this day I’m not allowed to leave the country to see my family. I don’t know many people here because most of them already left so that sucks.

Although my company is great, we got a new female CEO which (just my impression) feels like she gotta prove herself to the world and the company is falling apart since she took over. Seniors leaving on a weekly basis and new managers and grads get hired.

I could go back to the country I grew up in and make my 110k a year (which is a lot in Europe) and I could be close to my fam during covid shit. But I told myself to never go back there because I hate that place..

I’m seriously considering leaving the country I love to go back to the country I hate, make good money for 2-3 years and then come back.. but when thinking about going back there I could cry..

It’s fucked up but COVID makes me consider it..

If I could I would buy a cheap farm somewhere and go off grid 😅

True story, honest to god.
Developed a state or the art SOA web app. Front end communicates with backend through API.
Client meeting, this guy looks me right in the eyes and blurts out : « why does the submit button get disabled after first click ? Clicking it a few times gets my request high priority »
I folded back my laptop and left the meeting without saying a word. Pretty sure I’m getting fired tomorrow.

I heard good things about Edge recently and thought that I should give it a try for a few days.

I’ve opened the same pdf file in multiple Edge windows and and tabs, each scrolled to a different page.

#1
The middle-mouse button scrolling is broken on half of the windows and tabs. You press the button, you see the scroll mouse curser. But it doesn’t scroll.

#2
Scrolling horizontally to an area which wasn’t visible before, the content there is extremely blurry. Scrolling vertically to different pages doesn’t fix it. Is it the pdf? No. It’s just Edge. Zoom in and out again and the blurriness is fixed for now. Until it comes back later on a random page.

#3
Duplicate another tab and suddenly it crashes all of the tabs and windows of Edge. Now I need to open them all again and scroll to the positions that they were before…

If you think that it was just a one time issue, you are wrong. All of them happened multiple times and after Windows reboots.

I’m back to Firefox again.

Updated an online profile on a jobsite this morning for a frontend job. Got called this afternoon:

Recruiter: “i have this great frontend opportunity for you. Are you interested and can i mail the vacancy over?”

Me: “yes i’m looking for something so mail it and i’ll get back at you”

A few moments later...

Recruiter mailed a backend function

This is why people don’t like to work with recruiters.

My life is basically a loop of:
1) “I’m in a slump and terribly depressed because of my lack of productivity.”
2) “I know! I’ll try using the strategies that proved to make me very productive”.
3) “I’m very productive right now, that’s because I’m so smart and talented, it’s just part of me”
4) Back to step 1

Im an unaccomplished idiot with a big ego. Why do I have an ego if I don’t have any real accomplishments????
Dear god, I will become a fucking egotistical moron the day I actually do something worthwhile.

I’m a goddamn fucking piece of shit.

I’m fairly new to maintaining my own webservers. For the past week the servers (two of them) kept crashing constantly.

After some investigation I figured it was due to someone running a script trying to get ssh access.

I learned about fail2ban, DOS and DDOS attacks and had quite a fight configuring it all since I had 20 seconds on average between the server shutdowns and had to use those 20 second windows to configure fail2ban bit by bit.

Finally after a few hours it was up and running on both servers and recognized 380 individual IPs spamming random e-mail / password combos.

I fet relieved seeing that it all stopped right after fail2ban installation and thought I was safe now and went to sleep.

I wake up this morning to another e-mail stating that pinging my server failed once again.

I go back to the logs, worried that the attack became more sophisticated or whatever only to see that the 06:25 cronjob is causing another fucking crash. I can’t figure out why.

Fuck this shit. I’m setting another cronjob to restart this son of a bitch at 06:30.

I’m done.

I was applying for a job that I really wanted, and were told to code an assignment. I sat for 2-3 days coding an e commerce app in react which was super fun and challenging, I think I made a pretty decent app. but after I handed it in and a couple of weeks later I got back that I didn’t make it further in to the process. The feedback showed that I missed some essential stuff and I mixed typescript and JavaScript even though it was supposed to be in typescript (I’m new to TS) :(
I feel so disappointed, I probably had too many things going on while doing this that I didn’t had time to review it properly before sending it in. Oh well, at least I have a nice job now (but underpaid)

I’m done with people that derail meetings and discussions.

While I want to seek feedback for an Interface that I wrote, these attention seekers decide it’ll be the perfect opportunity to bring up the topic of “how functional programming paradigm facilitates better encapsulation”.

Everyone else follow suit. I try “time checking” and bringing the talk back on track. Never worked.

I’m concluding that meetings are shit and a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

Set up a 2GB upload to run and a 6GB folder to compress while I went to do an errand. Came back to find computer had rebooted itself while I was out. No reason for it in event logs. Just a random reboot for giggles, I guess. File upload aborted with no resume and I’m unsure if the full folder compressed. Have to start over.

I’m hired as pizza making burger flipper for $12/hr since I have no formal schooling and then I am walked out back to the utility room to do what cooks REALLY DO... Secret network engineering and admin... Never fails... They always find out and I always end up replacing whatever company or person they used for tech/admin work.

Time to at least get some Oracle certs and a nano degree!

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

When I told John our newest colleague “I understand your frustration but you need to calm down because collaboration is key”

John:
Okay okay okay, I get it. Collaboration is key and all, but these meetings freaking killing me. We need a better balance, where we can have effective meetings that actually drive progress without sacrificing our precious coding mojo.

At the end of the day, I just wanna do what I’m f*ckin paid for. But these damn meetings are killing my vibe, and it's downright frustrating. Can't we just get back to the good ol' days of actually getting sh*t done!

{Bro is in for a long ride}

Me: Ugh. I always forget to change my Slack status before leaving my computer. I wish it would just update when I locked my computer. And maybe cleared the status/set me back to active when I unlocked my computer.
*realization that I’m a programmer now*

——
A week later:
... it throws a nilError exception on every running of the Automator action to the stderr file it’s configured with, but it does what I programmed it to do. What? Why? What have I done?

I’m on a screen share watching an offshore associate copy code from my email to the target script...

... by switching back and forth between windows and typing in the code...

Is COPY-PASTE a little too advanced for this team???

Things I’m learning from my accounting job that will help me in my future dev career:

Today I have really, truly understood the need to sometimes just walk away.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix something, I kept fucking up, and at 16:40 I realized I can just stop, do something else that’s easy and doable, and come back to the fucked up mess I made in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a lesson I’ve been continuously learning over the last few years, not to stubbornly brute-force my way into doing something when I’m not in the right mindset and able to do it, and instead just calm myself down and come back to it later.

Worst Monday ever.... going back to work today after a lovely week off. Just checked my emails before I get to the office and I’m already offended by the amount of ‘stupid’ that has happened whilst I’ve been away. Wish me luck, I may have murdered someone by the end of the day!

Please, please, please stop cornering me at the water cooler and asking me about work. This is my break.. I can answer your question in five minutes when I’m back at my desk. Thanks.

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

!dev

What a fucking son of a bitch day...

I’m hungover as fuck so i don’t wanna drive, so I want to pay parking for a few hours.
I didn’t find my fucking key, when I pulled up the couch to look under it, my XPS fell of it and smashes the screen. At that moment my landlord knocks on the door to take a look at the kitchen ceiling and t he kitchen is a fucking MESS! You know when you’re drunk and get a late night cooking attack? Yea, that sort of mess.

Completely fucked in my head I got the reserve key for the car, unlocked it and the bloody alarm went of because the keys battery is empty. So managed to turn it off, went back into my apartment and found the key BEHIND the motherfucking couch.. BEHIND THE COUCH, HOW WOULD IT EVEN GET THERE? Ffs...

I’ll just continue drinking now and hope tomorrow is gonna be a better day.. and order a new screen for my laptop, it’s not at all like I’m short on money this month anyway..

!dev

Fucking money problems..
Had 20k on the side before relocating..
Old country wanted 10k taxes, 10k left..

Flight, hotel etc 2k..

8k left..

Bought a cheap car, 5.5k left..

After the rental cars, 3k left..

Bank blocks card because of potential fraud, so I can’t pay the insurance and have to take another rental car..
2.5k left.
2.4k deposit so I can’t pay the insurance for 2k..

At least 0.4k left and first salary comes in, but since I’m new, I’m on emergency tax so I only got about 1.5k.. will get the taxes back later but for February I’m so fucking broke..

At least everything is paid now so I can start to safe from 0 again...

Fuuuccckkkk..

Totally worth it though..

#lifeIsSoMuchBetterOverHere,ImNeverGoingBack..

#iDontThinkCommasInHashtagsAreAllowedButIDontGiveAFuck!

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

I used to think I was the kind of programmer that was good with people. That somehow I was special because I could get on with colleagues and make clients happy.

But fuck people. It’s so easy to be nice, just don’t be not nice. Don’t say rude things and be surprised when I’ve had enough.

For some reason my latest colleagues think it’s too confrontational to talk to each other and instead give management anonymous feedback on who they don’t get on with. Which obviously gets fed back to everyone immediately.

I’m done putting on a smile. Elegant code speaks for itself. I’m getting a PA to talk to people from now on because fuck this.

Whyyyyyyy do people go back on their word and stab you in the back just to make themselves look better?

Mate, I’ve got a paper trail of your request, detailing EXACTLY what you asked for. Don’t make me use it against you to prove you’re wrong and I’m right... guess I better start collecting emails to use as self defence 😩😔

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

I quit my first dev job of less than 6 months. Nothing lined up but it was not what I wanted and I was burning out quickly. Felt like a zombie, thinking of my work after work, and unable to get anything into my head, isolated and other needs not met for an entry level developer.

I luckily have money saved up for a year and hitting leetcode and everything else. Will I find a job right away? Probably not. However, I took the first position within a month of interviews during the pandemic and regret that I stopped applying even when I saw the red signs.

I’m scared but I didn’t beat my head against the wall at school to be taken advantage of like this (imo they need a senior).

2020 was trash as a fresh grad but maybe this year will be different. I know more than before and I especially know what I don’t want.

Here we go again, no looking back now.

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

Alright, I’ve got a question for some of you who may have felt this way or currently are feeling this way.

I’m burnt out. I hate my job(s), I hate computers, technology, programming, etc. Honestly, at my primary job because shit is so bad, I haven’t even set an alarm clock to wake up in the mornings for the simple fact that I just don’t give a fuck anymore. My direct supervisor is the same way. This place is falling apart and honestly I’m welcoming it.

I’ve grown up with computers my whole life. When I was younger my brother would hack and tamper with shit just to test the limits. To see what he and his machine were capable of. My dad, he was always taking computers apart, anything that had a board, it was at one point taken apart to see how it worked, and when put together; always worked. They liked modifying and testing the limits of things... the shit I use to enjoy...

I guess what I’m trying to ask is, how do you gain a passion back for something that has faded away over a period of time... I truly hope I haven’t forever lost a passion for computers and every subclass under it, but I fear as though I have... How do you guys get it back?

DevRant needs a save for later option... I see lots of long interesting posts, I start reading them and then something comes up (like a phone call or I need to do something). Then by the time I come back the post is gone, and I’m sad...

YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.

Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.

Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.

I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.

Had a bad day at work :( They gave me this code for some obscure streaming job and asked me to complete it. Only after 3 days did I realize that the LLD given to me was incorrect as the data model was updated. Another 2 more days, I was able to debug the code and run it successfully— I was able to parse the tables and generate the required frame but not able to stream it back to the output topic as per the LLD. That’s where I needed help but none of my emails/messages were replied to. The main guy who is pretty technical scheduled a code review session with me— I expected that I would run the code and he would spot it something I might’ve missed and why my streaming function isn’t working. Instead, what happened was that he grilled me on each and every line of the code (which had some obscure tables queried) and then got super mad at me saying “Why are we having this code review session if your code is not complete?”. I’m like bruh, you asked for it, and yes, the main parsing logic is done and I’m just having this issue in the last part. And he’s like “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”. Wtf?! I left at least 5 emails and a dozen messages. He’s like this has to go live on Monday, and I’m like Ok, I’ll work in the weekend. And he’s like “Don’t tell me all these things! You’re not doing me a favor by working on weekends! How am I to ask my colleagues to connect with you separately on Saturday/Sunday? You should have done the on the weekdays itself. What were you doing this whole week?”. Bruh, I was running the code multiple times and debugging it using print statements. All while you were ignoring my attempts to reach out to you. SMH 🤦‍♂️ I can go on and on about this whole saga.

I took a break, reevaluated a lot, and I am now back with none of the pressure I put on myself over the years and I’m actually enjoying myself again

I’m back! I’ve been inactive because I forgot installing the app again :P

First time back to work today after a month long break. It was soul crushing. I don’t know if I’m permanently burnt out or just seriously disenfranchised with the corporate world but I would have thought after a holiday I would be energised and ready to go. It turns out after coming back to work I feel exactly the fucking same! Tired, exhausted, discontent, irritable and most importantly BORED. I am bored spending 8+ hours a day at a computer chair responding to emails and teams messages! Has anyone felt like this before? Did you ever overcome it? I’m worried as I’m getting older I’m losing my love more and more for programming whilst simultaneously hating the concept of work more and more.

Some hacker went through a lot of trouble to get around a minimum order amount on our site. And they’re still hitting us after Cloudflare issued a bunch of blocks. Well, there are some back doors I have to finish closing. I guess I’m lucky I’m just inheriting this site and I’m not the one who built it. But I’m still unlucky because I have to fix this mess. But damn hacker, why’d you go though all this trouble to get around existing validation. Go find another site to charge $1 amounts and test your stolen credit card info. Pretty please 🥺

I’m so fucking pissed off right now ... what the actual fuck!!! I worked so damn hard during this semester i got 70% for a presentation whilst some jack off who gets 100 fucking hundred percent doing it last minute by MY FUCKING HELP and also has the nerve to tell me to stay silent while he enjoys his Fucking undeserved HD (high distinction)

Well guess fucking what???? I’m not staying damn silent !!!! I’ll definitely be watching out for who I help in the near future, 😡 1AM i should be sound asleep but im legit so bloody pissed right now...I put my heart into my project stayed up late nights till 2 bloody fooking AM many times in a row, put my heart into my FREAKING presentation and i get stabbed in the back?!? Well thats how i feel right now.. i dont know how i will sleep tonight.. what PISSES ME OFF THE MOST IS HOW SOMEONE HAS THE NERVE TO TELL ME TO BE QUITE SO THEY ENJOY THEIR UNDERSERVED MARKS!!!

anyways guys and gals.. i had to get that off my chest. Thank you for taking the time to read my rant.. as always wishing you all the best.

Milo

QA personal voice assistant that runs locally without cloud, it’s like never ending project. I look at it from time to time and time pass by. Chat bots arrived, some decent voice algorithms appeared. There is less and less stuff to code since people progress in that area a lot.

I want to save notes using voice, search trough them, hear them, find some stuff in public data sources like wikipedia and also hear that stuff without using hands, read news articles and stuff like that.

I want to spend, more time for math and core algorithms related to machine learning and deep learning.

Problem is once I remember how basic network layers, error correction algorithms work or how particular deep learning algorithm is constructed and why is that, it’s already a week passed and I don’t remember where I started.

I did it couple of times already and every time I remember more then before but understanding core requires me sitting down with pen and paper and math problems and I don’t have time for that.

Now when I’m thinking about it - maybe I should write it somewhere in organized way. Get back to blogging and write articles about what I learned. This would require two times the time but maybe it would help to not forget.

I’m mostly interested in nlp, tts, stt. Wavenet, tacotron, bert, roberta, sentiment analysis, graphs and qa stuff. And now crystallography cause crystals are just organized graphs in 3d.

Well maybe if I’m lucky I retire in the next decade or at least take a year or two years off to have plenty of time to finish this project.

Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.

This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.

Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.

To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!

I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.

Been a few weeks now back at the office after a good four weeks off… still no work to do….

”Guess I’ll write a compiler in C then, a good chance to brush up on it.”

”… hmm, haven’t touched any simple html in ages, maybe I try and do this frontend as vanilla as possible”

”What if I tried remaking this backend with Suave? Haven’t written much F# in a while, here’s a chance to brush up on mah mad skillzors”

Never a dull moment, and while I’m cranking out code like a maniac, I feel very, very unproductive due to no actual work getting done.

This is actually a question about the devRant app.

I’ve noticed this a few times. When I click a rant repeatedly (say x times), from the front page or from the notifications pane, multiple layers of that rant open up. And I have to hit the back button x amount of times to go back to where I initially was (again, front page or notification pane).

Now, I understand an app capturing multiple user inputs on the same object but shouldn’t it also account for this by only considering those taps as one input, especially if the object is lagging and hadn’t been loaded? Why is devRant implemented this way?

I would consider it undesirable to have Gmail open the same email in multiple layers when you click the same email repeatedly. So, is devRant’s a feature or a bug?

I’m not a web (app) developer. I’d just like some knowledge on how user input might be captured and why repeated inputs aren’t screened out?

If anyone could page the two awesome doods who work on devRant, that would be awesome! I hope I didn’t just wrongly assume their genders.

The company I work for now has no PM, no UI/UE. It’s just me, because I’m a full-stack engineer. I originally thought that full-stack was just front-end and back-end. I kind of want to run away.

The interview I was so nervous about apparently went well. It’s a small ad company.

I was offered a month long “work trial” period.

Problem is I was caught off guard with discussing compensation & what I agreed to is less than half what the average dev makes in my state.
Like barely above min wage

I feel much less excited about this but this would be my first job in a loooong time.

I’m not sure how to feel but I think I have to at least try, but I feel taken advantage of already!
Is that bad? What would you guys do? How would you approach this before sending any signed commitments back?

Ugh!!!!!

I love Ada, it seems to be a pretty unpopular opinion, and maybe I’m biased because the best organized project I’ve worked on happened to be in Ada, but that’s association not causation.

However, the lack of multi-line comments in a language made to have specific custom type compliance seems like a fairly decent oversight. Wouldn’t you expect the authors to want to explain about their types?

The other thing that is a draw back about Ada is searching for help. I love the Americans with Disabilities Act as much as anybody, but but somehow “Ada language types” will still bring up ADA info. (Yes “-disability” helps but it’s an extra step)

I’m starting to flat out not trust my team. Every single time I delegate a task it comes back with massive bugs and features missing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is planning so awful at so many tech companies (and in general I guess)?

I’m barely a month in and already having to drop current projects because someone made a promise to someone else and realized at the last minute “wait we need infrastructure for this” and came to me out of nowhere “hey we need this super complicated pipeline and complex architecture built”

I ask boss about how this should fall in priority, he basically says “figure it out”. Okay….thanks.

I ask for the business case from the requesters and when they need it and I’m told “we’re going live in late September”

Go back to boss, tell him what I “figured out” and asked if this was something he intended for me to take on. He skimmed through the ticket and gave a non-committal “I’m not sure what this is”. I’m still trying to figure out the infra here, still haven’t gotten access to half the things linked in the JIRA, but there’s been about 3 email chains and a Director recently DM’d me on slack asking for an update.

So I guess I’m flying in the dark on this one.

If you never hear from me again in this community I probably flew into the side of a mountain or something. This new job ain’t it.

Now that I work from home as a freelancer, my favourite way to get through a tough day is:

1. Scream internally
2. Realise I’m getting over-stressed
3. Roll myself a blunt
4. Smoke said blunt
5. Dick about on YouTube / internet for a while
6. Make myself a drink (tea etc)
7. Come back and work the problem with a better perspective and fresh eyes.

Today our computer science coordinator went to me when we had another lesson on the computers. After a few moments she came to ne and said: “Can you come with me?”

I left the classroom with her and she said: “I’m happy to see you”
I didn’t expect that because she’s jealous and doesn’t like me. But of course she had again found something to invent.

Then it started:
C: “Did you try to install something”
Me: “No. Why?”
C: “What did you try to install, because my antivirus is telling me that it contains a virus.”
Me: “Nothing”
C: “It was on (my personal site)”
Me: “Yes, I visited my own site to see how it looked in Edge. As I don’t use any Windows device.”
C: “That’s the virus”
Me: “It’s a simple HTML file with CSS. No JS or so.”
C: “MY computers aren’t here for experimenting. I can see more than you think.”

I got back to class and told it to a friend.
She really is an idiot. Because her pictures are on a 50 mb “server” from our ISP that everyone can access. But she can see anything. Curious why she didn’t see that that friend also visited my site...

Fuck her. I’m asking myself if she even knows what HTML is as she will teach us how to program with scratch, where you simply place blocks.

PS: the antivirus didn’t show anything. I downloaded the same one and shows me nothing. She’s just inventing.

I’m back guys ❤️

I’m on a screen share watching an offshore associate copy code from my email to the target script...

... by switching back and forth between windows and typing in the code...

Is COPY-PASTE a little to advanced for this team???

When you go to update your Mac think great I’ll go chill out for half hour, let it update and hit restart, then come back to your computer and realise Mamp stopped your computer restarting without entering a password. FFS rookie error put in the password computer restarts to update. “Calculating time remaining...” 40 minutes. I’m so fucking bored right now just staring at the screen and having a rant.

I’m studying at uni remotely at the moment. I’m taking a software engineering class. I love developing software so I was super excited about this course. First assignment is to make a tic tac toe game in python. I finish the assignment super fast within the first hour of our first class.

We end up spending the rest of the fucking semester on this fucking program. No improvements, nothing. Literally just staring at this less than 200 line command line tic tac toe game talking about the same fucking shit every class.

Our fucking final is a presentation about this fucking program. The entire class is going to present the same command line python tic tac toe game

People told me that in the past, this class would find a local client and fulfill a request (making a website, etc)

However, now there’s a new prof teaching this course.

Best way I can describe it, 3 hours of this fucking prof screen sharing a google doc and droning on for 3 hours

I wish I could get the 20+ hours of my life back that this course has taken from me

404, Swag not found 🥲

I got sick and tired of waiting (4 years) for the debugging ducks to be re-stocked in the swag store, so i made my own.

Yes, I’m a front end developer and the domain redirects to an Etsy shop because I’m too fucking busy carrying the entire company that i work for on my back to develop my own custom one.

I’ll get around to it once PMO/Design/Marketing ops and Business get around to doing their jobs themselves.

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

I’m an idiot. Stackoverflow issue that I documented to a T. Javascript. So I put requirement of not having jquery or framework.

Get a comment about do I know it is working? My answer, debugging. They respond back with a question about debugging and some details I totally didn’t read.

Well, that was the bug. Chrome debugger was showing a message I didn’t understand. So they answered my problem perfectly.

But before realizing he answered my issue, I blew up. Of course I know what is going on. The debugger is showing me....did you even run my example?

I almost felt like giving up as a developer. Here is this awesome guy, solving my issue, and some dumbass like me has to be frustrated. Now he won’t respond to take a bounty he so awesomely deserves.

I’m still a dev. I just don’t feel so professional anymore...

Sometimes I do wonder why can’t I just be content at getting best I can get at what I’m already good at - and what brings in the €€€? Why do I go ”oooh look shiny intetesting language, let’s try do shit with it” or ”hey, let’s try this thing called kernel dev/pld/program verification which are all so far outside my core expertise they might as well be in a different universe!”

Dude I mean writing a kernel in V and doing proof oriented programming in F* are fun and all, but what good’s that gonna do me when I’m in all likelihood still maintaining legacy web apps in PHP ten to twenty years from now?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m torn inside with my current workplace offering me everything I value and stuff that’s rare to find - but at the same time I’d love to be challenged more and don’t really have enough of those opportunities in my current environment. Or some shit like that.

Well fuck that, back to writing my own embedded DSL into F* in F#….

I got randomly PIP’ed by this small company I was working at. They claimed performance issues without referring to specifics so I’m sure it was a financial issue (I’m paid more than other devs). So I took the laptop home and claimed I broke my back and started working from home (they don’t appreciate WFH). I did this so that I can freely give interviews. And now after 2 weeks I got 4 offers (with more than 50% hike). I’ve started the necessary documentation work and communicated my last working day with my current company.

So what is the moral of this story? Creative comments only.

In the mood of doing nothing because I have so much shit going on. Anyone knows that feeling?

Also so many (cool) projects I would like to do but no motivation to start anything... I have no real reason to... I’m just waiting for motivation to come back one day - but it has been a long time.. :(

I’m really bad at closing my tabs. I’ll often have 40+ tabs open when tackling some sort of problem or when doing research. Sometimes I’ll crack open another browser instance to research something unrelated. I use a tab session saver to save all of my instances before a reset. But the funny part is, I almost never go back into my stored sessions. I’ll just open up a fresh browser after restarting and the cycle begins anew.

I need help.

Project isn’t motivating me but I want to finish it but I can’t finish it because I’m not motivated to do it.

Should I keep going and come back when I feel motivated, or just keep going even though it’s a tough one.

Programming is a passion I’ve had since I was a kid and I saw my brother’s books on Basic and Pascal. YouTube didn’t exist back then... Stack Overflow didn’t exist and yahoo was my search engine after having to listen to the dial-up sounds. Once I found the right tools to learn on my own, after my first hello world program, I didn’t stop.
The fact that I’m still making time to write even a few lines of code every day, go through courses and dive into documentations makes me hope that one day I’ll be good enough!

I hate the process of trying to get hydrated when I’ve gone through a period of apparently thinking I’m a cactus.

When I don’t drink water at all, I feel fine. No dry mouth, no symptoms of dehydration.

I *start* trying to hydrate and it’s like my body thinks this is the best time to start giving me all those dehydration symptoms it doesn’t even bother with when I’m not drinking water because it’s just given up on me listening to them.

I drank 64 oz of water yesterday and woke up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and my throat scratchy.

I know that I need to keep drinking water in large quantities for a period of time for my body to chill the fuck out again, but words can’t describe how tempting it is to just go back to being a cactus.

Hydrating sucks.

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

So I work at a startup working on “cutting edge” technology with two other devs. Our lead engineer is an interesting fellow. The guy never ever writes a single line of code, just looks for similar projects online and receives a lot of credit for it, I have to hand it to him though, he has an ability to scheme through information and pick the gist of what’s going on but when it comes to detail, he’s seriously lacking. We recently started a projects a couple of weeks back and it was supposed to be an easy two days of hacking and we would be done but instead the guy looks for code online copies it I change the necessary variables to match the use case then it doesn’t work. So we’ve spent weeks debugging this code because someone is afraid to get their hands dirty. I can’t complain to the bosses because they’re not techies and the trust him more since I’m still new to the company.
I love their attitude though, they honestly believe they have a chance against some giants in tech and from the actual talent I’ve witnessed they’ll only get there through sheer luck.
I have to sit there and listen to them shit on more successful tech companies and that they have better ideas.
Maybe someone can change my mind on this issue as I’m still young and new to this industry.

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

It’s been a loooong hiatus from devRant but I’m back and still no swipe to exit a rant. Cmon, that shit would make this app easier to navigate.

I’m almost 49, which is now considered “old” by most tech companies if you’re just a lowly staffer. If I can manage to stay employed until I can afford to retire, my goal is to just push through in whatever job in the industry (or even out of it) I can manage to do. Learning and being proficient with zillions of languages and frameworks like all these job postings want is impossible for me. I’m trying to figure out a way to work in some aspect of the commercial spaceflight industry without having to go back to school for an engineering degree and clawing my way up again. If that means being a janitor at SpaceX or Blue Origin, I’m fine with it. I’m done with ladder climbing and ass kissing.

I’ve been in a sabbatical for the last few months and it’s been incredibly enlightening!

One of the things that I discovered is that I can still enjoy working with computers!! Just because something has been done doesn’t mean that I can do it again. It’s been done, but not by me yet. I’m not claiming is objectively better or anything like that, I’m just saying that is mine!

Together with that I’m also finding out that making things “my own way” is very motivating and satisfying! I don’t think this would work on a team, but it certainly makes programming a creative endeavor, which I think is why it sucks so much to work in the tech industry nowadays! Creativity is risky and dangerous and so, if Facebook became a million dollars company using ______ then let’s call that “industry standard” and do it everywhere, even if all it is is distilled excrements that only works because of the billions…

I guess the bottom line is that I’ve found out that I like programming because I’m a creative and places that force me to program while killing my creativity are both toxic and miserable… and I never wanna go back!

I’m thankful for my team. I had an upsetting personal incident and it was affecting my ability to be present. I even missed a meeting. They are giving me the space I need and rescheduling other meetings for me. It’s hard for me to accept compassion because I haven’t experienced a lot of that when I needed it. I was very distressed at the beginning of the week, but now I’m starting to feel better and getting back to functioning.

I’m struggling in studying and that’s seriously holding me back, regardless of the type of technical book I’m reading I’m always in a fight with my brain. Even if I enjoy the topic and then I’ll enjoy using what I read while I study I struggle to learn more than 1-2 chapters (sometimes even less) at time then my head starts to hurt, my focus drifts away and if I force myself to go ahead my brain just refuses to store the new informations, it feels like filling a full tank.

At this point I should have learned C++ and Swift and started to contribute to projects which aren’t overdone web apps but all I have are two half read books which silently “judges” me anytime I open my eBook library and I dread returning to having associated them to headache and frustration and the only things I read this year are design patterns (which haven’t found a single real life use since then) and F# (which I never used with the exception of some little demos and is now slowly fading away in my memory).

Have you got any study advice to help me dealing with this frustrating situation?

For the love of the God and compiler. Why do tech companies keep putting finance people in charge of operations?

Everything gets reduced to a value in a spreadsheet and ifsum<pretendprofits it’s a problem.

Company just closed $40m in funding and here I am quibbling about fixed costs with some MBA holding jackass to get $200 so I can equip my team with a licenses for a better IDE.

I’m this close to saying fuck it, buy independent licenses and then expense it back to the company. It’ll cost more than bundling but that’s why I’m not in finance.

I recently started a new job where I’m working with someone who is vegan. This is great and I have no problems with it at all. My diet also leans heavily towards vegan and I understand and sympathize with the reasons that can lead to this choice.

However, I seem to keep ending up in inadvertent conflict with my colleague in ways that surprise and baffle me. For example:

* After buying and showing him a vegan product I had just purchased (and commenting that I had done so in the hope of avoiding a more animal-product based health solution), I found myself harangued at length about how healthy non-vegan foods weren’t actually healthy, and “Would you eat a human? Have they done trials on the benefits of eating humans? No? Exactly!”

* I sent an all-office IM asking if anyone wanted a cheese sandwich I had accidentally bought (accidentally in that I thought I had bought a different filling). I received an email back from him demanding that I don’t include him on any further “offensive” emails. This was followed up by an office update telling all staff to use work communications appropriately.

I enjoy my job and I did enjoy working with this person, but now I feel quite thrown and unsure of how to react to him. I’m pretty annoyed at being accused of being offensive for my use of the words “cheese sandwich” and don’t want to bring it up as I can’t see a way of that conversation going well (I’m not planning to apologize; I don’t think I need to?!). I realize the obvious solution is just to never ever mention food (or nutrition or words that aren’t vegan) again, but I need help with how to get back to a place where I feel like I am comfortable in my work environment rather than slightly on edge in case he kicks off at me again for some insane reason.

Help me out,

Being a front end dev I suck at back end. I can do some stuff but some of the concepts and other things I really struggle to grasp.

Sometimes when I’m real clueless or have no idea how to do a task the best thing to do is ask one of the senior roles but whenever I ask him he rolls his eyes and huffs and puffs. I get it dev is quite a independent thing and you should do research etc. But it makes me feel so bad and I suck as if I don’t get the question he asked correct or I don’t understand he gets real impatient. I really do try I don’t want people to do it for me of course so I want to to understand but I just get moaned at. What do I do???

I’ve been bashing my head against a project for the past 8 weeks. The project creates a PDF pulling data from multiple APIs, scrapes and private DBs and plots charts using Plotly. We built it with Python, wkhtmltopdf and Celery+Redis. The input is an excel with a list of up to 5 influencers to analyse and compare. Runs on demand on a Linux machine and each report takes around 20 mins to generate. The project has no unittests so the only way I can check everything works is by running a bunch of different inputs. Even though you test 10 inputs (taking you more than a day), there is a high chance something goes wrong on the 11th input. I’m thinking that the only way to fix this mess is to go back to the drawing board and plan yet another refactoring to add unittests everywhere. What do you guys think?

For context: I’m a relatively new employee (~six months) on the outreach team at a large nonprofit. Our team rarely gets together, working remotely and out at events most of the time. My supervisor’s managing style is odd to me, and I’m not really used to it yet. She is very hands-off and flaky, but extremely numbers-oriented and goal-driven. She doesn’t respond well to emails and often ends up communicating solely via text.

Last week, a friend of mine passed away unexpectedly. My manager was out of town and not working that day, so I emailed instead of texting her to let her know that I would be travelling for the funeral and wouldn’t be working on Monday or Tuesday. She actually emailed back apologizing for my loss and telling me to just let her know when I’m back in town. I was impressed that she got back to me and thankful for her flexibility.

On Sunday night at 11:30 p.m., I received a text from her about a Monday morning meeting that I chose to ignore because I was annoyed that she would text me so late and expect a response, even if it would just be to remind her that I’m out. At around midnight she sent another that said, “That’s right, you’re out. I forgot.”

On Tuesday morning, while pulling into the church parking lot for the funeral, I received a text from her to our whole team complaining about outreach and program recruitment numbers with several follow-up texts asking for immediate explanations for not meeting this month’s goals. I immediately silenced notifications from the conversation and haven’t addressed them.

Am I wrong in thinking that this was extremely inappropriate and insensitive? I feel like that conversation would have been much better suited for an in-person meeting, or even an email, especially since she knew I was out on personal time. At the very least, she should have left me off of the text chain, right?

Should I talk to her about this when I see her next? Go to HR? Bring it up the next time I take a personal day (“I’d like it if you don’t text me while I’m out this week”)? I’m really terrible at confrontation and am nervous about looking like I’m overreacting, but this really upset me. Thankful for any advice you can give!

I know Windows update rants are a dime a dozen but HOW IN THE FUCK DID YOU MICROSUCKADICK BOOT LICKERS SHOVE SO MUCH HORSESHIT INTO THIS UPDATE THAT IT UNINSTALLED VIRTUALBOX? The hell?

Really, I rebooted my PC, short cuts everything, gone! Newer stuff is there plus any restore point would have had VirtualBox installed, so what the hell.

I’m stating to think that when Windows says “all your files are exactly where you left them” it’s a best guess because it just completely fucked with all your files for no reason and tried to put them back but it’s not so sure.

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

Mounjaro side effects are kicking my ass. Second week somehow worse than the first week.

First week, day after shot was the worst. Had really bad nausea and only managed to eat 10 saltines. All day.

Second week, two days after shot, woke up just in time to go to the bathroom and projectile vomit (making me acutely aware of the fact that I haven’t puked in *years*). Took that day and the next off work.

Now I’m feeling a lot better on the puke/nausea front, but constipated as heck, desperately hoping that that resolves soon, and going back to work.

But self-reflections are due.

Y’all don’t know how much I hate writing self-reflections.

But I’ve lost almost a pound a day the last 10 days, so … yay?

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

People just can’t show up on time. I respect people’s time and I do not waste a minute of anyone s time. I do not like it. Time is a precious resource and we should all treat it as such. I expect the same from other people too.

There was a meeting supposed to happen a month or so back. Me and another guy. This meeting was basically giving him the resource utilization and some cost related details for the budget our team used up. They wanted a more granular report than the generic ones we submitted.

He scheduled it once and about ten minutes before he cancelled it. Fair enough.

A week later he sent an invite and the next day he cancelled it a few hours before the meeting. Fair enough I’m still not pissed.

A month or so since the first scheduled meeting, he scheduled a meeting and I turn up and he s not there and I wait for about half hour before I leave. Next day I get an email saying he s sorry. Now I’m pissed.

A couple weeks back he schedules a meeting and I turn up and I could see through the glass door and he s talking to someone in the room he s in. He signals to me to wait for five minutes. It takes about 20. Finally I go in and he s relieved so he can finally get the data from me. I tell him I waited for twenty minutes and I have to somewhere and asked him to reschedule the meeting. He asks when and I tell him a time where I know he won’t turn up. About 8 30 in the morning. He says yes.

Next day I show up he s not there and I wait for ten minutes and just he s walking in to the floor I exit the room and run to my place. He comes over and asks and I tell him I waited for sometime and I’m busy now and he mumbles and goes away.

By this time it is already a week or so after the deadline. The bigger boss from finance turns up and asks me why I haven’t given them the data I asked for. I tell him they schedule meetings and don’t turn up on time and my other work is getting affected productivity blah blah and he says okay make the report and give it to me. I tell him no I’m not wasting anymore time on this.

He goes to my boss creates a little ruckus my boss comes over and he goes wtf. I tell him what happened. He says it’s okay give them the report. I’m like I don’t know where I kept it must be somewhere I can’t waste anymore time on this. Guy from finance joins us at this point and angrily says he’ll find it himself and don’t need our help anymore.

The file is in my laptop I use for travel. Just a local copy. Zero fucking backups. And I just deleted it.

Fuck. You.

Got an offer from another company for a 45% increase after tax, talked with my company and they matched the offer. I shook hands and thought thats that. Talked with the original company and they came back with a 65% increase after tax.. not sure on what to do. Don’t want to seem like an asshole and burn bridges with my current company by leaving, and I’m afraid of the new company and the possible learning curve and inadequacy. Help :(

Why does my brain sabotage me? I have a weird dream that wakes me up and now I’m awake at 3am and can’t go back to sleep. I went to bed at a reasonable time because I was dead tired and this is the thanks I get?

Holy shit this is creepy.

So I just got back from a team event today from a location that was a few hours away and, while we were at the hotel there was a little cardboard box on our breakfast table with an ad on it. The slogan on the ad was “Bada book Bada boom” it was really dumb and I almost forgot about it, but just now I’m listening to pandora on a completely separate network, many hours away from the location and an ad comes on with the SAME SLOGAN for what I assume was the same company.

Now I’m just wondering how they managed to do that.... I really do not believe it was a coincidence considering I have never heard that ad on my pandora before....

This is fucking creepy

I’m living the dream. Lightweight, powerful, beautiful gaming laptops are a thing (have been for a while) and I have the pleasure of owning one.

I remember one of my college peers having a BRICK Alienware laptop in 2010. Don’t get me wrong, It was awesome at the time and I was super jealous, but it was insanely loud, heavy af, and as thick as a calculus textbook!

But now with the amazing RTX GPUs, and TB SSDs I can game on max settings, benchmark fairly well and take it with me when I travel for work alongside my work laptop all in the same bag without breaking my back.

🤘🏼 I love my Asus Zephyrus 🤘🏼

The fan is still hella loud though 😆

Maybe by mid or late 2020s we will have a revolutionary cooling system that would rid our dependence on fans for cooling. Just dreaming out loud here. It sure would be great to not have to clean the dust out.

Using the new project as an excuse to try out the language I was an absolute newbie at. (Python, at the time).

A couple years later when I’m much more proficient and I go back and look at that code, I want to slap past me for putting that spaghetti mess into production.