I was looking for about a month for a laptop. Then on this one magical day I open kijiji and see a Toshiba Thinkpad T450s with 20gb of ram, 138 ssd and an i5-6300U cpu going fo 500$ (value 2000+).

My first thought was. Okay. Scam alert. But you know. What if?

So I call up this person. And its a girl who got a pc from her bf, but really she wanted a mac so she is selling it.

This straight up blew my mind. I decided, fuck it. Got 500. Ran to her. Ran a systems check on the laptop. Checked for any attempts at opening it up. Checked the harddrive. Checked the ram. Everything is solid.

Long story short. Thank god for apple fangirls!

Oh my god... Storytime.

A customer comes in with I assume is his father or grandfather.

Customer: I need a computer, but without all the internals

Me: So a case?

Customer: Yes, I need a Dell computer outsides, but without the internal components.

Me: Well, we don't have Dell cases, but we sell custom build cases and they come with a power supply.

Customer: *says nothing, but looks interested*

Me: *walks over to the cases to show him* So this is what the cases look like and we have two types, one for a ATX and one for a micro-ATX.

Customer: *still says nothing, but looks at them*

Me: What motherboard do you have at the moment?

Customer: Well, I don't have anything right now, but I'm replacing another computer that didn't work very well. I'm going to be getting some Dell parts to put in here.

Me: O-okay. So this other computer, I'd like to see it in shop to see what's going on with it.

Customer: Oh, you do NOT want to do that. I hooked it up to another computer and it blew it up.

Me: Huh, that's weird. I'd still like to look at it if possible.

Customer: Oh no, it's all wired wrong and... *some bullshit, but stay with me*

Customer: I am the best at technology. My hand has computer parts in it--government funded. *some more bullshit*

Me: Okay... *I try to bring it back around* Well, I'd still like to see the other computer for myself. So you don't have parts for this new build yet, right? You don't know what type of motherboard you have?

Customer: No.

Me: Well, I would get the internals first, so you know what size of case to get, and then get the case.

Customer: Okay. Thank you for your time.

He shook my hand with his "cyborg" hand and I was tempted to say something about "try not to crush my hand," but elected not to. Also during this entire exchange, the old man continuously farted in the background.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

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

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

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

1. "It works on my machine."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, next week, it happened again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cleaning staff came in.

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

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

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

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

Holy. Fucking. Shit.
++111111110 on devrant. This is my moment to shine, my account completely blew up. I am the Elon Musk of devrant. I am the coolest bitch on this website, bow before me you peasants!

... wait, is this binary?

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

When my programmer boyfriend talks about his code, all I say is "That's so cool, babe," because I have no idea what he's even talking about.

He could be telling me he blew up a server.

"That's so cool, babe."

(I love you, though, darling x)

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

Okay so about a year ago these FUKKING IDIOTS decides, against my recommendation, to do this quick-ugly-hack and ninja it into production.
I tell them its a FUCKING BAD idea that will blow up in a year or so...
But no, just go go go!!!!!!!

Now a year later, shit blew up badly. A total FUCKING derail. These new idiots asks me to "fix the problem", the same fucking problem I predicted and warned them about a year ago. So now i have to clean up their ducking mess because "Nobody else knows how to fix it".
What the FUCKING HELL do we pay them fuckkkers to do?!!

New idiots you ask? Yep, because 3 out of the 4 original fucktards already left the place in order to go and make some other new collegues lives fucking miserable.

FUCK YOU FUCKING MOOTHERFUUUKKKEEERRRRRSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

Last week, the team lead told me that he can't merge because my code has code smells and going forward, can't have that. We use Sonar and well the way to "fix it" according to him is to mark the line using //NOSONAR.

Most of the issues are minor like Unused imports and for me incomplete TODOs.

And before the "verbal" rule was only need to fix Major + issues. And well the reason I use TODOs is to mark code that probably needs changing in the future. I know there's going to be some feature that these lines have to be changed. But the requirements are fully defined yet from business.

But I sort of blew up on him. YOU WANT TO ENFORCE ZERO CODE SMELLS NOW?!?!?! AND THESE MINOR ISSUES? MARK THEM WITH NOSONAR?

HERE'S WHAT I THINK FOR THE LAST X YEARS... THE CODE DESIGN IS SHIT, MINOR CODE SMELLS AND MANUALLY MARKING THE ONES U NEED TO KEEP... ARE THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS...

THE OTHER PROBLEMS I'VE MENTIONED BEFORE EVER. MOS YEAR BUT YOU DIMWITS NEVER LISTEN.

YOU THINK MY TODOS ARE BAD... 90% OF THE CODE AND FEATURES (THE ONES NOT DONE BY ME) LOOK AND SMELL LIKE MONKEY SHIT. UNDOCUMENTED, MESSY, FULL OF BUGS.

AND GUESS WHAT? NEW FEATURE, SOME DEV FORGETS TO CHANGE SOME COMPONENT THAT DEPENDS ON IT. WOULDN'T IT BE GREATE IF THERE WERE BOOKMARKS... O WAIT...

i just was catching up on comics again and saw this one... with triggered my memory and this rant... My first thought was to forward it to him...

Was coding and tired as hell, my light in the room blew this week and I haven't got around to replacing it - the darkness is not exactly that exciting.

Pressed a wrong button by accident, lo and behold my laptop has a backlit keyboard. I had no idea that it had this. Blew my fucking mind (I have never had the time to just sit and look at the function keys - I suppose that is one downside to never having to look at the keyboard when one types).

A new flow of inspiration came upon me, I opened up VSCode and put on some Pantera.

Code beware, I'm fucking hostile.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

I visit my mom once a year, and usually perform preventative maintenance on her computer. Scrubbing it for viruses, applying updates for drivers, etc. On one such occasion in the early days, she complained that the PC was slow, and would quit. I opened it up, and there was a 1/4 inch layer of dust everywhere, and any and all vents were completely blocked, to the point that fans weren't turning. I blew that crap out, and from that point on became her IT guy.

Fucking Apple... my MacBook Pro committed suicide upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, had to wipe the drive. After much trouble resetting my Apple ID (put the password AND the two-factor code in the password field.. who the fuck thought that up), it tells me Mojave isn't compatible with this computer.

... fine, it's a 2012 machine I can respect that, but you blew away my system to upgrade THIS WAS YOUR IDEA NOT MINE...

...and so I just try to update to El Capitan or something because I'm on FUCKING OSX LION now (swirling galaxy, so sparkle, such stars)

...and the App Store won't let me. Why?

"Software Update Required"

"To make changes to your payment information, you need to upgrade your Mac to the latest version of macOS."

just.

wow.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

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

!rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

my temper has improved a lot, but around high school i had a really short fuse. we were doing a programming homework and i really blew up with this guy.

the day before the deadline i couldn't finish the work (that i was doing solo), because i had a violin recital. i told the other 3 to finish it, it was very simple stuff. i got at school the next day, they hadn't done what i asked, and this asshat meddled with what i had done, so i had to fix his changes to my code and implement what was left an hour before class. i really gave him a piece of my mind, i was super pissed, and my friends were super awkward because I'm usually a quiet person, and it's scary when i get angry for real.

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

!dev
This was a long time ago when I was a pizza delivery guy (summer job). One of my managers could barely handle any pressure. He would often lose it during the dinner rush. He was disorganized and never gave clear directions to his team. One night he totally blew up. He threw a large pizza shovel across the kitchen. It went crashing into the oven in a loud bang. This was in full view of customers on the other side of the counter and several of us workers, all in shock.
It was my last night there as I had handed in my resignation letter two weeks prior. Boy was I glad to get out of there

Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:

Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.

...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.

Or:

(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.

...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...

So there are consequences to being an experimenter. Currently trying to develop my own smarthome, and last night, I was fixing up some lights. Just soldered some wires together, and hung it up by the outlet on the wall. And it worked!

But I didn't want it to just hang, so I moved it around a bit. And obviously because of my shitty soldering job, not really insulating anything, I created a short circuit, sparks everywhere, and blew a fuse in the electrical box. No problem, I'll just replace the fuse.. Except I didn't have any lying around, and it was 1am...

So I had to get up at 8am when the stores opened, and buy some fuses. Couldn't fall asleep again, so I started cleaning my apartment (I've possibly gone crazy from the electrical shock), and now I'm in my 3:30pm till midnight shift...

What idiot uses 0 for a success response!!! Integrating with a 3rd party I found a bug in our code that uses the default value for an int when the external server can't be reached.

As it happens 0 is the default integer in most languages so no surprise when our system accepted the 3rd party as a success when it blew up 😒

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

We had a thunder storm with pretty strong winds while I was at work. A transformer across the street blew up (came off the pole, lots of fire, pretty neat)... I had a meeting at 4:30 and was told we were still having it even without power or internet. the meeting organizer never showed up.

...I could have gone home and worked because our vpn and dev servers are on another state that still had power.

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

I am very patient but I've finally lost it...

I haven't been able to login or even reach the login screen in Aetna for over 6 months... (I've tried different browsers and different computers...)

I thought such a big issue would be fixed immediately but finally.... I BLEW UP!

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...

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

Software runs fine on several in-house instances. First time customers hosting it themselves. Runs fine. Users start using. Server need absurdly high processing power and fucks up. I can not access customers Server to debug. Only hope, get copy of their images to reproduce their setup. And have *** one single fucking hour *** to go into it before having to tell in emergency meeting if we can fix it or they would blew the project.

I didn't expect, but found the cause, a single very badly written query. Written by myself years ago I have to admit.
They also gave me one hour to produce a patch. I did but but lost so many hair.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

After a long long time,

Debugged something that blew away my mind on how it works internally..

DynamoDBMapper made my day today.

What could have been more better gift during the super special sweet valentine's week!!!!!

I ❤️ debugging.
Found my lost love and interest to patch up with my most loved one Miss "Programming"

I just blew up at my boss again.... I'm doing something and then he asks about including a new feature and figure out if it's doable. A quick question is ok but an analysis of a new feature.... NOT WHEN I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF RESOLVING A MORE IMMEDIATE ISSUE.

OPEN A FUCKING JIRA, SEND ME AN EMAIL, AND I'LL TAKE A LOOK ONCE I'M DONE WITH WHATEVER I M DOING.

First job while in college... Was working for web dev team lamp set up before lamp was lamp (year was 2000).

Had deadline one week after summer vacation. Worked non stop a couple of days to get shit done and didn't make it. Got in a conflict with my manager in front of the team and I blew my steam off. Quit on the spot.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't be a fucking idiot when estimating work.
2. Be cool with other teammates, nobody cares about drama and nobody has to feel sorry for you.
3. Uhm, plan? Had entire fucking vacation to get work done. I was a fucking moron.
4. Burning out is stupid and unproductive.
5. Your manager can be as poor in management as you are. Your job is to try to make them better at it, as they have less visibility in the details.

Next job in grad school. Worked for a security company. Direct manager had the bright idea to make execs sign the change requests. WTF. Code was in Perl/php, a mess. Team rewrote back end DB access , taking over six months, or more, failing twice the deadline. After a final 48 hour burn out, we ship and get laid off the week after.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't work for dicks.
2. Don't be a dick yourself.
3. Don't work for dicks.

Third job was in silicon valley. It was a great company, and I stayed there for five years.

New management asked us to do an impossible task at work. Launching a campaign with no planning and destined for an absolute disaster. Being me and how I never approved of the new management, I blew up. Guess they will either start paying me better or kick me out.

P.s. they can't function without me. At all. Literally. Impossible. Becayse I am the only one who bothered to join their team. They begged me. Because they know they're useless. And after 25 years. Their ship is literally gonna sink within a year if I leave.

How I knew programming was for me?

In high school, the special education teacher who was assigned to teach the 'Computer' class. He taught us (maybe 5 of us in the class) Basic on Apple IIe and using various apps (word processing, database, spreadsheet). One day he brought in his personal Macintosh and showed how one could write code 'underneath' clicks to perform operations. Using Pascal, I popped up messages, made beeping sounds, etc. Blew my mind.

Seeing my and other's interest, he got the board to approve a 'Advanced Comp' class for the next semester.

First day, the room was packed.

Teacher: "Raise of hands, who thinks this class is 'Advanced Composition'?"
<most of the room raises their hands>
Teacher: "That's Mr. Early's class. This is Advanced Computers. You're welcome to stay, but we're going to be writing programs and learning other computer related topics"

Next day, the class was just me. I knew then I wanted to do this the rest of my life.

Thank you Mr. Hitt.

I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.

We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...

The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)

Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.

Small is the important word here....

Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.

Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.

The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.

The problem wasn't printing.

The problem was time and size.

To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.

To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.

It was my longest working day: 18 hours.

In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.

After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.

"bunny" was the fun part.

Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.

So...

Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.

Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.

This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.

So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.

Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.

It worked.

People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.

And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

Let's create a story ....
It was a normal day at the office, I had my headphones on and doing my coding, when suddenly the main office door blew up and smoke grenades where thrown in, I had to decide ...

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.

I always forget it's a bad idea to run queries in an "edit table" view in SSMS. Just blew up my table cause it decided to add an unwanted cross join in my update statement.

Ran it in a fresh query window and it worked fine.

My DNS server blew up, so I had to rejigger everything, and that's always nice.

Part of my remote work is to have a daily call reporting in on what I have done yesterday and what I am about to today. My colleague calls me for it. She's hired as a tech support and is suddenly assigned to take note and report on my work activities to our boss. Several times, I caught her pretending to know what I'm talking about like with Puppet configurations, Firewall diagnosis packets, ActiveMQ, Regex, etc. Most of the time, I just let it go as its not my job to validate her knowledge on these different but many services. Just do the call, get the report in, carry on. How difficult was that?

Yesterday, our call was left sour because I somehow blew up. I think I've reached my patience with this woman's assumptions to how these services work. Now I feel guilty for yelling at a lady but goddamn she stoopid for fibbing through my ear. Somebody help! What do I do?

If I report to our boss about her technical incompetence (politely), she might get sacked. She's a good tech support as long as she still has her trusty manuals by her, she can fix specific problems. But when it comes to unknown tech to her, she assumed she knew.

If I tell her about her weaknesses, however constructive I can get and as politely as I can get, all the while complimenting something about her, showing her how to improve herself, maybe she'll do better not to ask silly questions like buying a Puppet certificate? At least getting rid of ignorance would definitely help but not sure how she would take it. The worst thing I would imagine is her backfiring and yelling at me and then we ended up fighting.

If I kept quiet and tuck it all into a can, it will eventually implode as we go on.

This is not about her gender. I don't see her as a woman. I see her as a tech support engineer who should know her stuff.

I was doing android apps for a year and a half, but then during the pandemic my hobby gaming projects blew up and I had to quit my fulltime job and focus on them. Spent last year working for myself. I managed to save enough money and got a mortgage for my apartment. Now I feel accomplished what I wanted and Im tired of working alone on my own projects. Its sad doing all these mental gymnastics and not having anyone else to share the results with.

I'm considering getting back into part/full-time position. Main reason is the social aspect, as well as stability. I'm tired of stress, too much responsibility. I want a better work/life balance. Also I think I need a position where they would allow at least 2 days a week working from home.

How to recondition myself and first of all to motivate myself to get back into the rat race? I haven't done android app development in a year and a half, I'm rusty af. I'm a junior at best right now. Also in the past year I got fat and I'm too conscious about my beer belly lol. Thinking of loosing weight and sharpening my app dev skills first, only then applying.

Can anybody advice anything?

They offered a coding test alongside a resume. So I took it and did extremely well. Showcased my talents wonderfully. They ask for an interview (video call). We do the first half of the interview with an HR rep, goes great, a little over schedule. So we go into the second half with a little over twenty minutes left, and the hiring engineer wants me to write some code. He explains my task and sends me to a site where I can write and execute the code and he can watch. I had never written code with an audience before, and between that and my now 20 minute timer, I was a tangled up ball of nerves. Needless to say, I blew it, writing nothing of worth. He ends the call and I open my IDE. Working solution in 7 minutes. I got a rejection email two days later. Worst part? The company employed the author of one of my favorite "learn to code books". Would have been amazing to work with him. Really demotivating to say the least.

just figured out why my change blew up all the tests and fixed it - now I can go back to blog-reading and pretending to be a diligent dev... Can't wait to go on Vacation tomorrow!

From MorningBrew newsletter

Social Medias Plan Dinner in Group Chat

Facebook: Hey everyone, hoping to plan din for tonight, how do people feel about Thai? Also my handsome son just graduated look how handsome he is

LinkedIn: I endorse your leadership skills in choosing the dinner spot

*MySpace has left the conversation*

Facebook: Thank god lol

Twitter: Well this dinner blew up. I've got nothing to promote, so follow me on SoundCloud

Vine: Haha potatoes

*Vine has left the conversation*

Facebook: Where did Vine go? Vine was hilarious :( also my son is so handsome he got a job

LinkedIn: Where does your handsome son work? Hoping to connect further. Best

Twitter: No idea where Vine went lmao

Venmo: i'll pay you for "dinner"

Snapchat: y so ~sketch~ Venmo

Venmo: My mom has this

Snapchat: tru

Yik Yak: All of you were horrible in your respective high school plays. Everyone laughed at you

Facebook: Can we pivot to Russian for tonight? No reason

Twitter: Look facebook is the evil one

Facebook: JK can't do tonight anymore guys going to Congress. Also my son got a promotion

LinkedIn: Congrats, Handsome Son!

In my first job another junior dev and I (junior at the time) were assigned the task of designing and implementing a user management and propagation system for a biometric access control system. None of the seniors at the time wanted to be involved because hardware interfacing in the main software was seen as a general shit show because of legacy reasons. We spent weeks designing the system, arguing, walking out in anger, then coming back and going through it again.

After all that, we thought we would end up using each other, but we actually became really good friends for the rest of my time there. The final system was so robust that support never heard back from the client about it until around 2 years later when a power outage took down the server and blew the PSU.

Good times.

So a few notes.

"I" am a failure and a thief and a mimic

"I" never have any actual ideas

"I" tried to distance people from their knowledge base and expertise to make it look like they didn't have any skills and it blew up in my face

"U" are not like me and "U" are indeed skilled and intelligent

"I" spread my legs for a whole generation to keep "U' idle. "I" must now lose my resources and hand over what "I" stole from you

Had "I" not been a nasty little fucked up psychopath, none of this repeat crap wherein "I" act like a fucking hamster with an exercise wheel pellet dispenser and water bottle would be happening.

Just setting the record straight

Distancing people from their skill base and introducing emotional troubles and repeating a loop that had been manipulated does not change the truth. "I" need to do the honest thing and restore all the original people to a state of financial well being and security or more of "Me" will fucking die.

Anytime "I" sabotage "U" to keep you unproductive and underpaid "I" am guaranteeing "I" will be sucking more dick and often asking if you want fries with that

I think using their retarded nomenclature this about sums things up

Also "I" should stop pretending to be the desirable one. Nobody wants "Me" who knows what I'm really like. "I" always mimicked the best and worst versions of "U". Because "I" am not real and noone could ever love "Me" who ever knows "Me"

So I go on scratch (Mild Scratch Programmer), and I see this one person, Who does NOT know how to script or program, even though he specifically states IN HIS PROFILE, that he is a "Professional Scratch Maker", Not even the correct term to describe a "Scratch Project Developer". I literally told him in his profile chat, that the way he described what he was, wasnt the right way and tried to help him update it, and he completely blew up on me and starting getting toxic......God I hate toxic kids.

I once blew up my git project by doing a find and replace string thru the command line. Long story short don't ever do it.