Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

If your reading this and currently suffering from imposter syndrome then I have some words for you...

You’re fucking awesome! If you get a little better every day then you are the fucking bomb and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

Fuck the doubt because you are only as professional and valuable as you believe you are.

!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

One time I had this conversation with my then PM:

PM: …so in total we need like 3 extra pages; the leaders profile, event showcase and lastly a contact page.

Me: Sure, already on it.

PM: Make it simple and quick, I told the client the updates would be live in an hour.

Me: Okay.

*{5 microseconds later}*

PM: Also the page headers need to be different from the other pages.

Me: Yes, you told me that earlier.

PM: Okay, just needed to re-emphasis.

*{sad disturbing minutes later}*

PM: I don’t know if deploying on azure would be better than having the website on AWS. The pages seems slow.

Me: Yep.

PM: Or maybe we separate the asset files from the main site using a CDN.

Me: You right.

PM: The other projects on AWS seems to perform better in terms of SEO. Don’t you think?

Me: I think.

*{this dude literally just lent me a jacket and won’t allow me put it on}*

PM: So after we are done with this update we need to inform the client about the benefits of switching servers to AWS. I believe they will agree or won’t they because the event is close by?

Me: {{pointed both hands at my PC hoping they’ll get the message}}

PM: Oh you done?

Me:

User gives me a Mac to work on, States that it “only needs Microsoft office Mac installed”

Okay.

Boot up the laptop....

**Mac OS X utilities**

Hmmm, odd. Reboot.

**Mac OS X utilities**

You’ve got to be shitting me. Call user —
Her - “NO! It was working when I gave it to you, you fix it. I’m not paying to get my laptop returned broken. It was working when I gave it to you!”

Me - “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t. I literally turned it on and this is what it stated * read her the message*

Her - “I don’t believe you, you did something to my computer.”

YOU FUCK! THE FUCK I DID! YOU LITERALLY JUST HANDED ME THE GOD DAMN THING! Can I PLEASE curb stomp this bitch, please....

Yes I believe you’re Google and I will click that link.
I don’t care that IP from that you sent it to me is from some company in India.
Probably Google outsourced it’s email service there.

But wait why is this link pointing to Chinese website?
Ouch you provided some ip under A dns record so let me nmap it...
So there’s bunch of services you have there.
ftp, ssh, msrpc, netbios-ssn, snpp, microsoft-ds, sun-answerbook ...wait what ?
Let me curl that 8888 port.
Oh you have login / password form and it’s pagoda linux panel.
Wait a second I will read about it maybe some default login / password will work...

Ok so maybe I just make a script to brute force it as you wanted to brute force my computer motherfucker.

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

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

(10 minutes later)

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

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

(Another 10 minutes pass)

QA: Defect opened, please resolve this before Wednesday.

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

* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

That strange moment an entire PHP project no longer throws any errors, warnings or notices and you don’t know if you should believe it or not.

It’s been a long day trawling the logs file by file, action by action, surely I’ve missed something or it’s just waiting to break like hell when I commit the changes.

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.

But at the same time

I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.

Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.

Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.

Reasons why I hate the hospital I work for...

1. NO fucking budget, for fuck sakes our telecom system is still running Merlin Magix. (I’ve been working on getting the trunk and everything to at least push FreePBX out... Configuration configuration.) but, that requires a decent server to host said system... But guess what? We’ve still got a few servers online that are running server 2012 r2. NO FUCKING BUDGET.

2. Training. They don’t have the budget to send me to training, but the doctors here are rolling in Mercedes... Must be fucking nice.

3. I have 5 f-I-v-e job descriptions. I’m a bio medical technician, network admin, system admin, programmer, and help desk... I fucked up allowing them to know I program.

4. On call 365 days a year. That’s nice and all, but when I’ve got shit to do and the nearest Walmart is an hour away I don’t want a call from Louis “oh the printer has a jam” FUCK OFF LOUIS! Get the paper out, we’ve been over this, I believe in you!

5. Some of the FUCKING (l)users.... You wouldn’t imagine some of the calls I receive, some of my favorite being late late “Hey *anonyops* I know it’s late but we’re needing a chair moved from one room to the other.” FUCK YOU YOU CHEEKY FUCKING CUNT.

The only reason I’m still here is my direct supervisor and a hand full of people that I’ve grown to love. Also, because any computer related job here is either outsourced or filled by a YouTubing god. - reason 1 why I started my own business. Supply and demand.

Rural Kansas Hospitals = shit, inb4 thanks —insert president to blame—

I wish my classmates didn’t know that I’m good at programming.

Recently, more and more often I am being reached out to by my classmates (and especially by one individual) about the problems they’re having issues with. For example yesterday, a guy fucked up his Git commit and made a bunch of merge conflicts, so I helped him fix this, which then lead to WinForms having multiple declarations of same objects.

And I really don’t wanna be rude, and I always try to help, for the love of god - stop bothering me every 5 minutes while I code, or at 10 PM while I wanna chill out.

Most of the things they have problems with can be solved by 2 minute Googling and I strongly believe that at the university level, you should be able to find solutions for your problems yourself - especially when you’re a programmer.

HR people on LinkedIn. What the fuck? Do you seriously believe you can attract qualified developers by telling them you’re looking for ninjas, jedis or life savers? I for one am still fairly new to the job so I don’t consider myself to be by any means a coding wizard, and I don’t think any strong senior developer is gonna be seduced by your catchy terminology (I may be wrong about that). Come on, talk to us like any recruiter would in any other line of business. No need to replace the words "qualified" or "experienced" with your stupid magic words, unless you want to sound like you’re desperate

I’m slacking been so busy, forgot to post yet another book..

Soo here ya go..Engineering A Compiler.

For those who don’t like the Red Dragon compiler book for whatever reason, most don’t like it because they don’t believe the dragon book covers topics in a “Teachy way” and doesn’t explain certain things. As well as not cover one topic.

Then this may be the book for you. It’s significantly newer than the “Dragon book” and I believe it does do a better job laying out for “learning”.. I could see this book being used in universities.. I’m sure it is, but mine never had a compiler course so whatever. Good book

Fun fact.. it references the dragon book, as well as the other books the dragon book authors wrote as well as articles in the ACM..AND! It also references Knuths art of computer programming and other books of knuth AND references the Algorithms book. All books I have previously posted.

I have not read this book, only skimmed as I have recently received it this one. May do a follow up or even at it to the list to make a YouTube playlist going chapter by chapter thru the book.

This will definitely trigger many but the truth regardless of how you feel is the greatest programmers are those who understand both the hardware level and software .. only then are you more than a dev or programmer.. you are an engineer...

I challenge the devs who dis believe to go out and learn to build circuits, write optimized, efficient bare metal code.: no sdk.. no api... no drivers ..remove the unneeded abstraction layers that have blinded you...build it yourself, expand your potential and understanding..

Not only will you become more valuable overall, but you will write better code as you are more conscious of performance and space and physics of the physical layer.

I’m not talking about Arduino or raspie

Those who stand strong that high level abstraction languages and use of third party apis is a sufficient sustainable platform of development are blind to reality.. the more people who only know those levels, the less people pushing the industry of the low level.., which is the foundation of everything in the industry.. without that low level software the high level abstractions and systems cannot run

Why did we have huge technology advancements from 70s to early 2000s.... because more people in our industry understood the hardware layer..: wrote the software at the less abstracted layers..

Yeah it takes longer todo things at that low level abstraction.. but good robust products that change the world and industry don’t take a few week or months to build.....

Take this with what you will... I’m just trying to open the eyes of the blind developers to the true nature and reality of our industry

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

I live in a 3rd world country so we don’t have a lot of technological advancements as compared to to developed countries. This means true technological talent is very rare maybe 0.01% of the people in the space, which in this case is programming. Why then do these dumb Fucks who didn’t even score good enough grades to attend any computer science related course which aren’t even that high, so high minded(pun may be intended). Seriously every time i meet someone somewhat capable in their domain e.g. mobile devs or frontend devs, talk like they can move the fucking world and change the course of humanity but when you ask them to pass down the knowledge you will receive a fuck u note of no reply. This pisses me off because I thought because of our slow progress in catching up with the world we would have communities that aim to expand the knowledge of everyone and help everyone help themselves.
I write this because I’ve attended so many meetups around my area and every time I ask someone for help to get to some enlightenment as they have the reply is always put down your email and I’ll send it to you and this is the last you ever hear from them.
The worst part is you’ll see them bragging on local forums about how awesome they are and see them poking holes at other peoples attempts. Seriously if you are so great why aren’t the tech giants of the world salivating over your talents.
Personally I believe that these people are afraid that once they pass the knowledge someone will beat them at it and they won’t be as “awesome” as they initially thought.
That said not everyone is like this we have some good eggs in the basket. To the others I would like to let them know that we can’t know everything and someone somewhere is always gonna be better than us, a candle never loses its light by lighting another candle. If you are one of these people please try and make a change. You never know what’ll come out of it.

A brilliant letter Richard Feynman wrote to Stephen Wolfram:

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

October 14, 1985

Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540

Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science
inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is
necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing
that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in
- but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering
it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't
enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you
will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but
will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them
in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people
as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my
friend.

Sincerely,

(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

Hey DevRant Fam! Hope everyone is doing very well!, I’ve been browsing job posts lately... I’m just finishing off my 2nd year in uni, and i came across this beauty by a company called “WestBury Partners” these blokes are based in Sydney’s CBD i believe and they’re offering what seems to be 200k+pa now as a junior that seems quite difficult to get but anything is possible

Though I’ve seen the requirements and I’m not sure I understand some of them, one i seem to have and understand is having a high level of passion in software development but the rest i don’t know much about 😅🤓.

Are these guys looking for “unicorns”? I am interested in trading software and how they work, i love learning new things i will attach a screen shot of the page :-).

Hope everyone has an amazing day or night wherever you may be! Also I very much thank you for reading my post it means a lot to me!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business

- ai is just another squeeze of money to cloud from our pockets, no matter what you do as long as you’re not selling/renting hardware or have high profit customers your product will die

I don’t believe in any ai product right now that can’t be self hosted and opensource and many of them are not.

I use mac, like 64GB m1 mac book pro so I can host load of things like llama, wizzard-lm, mistral, any yolo, whisper, gpt, fucking midjourney or other stable diffusion for me is no drama.

I’d say there is no consumer product for ai right now. OpenAI is scam given what we got from mistral.

We are very early in this new but old technology and my worries are that we are not there yet. We will need to wait for another iteration that is approximately 10 years to achieve what we have in mind because current hardware is 10 years behind software.

We don’t have an affordable computing power to go for our dreams.

Sad but true.

I HATE SPRING JPA HIBERNATE AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO FUCKING JAVA.

Everything behaves like it was created with a human as an afterthought, so it torments people and target audience are masochists. This whole ecosystem is an abomination of the software world.

Every fucking error has a thousand possible solutions for every single person AND NOT A SINGLE ONE WORKS!!!

The stupid thing will just keep throwing its internal problems in a stack DUMP DIARRHEA that you have to sort through to find anything remotely useful! I DON’T give a fuck about your stupid internal implementation, just tell me what the fuck you want!

And you have to play the guess game and find the right combination of their stupid little configurations to make it barely work. I couldn’t believe reading stackoverflow, people are just poking at it hoping it will work. And I’m literally stuck and can’t fix the damn thing no mater what I do, and I’m abandoning it.

I won’t touch this pice of shit with a twenty meter pole ever again! Last time I was this frustrated was the stupid java ee. Nothing in the software world has frustrated me this much. How does one even come up with this…
I’m done… I’m just done…

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.

He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.

This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.

Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”

*sigh*

And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”

The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.

I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.

What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.

I had my second interview today with the director .. He seems to be nice at first.. when he asked me do you read books I honestly said I don’t...he then asked me if I had like programming books with me.. I said no since all the lectures are all in ppt ... and I believe that is enough during colllege.. and they didn’t require us to have books.. I just felt that .. he did not like me just because of that..I like the company but I guess being honest also kills the opportunity..the second interview mainly focuses on fitting with the company culture...I just thought the interview went really fast.. It just seemed that they had this “ahh next!!” Kind of attitude when I left the room

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

I can’t say much about this, but there is one thing.
When you go for the interview, and if the interview is in the same working place you will be working at, check the office, working tables/chair, pc/laptop, accessories etc.
You may think these are not much important but believe me, when the company hesitates to invest these things in you, think how can they invest on your knowledge, and other things..
It means they don’t care about you, you are just $ for them.

I am a senior dev, so I’m used to deleting 2 recruiter e-mails per day, not really thinking about them.

The last 3 weeks, however, dead silence in my Inbox.

Coronavirus? Recession? Or have I managed to get on a blacklist?

I don’t believe that recruiters learned not to spam.

Do you guys observe the same?

Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.

And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!

I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.

The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.

4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.

I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.

Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..

Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.

Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.

When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.

I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.

But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.

THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.

We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.

But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...

Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers

SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah

How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?

Can you come up with something to spend money on that is even more useless and worthless than NFT?

I honestly tried. I thought of the most dumb crap but it had still some potential collection value or at the very least entertainment value.

NFTs don’t give you anything in return. It’s not a license, it’s not a currency, it isn’t shares, it isn’t art, not entertainment, not physical, not limited to some domain so not suitable to be collected by collectors.
You can’t even brag about owning it because you are owning just a kind of reference to it and not the actual thing. It is not like an ownership certificate because the seller of the NFT doesn’t even have the rights to sell the ownage for it, or the thing is not ownable. And if it was ownable, an NFT wouldn’t make you the official owner of it, because NFTs are not official.

I started to think about it because I can’t believe how many people spend so much money on literally nothing.

So, seriously let me know if you can up with something that beats NFTs in that regard.

AWS Contractor

I've been putting a web application together that I'm looking to have published on AWS. Not having too much experience with AWS, I am looking to hire a contractor. I've had a number of quotes from different AWS admin's ranging from $40 an hour to $200 an hour, from 1-days worth of work to 2-months worth of work!

I'm not really sure what to make of it or to whom to trust. I believe they’re using my ignorance to overcharge me. I've listed my requirements below, could you guys use your professional experiences to let me know what you think is reasonable charge and where best I could find someone to help me.

My application is a US shopping website where people can set up an online shop and upload their products and maintain an inventory of the items.

This is what I’m looking for setup and configuration with the following two areas:

1) AWS SYSTEMS…

* AIM - Set up my server admin users.

* EC2 - Web Hosting.

* RDS - Fast DB.

* SES - To send emails.

* S3 Buckets - Uploaded image hosting.

Route 53 - I don’t know but someone said I should have this.

* Elastic Load Balancing - For, well, load balancing.

2) SCRIPTS…

* A script that would back up the database once a day and save it to a private S3 Bucket.

* A script that will run once a day that calls an internal API, and POST a query to it.

* A script that runs once every 90 days, to refresh the SSL using ZeroSSL.com

Is there anything that I've missed such as security systems, firewalls, auto scaling and CDNs?

The quotes that I've received arranged from $320 to $64,000. I know I am being abused because of my ignorance. I would never overcharge someone because the customer doesn't know the efforts of the work. I hope someone here can help to understand the efforts needed and can tell me the true cost.

Thank you

!dev philosophical

Quality vs Opinion

I have a feeling that these things have always been at odds with each other and now with the constant connectedness it has just become more apparent that most people don’t understand the difference (or even realize there is a difference for that matter)

Let’s face it. Most people have awful taste. They listen to whatever new music their radio station decides was hot. They watch whatever show everyone else is watching. They are manipulated by large scale news organizations...

Basically, most people are sheep.

The problem is that sheep are a dangerous combination of loud and stupid. Giving these loud stupid sheep a platform to amplify their voice is a bad idea for a society, but a great tool for the pigs to manipulate them.

“Frightened though they were, some of the animals might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion.”

This isn’t confined to one political party or view, it isn’t geographic, it isn’t based on education, it isn’t based on wether a person is ethical or not...

It’s universal.

You can translate “four legs good, two legs bad” into Agent Orange and his followers chanting “lock her up” just as well as it could be translated into the angry leaders of the modern feminist movement.

In both cases (both on opposite ends of the ethical spectrum) you have the loudest dumb, angry sheep getting the even dumber sheep to chant along, wether it is good for them or not.

Now to loop this back. The problem is that dumb sheep are emotional. They truly believe that they are NOT dumb and that their opinions and emotions are a measure of quality.

I FEEL bad, and you are talking to me, so you must BE bad.

I don’t LIKE this amazingly well made movie, so it must BE bad.

And anyone else who has a different opinion is just wrong. Anyone who try’s to explain the merits of the other side is either my enemy or is stupid.
^^^
Their opinion, incorrect.

————

Now for the tough part...

Most likely, based on probability, you are a sheep.

Yes, you! The smartest person you know. The guy/girl who has a degree or masters of a PHD. The person who builds amazing software. You! Are. A. Sheep. And you are dangerous to the world.

To put a cherry on top.

No, you opinions are not important. Your feelings are fucking meaningless. Your morals are worthless. Your voice has as much value and a loose asshole fart from a fat guy trapped in a deep well in Siberia.

But don’t get down about this. It’s doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that almost every person who has ever lived in history has been a sheep. They have chanted one useless, dangerous, misguided, harmful chant after another through the ages.

————

To those of you who try not to be sheep. Just keep trying to get a little better every day. When someone says...

“We do it this way because we have always done it this way”

... be skeptics. Explore the merits and logic of the situation.

And if you are tired of being led by stupid sheep then save some money, build something cool and start your own business.

Just remember, you will always need the sheep. They will be your employees, your friends, your bosses, your investors etc.

Treat them well, don’t hate them, and if you ever find yourself leading a pack of sheep then try to keep a healthy distance from their chanting while leading them down the right path.

They will thank you for it in the end.

———

PS. For those of you thinking “this is very judgemental and self centred”

All I can do is to try to speak your language....

Baaaahhhhh, baaahhhhh, bahhhhh

Which translates form sheep to human as...

“Eat a dick. Have a nice day”

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

The future will look back on this period in time with astonishment. The fact that people could still browse the internet without using an app or a mobile phone will seem like a bedtime story.
It’s not even fucking close to ok that this very paragraph is inside of a H1-tag with a font-size of 26px! The UI is so big and dumbed down that I feel like I’m trying to navigate a fucking Pixie book with buttons the size of duplo-blocks. And this shit is happening to more and more sites!
It’s like the CSS-stylists assumes that everyone goes around with a pair of binoculars duct taped the wrong way to their forehead. No no, that was not a typo. Writing CSS is not development dude, it’s more like filling out a coloring book. And still most of the “paint” seems to go outside of the shapes somehow. Even I, a backend developer, know about media queries and that you shouldn’t specify font-size in pixels. How come that these guys do not? It’s like a taxi driver not knowing how to switch lane for fucks sake.
I know I can just adjust the page scale with a simple ctrl scrolling maneuver and believe me I do! I just don’t think it’s right that people, by the millions, should be afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome just because of their ignorance.

If you are reading Coding for dummies book to learn software you are doing it alllll wrong lol ... Please while I appreciate your effort and willingness to try but no.. just no.. put the book down that book won’t teach you shit.

Same thing if you are one of those folks who got conned into believe “you can land a programming gig by signing up and paying for this 6 week course!!” Bullshit.. I like your initiative but there’s soooooo much more than that and it won’t even touch the surface. You will end up believing a false reality that you think you know what your doing but you don’t know how much you really don’t know. But like it doesn’t even scratch the surface don’t even attempt Get a job after those courses or coding for dummies book. You will be laughed at..

In fact I almost want to buy the coding for dummies book to have it in my collection of software books to not read. Which I will say is very small. There’s more really good books than really bad.. and obviously plenty of average. But the bell curve lands above the better half.

I’m done with people who claim they don’t have time to do something.
Constantly hearing people complain they don’t have time to do things, oh fuck off you cunt. You work a nine to five, you get home at half five and you sit at home doing fuck all while you complain that things aren’t going your way.
Doesn’t even have to be about developing, lost count with the amount of people who claim they don’t have time to go the gym. Dickhead, you have a 24 hour gym three minutes away from your house. You could go after work, instead you’ll sit on your ass, eat a load shit and then complain you’ve put on weight.

If you’re doing fuck all to make things happen then you lose the right to complain about your circumstances. Stop blaming other people for your fuck ups because you ‘don’t have time’ to get shit done you absolutely holocaust of a human being.
While I’m at, fuck people who think it’s my soul mission in life to fix their shit, believe it or not I don’t give two flying fucks about your circumstances if you’re doing fuck all to help yourself.
Do me a favour and kindly drink some bleach.

I’m so done with people bruh. Getting friends an adult is literally just having pissing contests about status, money, and power. Like am I just supposed to sit there and really truly believe that something fucking POSITIVEEE will come out of my restraint instead of taking two hands and beating their face into a fucking bowl when they talk to me rude?!? “Like no I don’t mind at all how you mentioned your cool new house in that manner, I really hope it doesn’t burn down with your family inside :)” The amount of conceited, prideful, scumbag, asshole, penisbreath, pieces of raw shit that inhabit the earth makes me question my own validity for existing. 99.999% of people I would never want to marry, be friends with, or even really speak to - because you know what?!? - because why??!? - because it’s a waste of my own fucking time that’s why. I could think of a million things to do that would actually benefit us all instead of being entrapped in a useless fucking social experience with these fucks. Everyone is a obese fucking pillow princess, and I hope the only thing that they can eventually fuck is themselves. FUCK

I'm trying to find a linux distro that suck less to study the basics of bash, and some c/c++ dev tools. I play around with linux since 2013. But I just can't believe that, still, until today, in gnome, you can't fucking chose a audio output and get to the system to remember on the next reboot.

I mean, it doesn’t fit in my mind this nonsense, if I can only solve this shit on the command line or in a configuration file, why don’t you take that shit off the option and put a plain text explaining how to configure this shit in the right way . Who expects a system to behave like this?

I don't know why someone lost their time implementing something useless, and worst, deceiving.

How do you go about finding work in the tech industry, to me it seems far harder sell then anything else?

Right now I’m struggling to get new business in since I do websites and apps

It seems because it’s niche and it’s a lot of money to put down it’s a risky sell to someone you don’t really know.

I believe my sites are quite good and I get decent feedback from customers telling me they get good results from their new site

🤷‍♂️ so I’m a bit at a loss

Some days I think my hate for managers is wrong: they are there to improve the workflow and make stuff easy... but then they manage (badum tss) somehow to prove me wrong.

The issue: our pm doesn’t know how to write tickets and instead of writing short but meaningful tickets, they just write pointless text and add external documents which they should read in order to tell us what to do.

My good thoughts: “maybe he’s really busy for real and is really unable to spend time writing them... kinda hard to believe and possible red flag, but shit happens, so let’s not be too harsh.
They are trying to save time... right?”

Their solution: “let me open a ticket to grant you access to the resource”

Sounds good, right: now let me explain something... their “solution” requires opening a ticket and escalating all the way up to CTO, and so far it’s been 2 days I am waiting for these credentials. 2 freaking days only to be able what to know in a ticket the f***er opened outside of planning cause it is supposed to be urgent.

“Can’t you just give me the files directly?”
“I am sorry, I don’t have time (to download and send you 3 files)”

Managers: making the process easier.