This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

One reason for tons of android permissions in simple apps.

I recently installed an app that asked for like 12 permissions. The app obviously needed 2 of them. No more.
I was also right next to the guy that made the app and asked him, wtf?!
The answer:
"We based out app on some other one that needs all that and even though we use just a couple of it's features we can't be bothered to remove the others from the code."

Fuck this guy. Or whoever ordered him to do that.

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.

I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.

I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.

In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.

After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..

He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

I’m on this ticket, right? It’s adding some functionality to some payment file parser. The code is atrocious, but it’s getting replaced with a microservice definitely-not-soon-enough, so i don’t need to rewrite it or anything, but looking at this monstrosity of mental diarrhea … fucking UGH. The code stink is noxious.

The damn thing reads each line of a csv file, keeping track of some metadata (blah blah) and the line number (which somehow has TWO off-by-one errors, so it starts on fucking 2 — and yes, the goddamn column headers on line #0 is recorded as line #2), does the same setup shit on every goddamned iteration, then calls a *second* parser on that line. That second parser in turn stores its line state, the line number, the batch number (…which is actually a huge object…), and a whole host of other large objects on itself, and uses exception throwing to communicate, catches and re-raises those exceptions as needed (instead of using, you know, if blocks to skip like 5 lines), and then writes the results of parsing that one single line to the database, and returns. The original calling parser then reads the data BACK OUT OF THE DATABASE, branches on that, and does more shit before reading the next line out of the file and calling that line-parser again.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK

And that’s not including the lesser crimes like duplicated code, misleading var names, and shit like defining class instance constants but … first checking to see if they’re defined yet? They obviously aren’t because they aren’t anywhere else in the fucking file!

Whoever wrote this pile of fetid muck must have been retroactively aborted for their previous crimes against intelligence, somehow survived the attempt, and is now worse off and re-offending.

Just.
Asdkfljasdklfhgasdfdah

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

One of the first things I learned while screwing around in Linux for the first time was the calendar in the terminal. I never thought I'd have an actual use for cal, and it just sat in the back of my mind for a year.

Then, two weeks ago, I needed to find the date for a saturday in December, because I thought it was the seventh. My duck was like "Hey, your terminal is right there, why not use that cal function instead of looking for your calendar?" And I was like "Dude, that's genius!"
I have since done it thrice more for various reasons, and it has saved me like four minutes in total. I love all the little things like this in Linux (I'm pretty sure Windows and obviously MacOS do the same thing with practically the same command, but shut up and let me enjoy myself (and it just feels more accessable in Linux because I use the terminal so much more often))

So yeah
Stuff

God I need something to do...
Wait! I have several things to do! The first one will be making a list of all my projects.
Or spending another two hours on devRant.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Annoys me so much how obviously lazy my department has been with one of its products. We have an iPad app that does document management and eForms and stuff. Its not perfect but not the worst. Then they decide they need to build an app to handle a specific kind of eForm. They just went "well this app already does eForms so lets just adapt it".
Worst. Decision. Ever.
the app is simply a branch off the original app. despite being a completely different product which isnt even concerned with the same business objects. it has been hacked until it does what it needs to. And i have to somehow maintain this trainwreck.
As a result we have a branch in our main Git repo that contains a completely different product, which is basically an iOS wrapper for an HTML eForm with ~5000 lines of jQuery to further hack on the functionality that the eForm provides.
And they wonder why iOS developers have been leaving and some keep threatening to leave. Even the Delivery Manager wants us to just do what is needed and get it out the door and never look at it again. How are we supposed to care when thats the attitude of the people who are supposed to be invested in it. Im surprised the client hasnt told us to get lost the app is so hideously broken and unmaintainable. Performing an action on the form can break a completely unrelated section somewhere else. We have lost control.
And they just keep adding more scope, ignoring our concerns cos hey its too late to just start changing the whole approach of the solution.

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

I have the same problem as @linuxxx does. Buying things when I really don't need to.

I went to a mall with a friend today because his headset was literally falling apart. We both bought new headsets. Great.

Lesson learned: Don't leave your house unless necessary.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

If I had to name one of my weaknesses it would definitely be impatience.

When I'm working on a backlog issue I want it to be done, finished, pronto. In the real world that's ofcourse not always the case, I can't disturb my colleagues with every question or ask for feedback every minute. I also hate it to have to wait for someone else to do something for me if it's blocking me, like when I need to fix something on a server but don't have access or when I somehow don't have permission for something and have to wait for someone to come and fix it. Even worse: Slow programs that fuck me up when I _just a second ago_ figured out how to fix a bug or implement something.

I also have to wait for pull request reviews so I usually end up with a bunch of stacked PRs that all feature small changes but are dependent upon each other because I needed a change for a different change, never more than 2-level stacks though!

Obviously it's a bit childish to lack professional patience, but it's definitely something that I wanted to rant about and think I should grow in.

Look here Mr Senior Tech if you don’t know 100% what you’re doing, don’t fucking touch the goddamn firewall with your fucking sausage fingers and you overblown call center team lead. I mean you need to have the confidence you would have if you were eating a banana and some one told you it was a poisonous berry, you’d laugh and eat it anyway, cause it’s obviously a banana. That’s the kind of confidence you need to have when fucking with the entire goddamn network configurations. I just went thru a 7 hour shit show because you THOUGHT you knew what you were doing. Not a damn thing was broken there. One service needed a hole in the firewall and you fucked all this beyond an easy fix. Now I’ll admit I don’t have that much confidence working with the firewall, that’s why I would fucking cal one of the companies that set it up even though we don’t necessarily have a support contract, it would have cost a lot damn less to have them work on it than for the whole company to be down and for me to have to stress over every fucking thing going (or not going) on.

I'm so fucking fed up with the npm ecosystem. Every single god damn time I've had to do anything it always takes DAYS to figure out how to get anything working and I always have to try multiple tools or libraries to final get it half way sorta.
I'm so fucking annoyed right now. They always turn out not that great, have lacking features or trivial oversights in functionality and ALWAYS have garbage documentation.

I just want to build a fucking npm library with TypeScript to be used with node. That's probably the NUMBER 1 use case so how fucking hard can that be?

So obviously I start out with tsc. That's quite simple, compiles all my stuff and shits out .js and .d.ts files. Okay so how do I use them via es6 import? I don't fucking know, because it doesn't work no matter what I do. The 'module' option in tsconfig is absolutely useless btw. It does *literally* fuck all. Nada. Absolutely nothing.
Okay I'm far from defeated, maybe I'll just have to bundle it. So I waste two days finding something that half works (I'm using fusebox right now) and at last I get a stupid es6 module as a single bundle... But what about type the declarations? They are nowhere to be seen and of course there's no option for that. Because Fusebox the pile of shit that's oh so well Typescript integrated apparently doesn't think TYPE DECLARATION FILES are needed. What the actual fuck.

And that's where I'm now. I need the fucking .d.ts files so I can use it as a module with import. Do I really need another fucking piece of shit tool that bundles these files? Honestly fuck all of this. "Oh the Javascript ecosystem is so great" YEAH fucking great, alright. Where 90% of the ESTABLISHED tools and libraries (we don't talk about the landfill of all the other shit) flat out don't do what you need. Again, how fucking hard can it be to make a npm lib with typescript? That should be NATIVELY SUPPORTED. If not by npm atleast by typescripts tsc.

FUCK NPM. FUCK JAVASCRIPT. AND FUCK THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM

!dev

So last week I sort of unfriended a friend from college that i guess is more like a "chat buddy". After college we've never hung out. Part of it maybe because I'm deaf so there's a communication barrier, I lost most college "friends" after that... but then are they really friends?

The reason was though, he talks to me every night (usually 1-2 hrs online chatting on and off), we do have some laughs but recently he's been complaining about his year end bonus, how it's not enough. And also about how he deserves to match with better girls than the ones he's getting now. He's on those online dating sites and went out with a few. And he's been on a few dates but with my looks and health issues, online dating is pretty much useless. He was the only reason I even tried

He makes twice as much as me already but "he comes from a poor background" so he needs more. Honestly I make enough, but the job isn''t great (not really learning anything new, lot's of things that could be better... obviously) but it's very flexible and near where I now live... should I even choose to go into the office (I sort of work remotely from the rest of the team).

I probably haven't spoken too him for a week now and I don't feel problems, frees up more time but wondering if I sort of withdrawing/unanchored from reality and ignoring problems, settling for less.

Nowadays it really feels like, when I'm in my own apartment or just alone, I'm in my own world, I can do whatever I want... thought most of the time is spent with my devices... so I'm not sure though if that's good or not... Am I a Bachelor or a hermit?

Now i've been rambling for the last 1hr and have no idea what I wanted to say.... guess I just needed to rant...

Ah I remember now sorta... Is this relationship worth keeping or should I find new friends that are more similar to me?

Maybe I've been moving in the wrong direction in life... I shouldn't do things the normal way... Think about what's actually important to me/people like me... not what what everyone normally does...

When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.

Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).

Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.

Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.

My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are.

This is why I don't use and will probably never use Python.

Back in the uni days, I had a very important assignment. It determined whether I was going to the fourth grade from the third or not. It involved math and charting. It was very complex, and I spent a very long time on research, naturally. I knew Python 3, and I decided to use it. The only lib I needed was matplotlib, which I installed with pip. So I did the whole thing, tested it again at home, closed my laptop and was ready to go. My laptop used Windows 7 and was set up to ignore the lid closing. When I closed it, nothing would happen, even the screen stayed on. When I arrived at the lab, I opened my laptop, hit Ctrl + B as usual… and matplotlib import wasn't working. I obviously panicked, I tried to do something about it, but it just kept throwing an import error. Reinstalling the library didn't help. My friends too weren't able to help me. It just wasn't working, and that was it.

I failed the assignment, automatically. I had nothing to show. This was the first time I failed anything in the uni. Later I rewrote the code in C++ with Qt plotting library, and everything worked fine.

I never used Python since. I did everything uni with C++, and later with JavaScript. I don't care if it was Windows error or Python's. My Windows install was clean, I reinstalled it pretty much every year and kept the default settings. My laptop was for studying purposes only, and all my personal life happened on my desktop.

I didn't use exotic things like PyPy. It was just Python 3, the most basic, official installation. If you promote your fucking language as a cross-platform solution, please be bothered to make its basic behaviour stable on the most popular OS out there.

I will probably never use Python again. Maybe this issue was addressed and fixed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it never would've happened on Linux or Mac. I don't care. It's like maintaining friendship with a person that betrayed you. I just can't do it.

JS and NPM never failed me.

So I salvaged some computer that was about to be thrown out by IT because it works perfectly fine and would be a waste to lose.

The (current) problem is, there is no built-in wi-fi adapter so I had to order a usb adapter to plug into the machine.
Fortunately enough it supports Linux but cones with a cd with the _source_ of the driver in it and we are supposed to build it. Now what's the problem with that?

First problem: building needs all sorts of build tools, starting from gcc and make. Since it's a fresh install, though, I _cannot_ install those normally because -- you guessed it -- I don't have a WiFi connection, which is why I needed the bloody adapter in the first place, so I spent hours trying to fetch the binaries from the apt register using another computer and bringing them over via USB.

Once that was (more or less) successful, the next problem came around; Second problem: the instructions clearly state to run make, but there is no fucking makefile anywhere so that obviously fails spectacularly. What _is_ there are some bash scripts so I try running those.

Now, just when I think it's finally done (one of the scripts has been running for a while and seems to work) the compiler dies with an error: the fucking driver won't build for the current kernel version. And not just that, but it is clear nobody is using basic things like include guards because gcc kept screaming at me about the same macros being defined over and over due to header file re-inclusion. Like, seriously? Come on!

Long story short the fucking adapter is going back to the seller, let's see if the next one I order more civilized.

Hello ranters, I'm looking for advice in regards to a freelancing job which I haven't been paid.
In summary, I got a freelancing job in like March 2018, I had to do a simple platform with an administrator section, simple but "long", it had to be fully customizable, so I did it. I then got another project, which I also finished, both by December. I added some functionality not on the requirements and also some other asked by them, I also deployed both of them, tasks not included on the "contract". The problem is that I didn't sign a contract (my fault), it was all verbal. Since I was "friends" with them, I asked them to pay me with a motorbike (of around 2300 USD) and they agreed. Then they gave me another project which started wrong, they asked me to finish it within two weeks with a language I didn't know and other tools I also didn't know, I told them about this and agreed that could be a delay, besides, the requirements weren't totally clear and they were clarified three days after the project "started". After this, we had a discussion about how I later realized I was totally underpriced, that I hadn't been paid yet and how the dude that was like my main contact for the project told me that "my code was all nice and cool but was useless" because he clearly thought that an excel could be used as a database and din't know that I had to parse it and upload it to Firebase, which in total were about 4 million documents and this obviously took time. To not make it longer, I delivered the project 1 week later and they told me that they had to "assign" a full team of 7 members to do it from zero because I didn't deliver it on time and because when he asked me to "help them" I laughed. I first delivered like the 90%~95% of the project and he was been condescendent, he also blocked me from everywhere (hangouts, slack) and told me to "deliver what I had" to at least have something to prove that I did work. His team of "7 members" was stupid enough to not be able to at least run an npm install and npm run, they were also stupid enought to not understand what a GET request was an all and when he realized this, he asked me for the database dump and for the 100% of the project, so I also delivered it. We agreed that we were not going to work together anymore, so I asked him to pay me at least what had to be paid of the other two projects and he agreed, he also purchased a computer for me which I was paying him and was going to be discounted from the total payment. In the end, I was going to be paid 1430 USD. He asked me for my bank account and like my tax ID, for whatever he needed it. Since then, almost two weeks, he hasn't paid me, replied or even seen my messages. He also had a "partner" which was also "my friend", the huge motherfucker isn't even replying my mails or anything, so, since it was all verbal and they are being such motherfuckers, I don't know what to do. They are being such motherfuckers and I think I can't proceed legally, since there is no written contract. So what should I do? I was planning on going tomorrow but I pretty sure they won't even open the door or will tell me to wait or whatever. I seriously wanna cry, I don't get how people can be such dicks and unfair fuckers. I believe in karma but I don't think karma will give me that money and time back. :(

In the past, apps I've written have used a flat file backend. It's very fast, but obviously clunky to have a big structure of flat files for an app. It ran circles around framework-based RDBMS backends, as performance is concerned, but again, it was clunky. Managing backups and permissions on tens or hundreds of thousands of small files was no fun. Optimizing code for scaling was fun- generating indexes, making shortcuts -but something was still missing. Early in 2017 I discovered redis. A nosql backend that just stores variables and lives almost entirely in memory. Excellent modules and frameworks for every language. It was EXACTLY what I'd needed, even though I didn't know I did. I spent a good deal of time in 2017 converting apps from flat files to redis, and cackled with glee as they became the apps I wanted them to be. Earlier this week, I started building my first app that started with redis, instead of flat files, and I can't stop gushing to anyone who will listen. Redis for president!

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

At my IT security job(yeah, it sucks sometimes. I want a dev job but that's another story).

Needed to help some end users use and install a toolbar and get it to download through a proxy so they can edit stupid government online forms, which only supports IE 11. Obviously it didn't work.

Wait a MOTHETFUCKING MINUTE.
It's 2017. What the fuck. Who the fuck uses fucking toolbars anymore.

How fucking retarded and out of touch with reality the government can be, when it forces its users to download a fucking toolbar(with admin priviliges!) and use fucking IE 11 just to access a basic feature of the website.

Another fucking proof that governments are cancer and we need Anarcho-capitalism ASAP.

This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)

TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days

So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.

I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)

So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).

So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap

"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."

Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add

"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"

....Okay....shots fired. So i respond

"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"

"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"

"With one wfh day?"

"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"

"Oh... I hear that...what day?"

"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"

".............................I'll think about it"

"There's nothing to consider"

*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."

So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "

Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"

What kind of Godfather comment is that?

Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."

.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:"

So I needed to go through a documentation of a program that was obviously developed by Chinese people, and went through some kind of Google translate to be in English.
This is an utter disaster: sentences that barely make sense, code blocks without a matching ending that cause the rest of the paragraph to be in the code block as well, code outside code blocks and without formatting, sentences unrelated to the section they're in, etc.
The program itself is great, but the shitty documentation makes me wanna kill whoever wrote it

#Suphle Rant 11: Laravel board launch

The launch took almost 2 weeks more than originally slated, because I sought to install it manually, just as an outsider would. Installation steps had been documented, automated tests for the installation tests were passing. When time came to actually execute the binary from the terminal, we went from one obstacle to the other. First, were the relatively minor Composer/Roadrunner issues, eventually resolved by the helpful RR maintainers who sat with me through a Discord server for about 2 hours until their command ran the way I needed it to.

Next was the Psalm scare: One of my value propositions was the guarantee of eliminating all type related bugs in Suphle apps. I intended to use Psalm for that. Wrote tests as usual. Turns out the library behaves differently under conditions differing from raw CLI usage. I resurrected threads I'd opened since December that were left unattended, and with some help from the maintainer, we eventually got it to do what I need it to do.

I was all the more frightened by the fact that Transphporm had caused me to renege on one of my earlier promises. I can only miss so many targets. After this, the docs had to be updated with all the changes effected to accurately integrate those two. Project installation and initialization commands were ran rigorously to ensure all progresses smoothly.

Tagged one final release and suddenly became impatient to launch on our local Laravel group chat where I've been a member for the last 4+ years, where we've had a rollercoaster of emotions. In that time, I've refined my launch speech to suit that audience -- obviously, countless times. Not just a tame "It's my pleasure to announce what I've been working on", but near 40 messages going into details about the inner workings, why it was built, how it compares. An expose that dove deeper than I would anywhere else.

I scheduled a time for them to tune in and got some encouraging anticipation. Ended up deflated after posting the whole thing. Only about 5 persons interacted. 1 (who I've chatted with outside the board) was quite enthusiastic. Feverishly checked the docs but commented it was overwhelming and he'd need more time. Already starred the repository.

For some context, there are give or take 250 members on that board. Not all are active but activity there easily reaches a crescendo when the topic discussed is about inanities like what 3rd party services to use for SMS, how to receive salaries from abroad, or job openings. I was optimistic when the acquaintance mentioned above published a payment library and met a riotuous welcome as one of their own. Maybe, they are simply not fond of me and the speech should have been passed off to someone else.

I checked Packagist installs -- not more 10. For 3 years, I'd been hyped up for that night; but for some reason, the audience I considered myself closest to flopped, woefully. Thankfully, this isn't the main launch. I'm still holding out hope for that. If it fails, I would have sunk an immeasurable amount of effort and time, that nobody will compensate me for. That is the one place I go to see those more advanced than me in PHP. I constantly learn there and find stimulating conversations there.

Now, I can no longer predict reception from other presentations. All I can do now is hope

I think mine is a bit cliched! All my relatives let alone mom and dad thought I only play games, while I was infact gaining knowledge. Obviously, much more needed, but I think I can say that I did good for a guy who didn't even have a PC till the first year of my bachelor's degree!

I think I found a way to audit college courses without paying for them. Find someone that is taking the courses and get paid doing their homework (for cheap/free). Make sure they take good notes and provide access to all materials. Do their homework of course. If taken to the extreme you could have a CS/CE/Math background while possibly making money on the deal. Any time you want to take a course you advert that you will do the homework. You could even wrangle the victim to record the lectures so you can reference as needed.
At the end you won't have a degree, but will be able to do everything the degree demands.
Obviously there are issues with this, one being a moral issue.

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.

We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.

In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.

He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.

I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it.

Is there any way to tell how much ink a printjob needed? I use my personal printer at home for a thing for work and they asked me how much money they owe me for that. Of course I could print until the ink is empty and divide by the number of prints I got but that would obviously be a huge waste.

Is docker even suitable for anything that isn't deployment?

So much time, so much effort, so much trial and error, and I still feel like I don't know what Docker is for.

I had a development VirtualBox machine, which I used just to compile my code and test my application. So I said "why don't I just use Docker? It would be way simpler". Also because that fucking Virtualbox image was like 10GB, and it was slow af.

The VirtualBox machine wasn't created by me, but it was just given to me by a previous developer, so I just had to imagine what I needed and pick up the pieces. In few hours I was ready with my Dockerfile.

So I tried it, and....... obviously it didn't work. I entered inside my container and I tried to manually execute commands in order to see where it breaks, and I tried to fix each of them. They were just the usual Linux dependencies problems, incompatibility among libraries, and so on.

Putting everything in order, I started over again with a virgin Ubuntu image, and I tried to fix every single error that appeared, I typed something like 1 hundred commands just to have my development machine up and running.

Now I have a running container that works, I don't know how to reproduce it with a Dockerfile, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, because I'm afraid that any wrong command could destroy the container and lose all the job I did. I can't even bind folders because start/exec doesn't support bindings, so I've to copy files.

Furthermore, the documentation about start/exec is very limited, and every question on StackOverflow just talks about deployment. So am I wrong? Did I use containers for something that wasn't their main purpose? What am I supposed to do now? I'm lost, I feel so much stupid.

Just tell me what to do or call a psychologist