The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

Some guy my girlfriend knows, heard I'm a software developer. He had this 'great' idea on how he wanted to start a new revolutionary way of paying on the internet. He wanted to create a service like paypal but without having the hassle of logging in first and going through a transaction. He wanted a literal "buy now" button on every major webshop on the internet. When I asked him how he thought that would work legally and security wise, he became a bit defensive and implied that since I'm the tech guy I should work out that kind of stuff. When the software was ready, he would have clients lined up for the service and his work would start.

I politely declined this great opportunity

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

I usually don't work for indian clients. But when I do, they make sure I don't get paid.

Some highlights from my last project,

Client: Do you know ERPnext?

Me: No, but I am good at python.

Client: My boss wants me to find a guy who can create barcode generator for erpnext.

Me: I can use pyBarcode to do it.
This is exciting I thought. I get to learn a new framework. Start working on it. Not an hour passes by,

Client: hey can you remove this menu item?
Me: Which one?
Client: Also can you add the dashboard icons to left sidebar? Like Odoo? Do you know it? It is also python based.
Me: Then why don't you just use Odoo instead?
Client: My boss wants it. He doesn't understand computers. He is pissing mr off.
Me: Then how come he suggested erpnext?
Client: His friend told him.
*experience mindfuck*

For the next 3 days he has me working on these UI tweaks, never mentions barcode again.

But I finish the barcode stuff. Tripple check everything to make sure they work. Tell him to check so I can get paid. Guy asks his boss to check.

Boss > Client: It doesn't work
Me: What doesn't work?
Boss > Client: Everything!
Client: I actually tested everything and they work. My boss doesn't know how to use it. He is very old.

Makes me make more changes and finally when I ask for the work done so far,
Client: Boss didn't come to office today. I'll get you paid. Please try to understand my situation.

Me thinking, "mofo your boss didn't hire me,l. You did". But I keep calm and tell him I won't work until I get paid 50%.

3 days passed. No reply. Set his skype status to "Away" forever.

*spidey sense tells me I'm not getting paid, again*

U am beyond pissed and burnt out. I fucking wish there was a mafia I can request to collect my fucking money from them.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

Long story short, I'm unofficially the hacker at our office... Story time!

So I was hired three months ago to work for my current company, and after the three weeks of training I got assigned a project with an architect (who only works on the project very occasionally). I was tasked with revamping and implementing new features for an existing API, some of the code dated back to 2013. (important, keep this in mind)

So at one point I was testing the existing endpoints, because part of the project was automating tests using postman, and I saw something sketchy. So very sketchy. The method I was looking at took a POJO as an argument, extracted the ID of the user from it, looked the user up, and then updated the info of the looked up user with the POJO. So I tried sending a JSON with the info of my user, but the ID of another user. And voila, I overwrote his data.

Once I reported this (which took a while to be taken seriously because I was so new) I found out that this might be useful for sysadmins to have, so it wasn't completely horrible. However, the endpoint required no Auth to use. An anonymous curl request could overwrite any users data.

As this mess unfolded and we notified the higher ups, another architect jumped in to fix the mess and we found that you could also fetch the data of any user by knowing his ID, and overwrite his credit/debit cards. And well, the ID of the users were alphanumerical strings, which I thought would make it harder to abuse, but then realized all the IDs were sequentially generated... Again, these endpoints required no authentication.

So anyways. Panic ensued, systems people at HQ had to work that weekend, two hot fixes had to be delivered, and now they think I'm a hacker... I did go on to discover some other vulnerabilities, but nothing major.

It still amsues me they think I'm a hacker 😂😂 when I know about as much about hacking as the next guy at the office, but anyways, makes for a good story and I laugh every time I hear them call me a hacker. The whole thing was pretty amusing, they supposedly have security audits and QA, but for five years, these massive security holes went undetected... And our client is a massive company in my country... So, let's hope no one found it before I did.

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.

Manager walks in.

Here's the context.

We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.

I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.

My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.

He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.

We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"

That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.

So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.

As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.

The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

A new guy was brought on to help with a particular part of my program.

He worked on it for a little while and got something working. But honestly the code hurts me. And not because I'm some arrogant prick, but because there's something about the way it's written that's really bothering me.

I was saying to my girlfriend that I don't mind people helping me out and adding new features. Usually they bring something to my attention that I otherwise would have never thought of.

However, in this case I was told to back off completely. This of course, makes sense, we don't want to be stepping on each other's toes. But now that he's sort of done, I've taken a look around at it is really getting to me.

They've placed redundant pieces of code in places that I would have never done. And objects have been made that seem to only match precisely one particular use case.

I had overhauled this program with flexibility in mind a while back, and now I feel like it's doing a 180 again simply because the client is getting impatient.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

!dev

My toxic father. Seriously man. It's my 4th day of learning to drive with an instructor. He sits besides and never knew how to drive. I think I am driving good wrt to being very new in it. He thinks just because I slow myself down on the road and cannot take a turn properly, let me say it again, on the 4th day of driving a manual car, he thinks I can never drive. What a fucking douchebag. What a fucking coward, impatient human says that. I am in rage because now I'm like 27, but in my childhood he was at his worst behaviour. That's why I was always scared of doing complex things, I stick with easy because I will make no mistakes. He has fucking no right in being proud of me. He's so fucking bad, I hate him. But more than hating him I want to find a way not to give a fuck about his fucking small discouraging shameful opinions. Fucker cannot do anything by himself. He's the most messed up fucking person I have ever seen. And oh god I fucking resent this guy.
I should start calling him a fucking retard that way I can devalue him as a person. I could never thought that I will think about a person like this but this retard left me no choice.
The thing is even a person is a retard I will try to understand them so give me a good word that just devalues a person instantly.

I was unemployed and had to sent out 10 or so job applications per month to e eligible to receive the money substitution for unemployment...
Anyways, not many jobs fit my experience, so I was sending out to those with higher/different requirements aswel.. That day I was meeting my sister and she was already waiting for me, so I quickly sent out a totally unpersonalised application for a job I wasn't qualified for. Next day I got back response email with a self grading questionaire I didn't really understood, all about MS technologies I never worked with..which means I didn't know how to grade myself..I decided to ask around people to try to help me grade myself, but then I totally forgot about that in the next days and never replied to that email.
Anyways, week later I got email for job interview from a sister company (found that out later, snooping through linkedin). I was surprised someone requested a meeting with me, especially without the agenda (at that time I was not aware it was a job interview).. Anyways I went there, found out the guy interviewing me thought they lost my questionaire. I explined the situation and he just decided to ask me around to see what I know. So we talked about my past experience and the guy who was doing the interview explained what is what & and explained what I did before and together we figured out what I know and what my experiences are... After we were done, he said that everything else, the payment and other stuff about the job position I should discuss with the director. Not to ask questions, but negotiate.. O.o And just like that I got the job, because they liked my CV & attitude (I like to learn new stuff) and they thought I'd fit in perfectly.
I'm still working there, it's been 4 years now, I think.. loved it since the day one.. Got 'promoted' to another project, crappy old code noone wants/dares to touch but I love it! The guys think I am weird cuz I like to solve/fix things and make them better, and previous employees who worked on that project have all lost their shit and quit. They are all wondering how I can handle this, but little do they know about devrant & my love for the crazy!!

Today I had to explain a bit of ressource planing for the coming quarter and ahead.

Hardware ressources.

All in all I knew what I was talking about, but given our tight budget, it''s a lot of moving stuff to either put the hardware to rest or to recycle it.

Moving in sense of new hardware, migrate old to new, decommission / recycle stuff.

After roughly half an hour I stopped and asked If I really should continue, as I felt bored by myself and it's really hard to follow when the whole thing looks exactly like the guy in the nice picture under the post...

A colleague of mine answered: I can still follow, but I'm terrified.

I somehow burst into a mixture of laughing and crying cause that was exactly my thought.

It's gonna be fun... Way easier than the last time, but still. XD

Was at least a funny meeting...

We stopped after everyone calmed down and talked the rest of the time bullshit.

By the way: I look exactly like the dude during planning. :)

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

So one of my clients had a different company do a penetrationtest on one of my older projects.

So before hand I checked the old project and upgraded a few things on the server. And I thought to myself lets leave something open and see if they will find it.

So I left jquery 1.11.3 in it with a known xss vulnerability in it. Even chrome gives a warning about this issue if you open the audit tab.

Well first round they found that the site was not using a csrf token. And yeah when I build it 8 years ago to my knowledge that was not really a thing yet.

And who is going to make a fake version of this questionair with 200 questions about their farm and then send it to our server again. That's not going to help any hacker because everything that is entered gets checked on the farm again by an inspector. But well csrf is indeed considered the norm so I took an hour out of my day to build one. Because all the ones I found where to complicated for my taste. And added a little extra love by banning any ip that fails the csrf check.

Submitted the new version and asked if I could get a report on what they checked on. Now today few weeks later after hearing nothing yet. I send my client an email asking for the status.

I get a reaction. Everything is perfect now, good job!

In Dutch they said "goed gedaan" but that's like what I say to my puppy when he pisses outside and not in the house. But that might just be me. Not knowing what to do with remarks like that. I'm doing what I'm getting paid for. Saying, good job, your so great, keep up the good work. Are not things I need to hear. It's my job to do it right. I think it feels a bit like somebody clapping for you because you can walk. I'm getting off topic xD

But the xss vulnerability is still there unnoticed, and I still have no report on what they checked. So I have like zero trust in this penetration test.

And after the first round I already mentioned to the security guy in my clients company and my daily contact that they missed things. But they do not seem to care.

Another thing to check of their to do list and reducing their workload. Who cares if it's done well it's no longer their responsibility.

2018 disclaimer: if you can't walk not trying to offend you and I would applaud for you if you could suddenly walk again.

At a previous job I bumped heads with the IT person a lot because he would spread misinformation about technology so the owners would never replace him. This was conversation with the VP:

VP: Hey I just got a new security setup at my house and I can monitor everything with my phone.
Me: That's cool.
VP: I'm rethinking it because [IT guy] said it was very dangerous to have, what do you think?
Me: ....? What did he say was dangerous about it?
VP: He said hackers could then gain access to cameras and plan the perfect time to rob me since it's in the cloud.
Me: I seriously doubt anyone is planning an Ocean's 11 heist to steal your TV.
VP: Yea I thought it sounded weird when he told me.

At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).

At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.

I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.

A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.

First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.

Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.

So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.

Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care.

note: it is already dec. 23 in here

testers and another integration team are working for an urgent deliverable.
they just called, asking if i can come to the office and complete my code so they can use it as a basis/reference to theirs.

wtf

Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.

A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.

My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.

Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!

I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?

But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.

I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.

And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.

It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?

It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?

By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.

But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.

And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.

Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.

And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...

The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".

Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!

"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.

And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...

"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "

"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".

But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "

"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.

That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.

Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!

And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.

And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.

[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?

We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?

Look no further than BloodCurse, the ancient hex that will haunt your family for countless generations! With BloodCurse, you may crawl the earth as a mindless, shameless, piece of shit cockswallowing JUGGERNAUT that craves nothing BUT the consumption of scabbed human ass!

BloodCurse is easily contracted through consumption of the GENITAL fluids of highly-lecherous succubi, conjured through [EXTREMELY CENSORED]! This forbidden arcana allows the user to debour HIS OWN testicles in no time!

Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!

Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>

:~

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

I'm faszinated by some dev's ability to write legacy code.
Not maintaining but plainly creating code so horrible, that it can be considered legacy.

I wrote a new API for a silly Application because the old one had hardly anything to do with rest. At all. And despite the code being only 2 years old, it was still unmaintainable.

Now that I'm finish with this task, i got the next generation of the angular Frontend.
A guy wrote a completely new version of the frontend in angular5.
Only untyped variables, no documentation, no tests at all, no idea whats going on where,....

I thought my job was to adjust a few URL's and change some DTO's, but now i have to refactor everything again...
And the pain continues.....

My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....

I can't recall one single person I can call a mentor, however...

When I first started as a developer I had a senior to work with... I knew close to anything but I was always good at research and learning on my own... But we used an asp.net framework, it was new and there was little to no useful information, only basics... When I asked the senior (let's call him Joe) for help he gave me a quick answer:
Joe: Go to file xx, there's an example of what you need there...
Me: Well, been there and that's great but it doesn't help...
Everytime I was stucked during my first week it was always some sort of the same, so I insisted this time...
Me: so, Joe... I'm really stuck on this one, can you give it a look?
Joe: I know, I've been researching a way to do it for an hour now and can't get it either...
Me: wow! Thanks... But I thought you were an expert on this...
Joe: not really, never used it before. It's as new to me as it is to you! :)

So, that switched me from "this fucking weasel won't help me for shit" to "well, let's help each other"

We became good friends, always challenging each other and from that day on I stopped asking for help, and asking where can I help others...

I had great and greatly bad colleague and seniors. Each one thought me something either what to do or what not to do, how to act or not, how to tackle problems, how to teach...

Everyone I have worked with, worked for or trained is a mentor of mine. Even those I feel like I failed training thought me how to do better next time...

Thank you guys for being grate... Thank you assholes for teaching me how to send a guy go fuck himself! Good luck for those who get stucked with me

I don't feel ready to search for jobs. I don't feel that coding is for me.

There is this guy that wanted to study physics and changed to System Information. He is more logical and rational than me. I'm too "emotional" to code, I get stressed easily when something isn't working.

I'm doing this because I wanted to challenge and prove myself that I could be more. I could have been a teacher, but I thought that it wasn't enough for me and I wanted to go further.

Every day I'm outside of my comfort zone and I don't know where this path will lead me and I'm scared and at the same time, I'm hoping for a happy end.

Maybe my brain is not made for coding, maybe it is more on the database side. But I'm sure of one thing: this year I'll give my best and everything at my current internship to get better at coding with Android Studio, Windows Form, Angular and React. My results will determine if I''m a good fit for coding.

Remember one thing: not everyone can easily learn how to code, but you will never know if you don't try it. Go out of your comfort zone in your life and you will meet a whole new world.

OK what the actual fuck is going on within this company.

TL;DR: Spaghetti Copy/Pasted code that made me mad because it's just a mess

I just looked into a code file to search for a specific procedure regarding the creation of invoices.
I thought "Oh this is gonna be a quick look-through of like 1000 lines MAX" turns out this script is 11317 fucking lines long and most of it's logic is written there multiple (up to 6-7 times). And I'm not talking about a simple 10 lines or something. No! Logic of over 300 lines.. copy & pasted over .. and over .. and over?! I mean what the fuck did this guy drink when he wrote this.

Alsooo 10000 of those 11317 lines is ONE FUNCTION.. I kid you not! It's just a gigantic if / else if construct that, as I said before, contains copy-pasted code all over the place.
Sadly my TL thinks that code cleanup / optimization is "not necessary as long as it works" like wtf dude. If anyone wants to ever fix something in this mess or add a new feature they take a few hours longer just to "adjust" to this fucking shit.
This is a nightmare. The worst part: This is not the only script that has shit like this. We got over 150 "modules" (Yeah, we ATTEMPTED something OOP-ish but failed miserably) that sometimes have over 15000 lines which could be easily cut down to 1/3 and/or splitted into multiple files.
Let's not start about centralization of methods or encoding handling or coding standards or work code review or .. you get the point because there's a character limit for one rant and I guess I'd overshoot that by a lot if I'd start with that. Holy shit I can't wait until my internship is over and I can leave this code-hell!!

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

[off topic] (good thing this isn't stack overflow)
2.5 years ago I moved 35 minutes north of all my friends for a job and only see them about once a year now. I have a wife, kid and a few clients so spending time meeting new people has become a disability.

I have a bar near me that does board games and DnD n shit. I thought I would be able to pop in, make a few friends and play a few games of cards against humanity or something.

Nope. Even though I knew I was the coolest guy in the place (I'm a musician and up til a year ago played bass in rock/metal/90s bands ) , couldn't bring myself to talk to anyone or try to play any of the games. I sat at the bar on my phone, like a nerd.

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.

So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.

After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.

I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.

Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.

The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.

I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.

Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.

So last semester for my English class, I had to learn a "new skill" and write an essay [the final] about it. So naturally instead of taking the time to learn something new, I just slapped together a c# (in which I'd say I'm already fluent) calculator app with winforms.

When it came time to present my "new" skill to the class, everybody was overimpressed. Then at the end of my little presentation, one guy goes "Oh! Is that all done in HTML?".

Without giving it a thought, I instinctively replied "No, it's a programming language". He just looked so confused after that.

Happened way back when I was still in high school and facebook was relatively new. We used to own a cyber cafe.

--

The Guy: (Talking to other customers) I'll have you know that I'm a graduate in Computer Science! *Proceeds to boast about self and other bullshittery*

Others: *In awe*

Me: *Veeeery Skeptical*

A few days later...

The Guy: (Talks to me) Hey, there seems to be a problem with your internet. I can't log in on facebook.

Me: Could you try to do what you are doing again?

...

The Guy: See, doesn't work.

Me: Have you registered your account on facebook?

The Guy: Huh? What are you talking about? I have my Yahoo! mail.

Me: ..You need to register your email on facebook in order to log in.

The Guy: What?? I don't get it. I am registered and have a Yahoo! mail!

Me: *Brain Sigh*

(I proceed to help him register his email on facebook)

The Guy: Oh, you had to register on facebook! Now I get it! I thought that if you created an email you can immediately use that to log in to facebook.

Me: *Internal facepalm x1000*

(This guy is a Computer Science graduate? Oh PLEASE. )

So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.

My story is;

The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.

Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.

Thank you for reading.

So, I have been offered two jobs at the same company (big, global corp)

1. RPA coordinator or operator or business analyst. Completely new to me, they're happy with my background enough so that I could learn on the job. RPA is new in this place and they're creating team from scratch.

2. Member of IT security team where most of my work would be split between things that interest me greatly - vulnerabilities, fixing them and pen testing.

I'm not sure what to pick, really.

Option 1 seems to be way more future proof and seems like a lifetime opportunity to get into something relatively new, potentially more ££ down the road.
Option 2 is what I already spent some time learning and I have quite a big interest in. I've always been less of a programmer and more of an admin/sec guy.

Tbh before option 1 called me yesterday I thought that option 2 is a dream job for me. Now I'm all in doubt.

So I have a MEAN app that is super simple just basic CRUD operations.

Everything works fine. Decide to extend it by bringing values over into fields on an Edit page. More work than I thought it would be but got it working, just passed values through an array in the URL. Pretty simple. So then I click save and it's broken. _id is apparently now undefined. Oh I posted it on the Javascript chat on SO and got nothing, instead everyone is talking about porn folders, a tweet, a random picture that looks like either a woman doing oral to a guy or a guy reading a book, and now Obamacare. FFS just answer my damn question >.< So I post it on SO itself and still crickets there. Worst part is I know its something simple I just don't know what it is because I'm still new to programming in general only been a few months in a bootcamp just learning the basics of MEAN stack (which I do like a lot tbh)

Man SO is so frustrating.