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Search - "impossible tasks"
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That moment when the development manager says "nothing is impossible"
And then starts to spend the whole day assigning the new tasks.1 -
So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.
Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.
On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.29 -
Almost a decade ago (damn I'm getting old) I was working on a virtually dead project - i.e. it was the third, and final, iteration of a very failed project in a huge company with literally millions of Euros poured into it.
I came in as a junior SysAdmin/CM to substitute someone who was happily fucking off to another, better job. And alongside me a senior started as well to deal with the management/interaction between vendors and internal "teams" (6 peeps to deal with infrastructure requests from vendors - DBA, SysAdmin, Networking, Hardware commissioning, that sort of stuff).
Now, nothing against this senior - really cool dude - but he was objectively doing a poor management job. Partially due to some personal issues and a little bit of incompetence/disinterest.
So me, and the rest of these peeps that the vendors interacted with, were getting massacred with impossible requests/deadlines and blamed for almost everything wrong with this project.
Two weeks after we started, SeniorMan had to take a week off due to some personal issues so I was asked by higher management to take over his tasks as well until he's back.
The next day, I took all the peeps to get coffee and told them that from now on, regardless of what anyone tells them, unless it's from our direct manager (who pretty much didn't give a shit) every information/decision/deadlines negotiations goes through me and me alone. And they're not allowed to even consider anyone asking them for favours without talking to me first.
Now, this also came with the understanding that I would become the sole person to blame in case of fuck ups, and I gladly accepted because I would have quit anyway if things didn't change.
So everyone agreed.
And oh boy did we put the heat on those fucking vendors, because those two weeks that SeniorMan was busy drinking coffee with the upper management, I studied the entire project - I was familiar with every single network switch, VM, application and most importantly, all the agreements between vendors on which applications they would deliver and when.
They guys from my team also followed through with ignoring vendor requests that didn't come through me. They would literally hang up on them. CCed me on every single email. It was great.
A week later, we learned that SeniorMan would be gone another week, so upper management gave me a company phone because things were going well. SeniorMan would later quit because he pretty much wasn't needed by the time he came back.
With the phone and the blessings of the management I was pretty much the only entry point for vendors to deliver their applications. And I was strict as fuck. My negotiation policy was to multiply everything the peeps from my team told me by 3. If they didn't like it, well tough luck, give us more resources and wait 3 weeks to get them up to speed.
And within a month we became the highest performing team on that project. Outperforming the second best by as much as 6 to 1. All this with much less stress for everyone in the team.
Thanks to these changes, vendors actually had to do their job and deliver the promised services without blaming us. So we magically passed the first milestone, and suddenly went from failed project to the most promising project in the company.
Ah good times, good times...
Bonus story:
I participated in a meeting, before hitting the second milestone, where the project lead from one of the vendors was trying to pin their incompetence on us being slow to deliver infrastructure requirements.
So I pulled out the Visio file that everyone in the room agreed to a few months prior, and one by one showed that not only everything was delivered on time but even earlier on some items. And that due to them being slow on testing their shitty software on our infrastructure everything is going to shit.
The CTO of the company was present in this meeting, and what followed can only be described as someone who had no idea what was going on, being hit in the face with some else's balls of steel. This CTO proceeded to yell out how much all the vendor contracts cost and that if these fucks didn't get their shit together he'll release the lawyers from the dungeon of debt.10 -
I work in a contract position and reviewed the code of a senior engineer recently. Regretfully I can't provide context to preserve anonymity.
He wrote awful JavaScript;
- handled a single DOM element with 2 different frontend libraries
- used the logical operator && to 'chain' two methods (it didn't work) instead of returning a boolean value,
- broke everything down into minute detail (a comment box had 7 components!),
- API calls were made for every component update instead of maintaining local component state where it made sense, which meant UI updates were slow,
- animated EVERYTHING, which made my Firefox on Xubuntu i7 64bit with 16GB RAM beg for mercy.
I had a rough couple of months with interviews, with 2nd stage technical interviewers throwing impossible tasks at me.
Example:
1. Create an online Python code editor with Javascript which can compile Python bytecode,
2. Use Mesos and Kafka to create real time architecture for Tensorflow with a Javascript frontend in 1 day. (I asked, and wasn't allowed to use Kubernetes or serverless architecture),
3. Hack a website from the browser's address bar using parameters ( what?!! ),
Obviously, the next time I meet a 'senior', I'm going to tell him talk is cheap;
'SHOW ME YOUR CODE.'3 -
Project in college, many moons ago.
Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.
3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.
The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.
The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”
Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.
## Week 1
We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.
He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...
## Week 2
We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.
After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.
Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.
Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...
“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”
And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.
## Week 3
We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.
Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.
You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.
## Night before
We say fuck it and do the thing.
In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.
In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.
## The day of
Partner 3 comes into class and says this...
“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)
Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.
“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”
He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.
We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.
Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.
He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.
The teacher ask him to stay after class.
## Result
We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).
Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.
Bonus Content:
That same asshat above once said this to me...
“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”
Yes, he wrote all code like this...
const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}
Fuck that guy🖕🏽4 -
So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?
I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.
The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?
I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)
My life is totally fine. Right?3 -
I swear GNU/Linux is the pure definition of a badly designed OS/Kernel
1) The separate file system. Of all things, all the set standards Linux uses exFat which can only be read by Linux. Not NTFS, not FAT32, you know, the common ones.
2) Unintuitiveneness and inefficiency of workflow. Linux is extremely inefficient, especially the cli versions, where one cannot perform several tasks simultaneously.
3) It's MESSY. The use of a Terminal is incredibly uncomfortable, because the text is tightly spaced, and in monochromatic in root. When looking at a large chunk of text, my eyes hurt on a deeper level than physical.
4) It's the most retarded way to handle drives. Why not assign drive letters and names? Why is it dev/sda1 dev/sdb1. If I have two drives of the same capacity, I cannot differentiate between them. How am I supposed to know which is my system drive and which is my portable hard drive that I'm formatting? And this stupid disk utility fdisk. What the fuck is that? Why is the command o wiping the device? Why is t selecting a partition? What the fuck?
5) Stupid naming system. Most CLI commands have deliberately stupid and hard to remember names. Also the prefixes to them such as -x -c or -v, say nothing to me. Reading through the manual in white, tight monochromic text is impossible.
6) Error messages that don't make sense. How am I supposed to know what "Error! [err=/dev/null, arch="27xE39Tmx849D" result="success"]" is supposed to mean? A search will cut down the error and I will find nothing.
7) General hype towards it being "focused on developers". It's not. It's really not. As a developer myself I find it absolutely painful to write code on Linux. It's sluggish, requires it's own set of IDEs and software packages.
People say "Oh you can't write and compile code on Windows". Yes you can. Windows has the exact same set of compilers as Linux, like gcc and gpp. Windows has a versatile and powerful command line. It's hidden from a regular user, because its actually user friendly, and is made for people, not aliens. The fact that you have to download a package manager first to access new ones is what flies over many peoples heads.
Go on start a wreck in the comments40 -
I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *
After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...
I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges. -
It's almost midnight here and I just realized something. I just realized that none of my college friends have contacted me in almost a year now... Like none of them. They hang out every weekend near the college I cannot coz im working and it has never occurred to them that "hey there's this guy that we we were together for four years with , I wonder what he's doing how's he holding up" and I wasn't even an asshole or a douchebag or something I guess I just vaporizer from their memories like a volatile liquid.
I also feel like my boss gives me nearly impossible tasks so that I fail like "design these two complete web applications in three months while you do your actual job of teaching people java for 8 hrs a day"
And now here I am at midnight sitting curled up in the corner of my bed like a paranoid chipmunk that drank a pot full of dark coffee, trying to talk to this random bunch of people from random places in the world who are doing random shit right now. And the worst part is I chose this ... I wanted this I wanted to make a difference. I didn't want to be just a cog in a machine.
If I die right now how many people would cry? I ask myself that a lot it's never more than ten. This is probably creeping u out right now so I'll probably end this.
Rest assured six hrs from now I will put my mask back on. a mask of a happy, mildly funny, averagely successfully geek, until my next date with sadness3 -
Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:
So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.
Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.
Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.
Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂 -
Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).
Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.
This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.
- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.
Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.10 -
I work with a few 'idea' and marketing guys. The quicker we can turn out a project, the quicker we can make money. Some days, I can get 3 quick, easy projects out. But sometimes, these guys get 'ideas' that are out of the norm so they can take a few days to get going.
One of the guys had an idea I knew was going to take longer than a day, especially with the rest of my daily tasks. This guy loves reading 'how to run a business' books and tries to say we need it today, 'nothing is impossible' (because it was in his book).
I explain reality to him and he gets all pissy. The following day he tried again, with something that would take less time. 'so, which one do you want? Yeah, I can do that one quicker, but the first one will take longer then.'
This guy don't get it. I will burn everyone of his fucking books.2 -
I have been given the displeasure of updating a company's WordPress website which was built and (sort of) maintained by another company which ended up closing down. NOTHING WAS DOCUMENTED. Almost no comments added anywhere. Not even a description of the what a particular file does. File names are basically completely random. There are 3 versions of the same theme this company made and no indication of which one is actually being used. On top of this; they used plugins and modified them, so they cant even be updated without them breaking. As well; after looking around it seems they used jQuery mixed with Angular (or maybe the plugin creators did this?). The website isnt mobile friendly either; one of my tasks was to see what I could do with fixing this. Seems basically impossible based on the complete mess of a project this is.
All this being said, I just graduated from Post Secondary and have almost no experience working with WordPress, There arent even other developers to help assist me on this project.....
Gonna be quite the experience.1 -
never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...
Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).
I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.
That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.
So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.
And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension. -
So we have this new vp guy, and a team in US and another in india
The vp asked me to finish one task by tonight 11pm, and if I need help with the India team's code, call a guy there to help debug
After some debugging with that dev, he replies with:
The code won't work because we haven't implemented it yet
.........
Yo, what the hell is wrong with people
How am I supposed to finish a task that isn't even implemented, and why pushing so much to have it done, wtf I'm so confused with this
Every week a new headache like this, but this was laughable, in two weeks I start a new job 😂6 -
My biggest personal challenge as a dev is getting help. Sometimes I feel so deserted.
Now and then I have to do things that are not my expertise and I feel out of my depth. I think if I had an expert come in for a day they would be able to save me weeks of slow progress. There are dev things like updating frameworks, etc which I am fine to struggle through or read the docs, etc but things like setting up servers, enabling single sign on, database administration, integration with other systems. These are not really software development tasks but they need to be done. It seems every time I try to get help it is so much effort then the help I get turns out not to be helpful.
In my current role I have no budget or company credit card, etc. To make any sort of purchase I need to get my manager to write a business case to get approved by his manager signed in triplicate, buried in soft peat, etc. Even if I went through this process there are so many companies out there who want to get paid to do nothing and say they are experts in all things. It is almost impossible to know if we would get competent help or if I end up just wasting time explaining issues to people in phone meetings who are no help. -
I just started on a Laravel project for a customer. Damn I’ve got a hate/love relationship with that thing.
I fucking love how fucking fast development is it in, even for fairly complex tasks, amazing.
I fucking hate how goddamn fucking slow development is when you get an error, as that shit is near impossible to debug, and you keep getting weird exceptions that you just need to know what means. -
I just wrote my exam in IT class. I'm really happy with the fact that we use a computer for a few tasks. That's how the average IT expert works. Think-code-debug. It's practically impossible to write a Java program on paper without mistakes.
Other than that I named my variables like
boolean iCanWriteNowWoohoooo = false;
etc.
It didn't work 100% in the end but I hope to still get a decent grade.1 -
I need a new laptop at work. Money isn't really a problem but it should at least meet the following specs:
14" 1080 bright ips screen
Small form factor, this is very important
Good keyboard and Touchpad. I really hate Apple style keyboards, they hurt my fingers.
Quad core coffee lake, i5 should be fine
>=7 hours of battery life.
Be able to run Linux without any major issues
12-16 GB RAM, preferably upgradable but I think that is impossible these days.
>=256GB ssd, upgradable.
Graphics card is unimportant.
Quiet operation for easy tasks such as coding or web browsing.
I/O is not that important as long as it has hdmi and USB B and C.
Bonus : Small power adapter
It feels like I have looked everywhere for such a machine but I can't find any that is good. There is always compromises.3 -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.1 -
So being in ops, I have certifications in networking and Linux, and am currently working on my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.
I've been talking to a few "professional" (they have jobs) devs that I personally know, and with the exception of 1, it seems like version control, automation, networking, and server related tasks are beyond them.
As I want to get into the dev side of things (devops preferably), I feel somewhat overwhelmed at some of the requirements of the job, especially knowing that I cannot take too much of a pay hit as I have a family to support.
My question is this, based on real world experiences with hiring, how much weight do you think knowing your way around networks, cloud, virtualization, servers, and all of the other things ops does when it comes to getting your foot in the door for a dev job?
I've casually looked around, and it seems that getting the foot in from this side is almost impossible.2 -
So, I just finished a semester project on Software Project Management, and this was my self analysis and my conclusions, along with my analysis of my team. I think some of you will relate. Hope you enjoy the reading!
My main contributions to the project were helping reviewing the documents syntax, to make sure it was smooth and easy to read with a good english level, working on the systems architecture, coding the application, helping measuring problems within the project and putting people to work by distributing tasks.
I tried to help whenever I could with things that were not assigned to me, even though we are a team, everyone must do what they are assigned for, otherwise disorganization will be installed and everyone will derive from what they are doing to focus on a single thing or point and that would cost us time. I tried to avoid that to see if people could be capable enough of fixing the problems presented to them with the least help possible, making that an example for future use so they don’t always rely on others to get tasks done and to be more independent. Also, helping others figuring out what they were supposed to do helped the team wasting less human resources and consuming less time, which lead to some faster developments on specific tasks. Making the impossible possible was kinda of a weekly routine when the deadline approached because time was short and sometimes tasks were not finished when they should be, so, in a way I helped speedrunning documents to see if they were close to presentable to the client.
As the overall performance, there were highs and lows, where some members worked more than others and that is not fair for everyone because that kept happening again and again, so, my point of view performance wise is that we behaved wrongly when it came down to it. Some of us kept on pushing tasks to others and continuously criticizing over other people’s work without having a logical background to motivate those critiques neither providing solutions to the problems encountered. Well, that couldn’t end well, and it didn’t. It brought our performance down and ended up causing a lot of damage on the project itself.