*walks to the kitchen at work to get a glass of water*
*walks back and continues debugging an issue*
*starts drinking from the glass*
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
*noticing that I never actually filled the glass*

😐

That "in the zone" moment 😆

Son of a bitch!

TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

> Customer calls
Her: I have over 5k 404 request to [insertwebsite]/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
Me: Sound like a missconfigured exchangeserver/client. Let me have a look.
> Takes a look and can confirm the IP and the owner of that IP
Me: It looks like someone/something from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is failing to resolve autodiscover.[insertdomain].com
and defaults to @ record on the zone. Do you happend to know to whom that IP belongs?
Her: No, and I dont care, just block it. I do not like the 404 that shows up on the summary.
Me: Alright
> Blocks the IP in the firewall.

>>> Fast forward to next day >>>

> Someone calls, it is the same girl
Her: I cant reach my website! Infact, I cant reach anything! WHYYYYYY!!!
> I remember, blocking that IP yesterday...
Me: Oh, can you please visist "minip.se" (whatismyip.com, swedish version) and tell me what you see?
Her: Yes, it is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Me: Do you remember that IP that you request that I block yesterday?
> I can hear the shame coming from the phone.
> Turn out that her collegues did'nt have any mail delivered to them from the time I blocked their IP
> Her boss is really mad
> Atleast she had a cute voice

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

Do not disturb someone especially if they are in the zone.

Hint : earphones on, a ton of error logs on screen.

Me, in the zone, staring at the code. Co-worker enters.
Co: hey, can you...
Me (not really listening): no.
Co: it's just...
Me: no.
Co: later?
Me: no.
Co: but...
Me: no.
Co: (leaving)

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).

libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)

If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.

PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

I spent about 5 hours today coding and I was totally in the zone. I'm talking things were working properly, tests were passing, bugs were being squashed all over the place. It was completely amazing, I felt like a god ruling over my code kingdom.

After about 5 straight hours I realized that I needed food so I got up, stretched my legs and had some dinner. Well I sat back down about an hour ago and I am SO far out of the zone. Everything is breaking, I can't focus and I have no idea why. My kingdom was overrun with a plague of bugs in just the short time I paused to eat.

Moral of the story: when you get in the zone don't stop for anything even if it seems like basic human necessity. After all we aren't human when we're in the zone, we are coding gods.

When you're in the zone you're in the zone

I was totally in the zone earlier.

Plenty of caffeine, plenty of anger thanks to idiots, rocking out to Amon Amarth and Disturbed, and chewing through a difficult logic problem. It was wonderful.

Then.

Then there was a mandatory all-hands meeting. A mandatory meeting entirely consisting of someone doing a (admittedly decent) presentation on very basic marketing. (Basic as in "This is what ROI is." 🙄) It lasted for about 40 minutes, totally killing my zone and butchering my productivity. I've barely gotten anything done the rest of the day, thanks to that.

On the bright side, I worked out the logic on stickies during the talky-people bits. Maybe I'll be able to write it tomorrow.

I fucking hate python and myself even more. Python is easy they say, Python has nice syntax but fuck you . Fuck you seriously I cringe if I see non-c-like syntax. Every time I leave my comfort zone I get fucked over by damn semicolons. Fuck this imports i don't know your damn library. But god damn In far too advanced for hello world. There are two versions and the lib I want to use is incompatible? Well fuck me? That kind of shit never hit me on PHP. Damn me! Fuck you python. I want to know you but you fuck me harder than life. GEHÖRT? DU FICKST MICH HÄRTE ALS DAS LEBEN DU HURENSOHN!!!!

What is even your problem? Indentation? Well thank you for not having braces! I mean come on I try, I really do. I know you are different but every thing I want to learn about you is either for uber beginners or so advanced I don't even know what's going on. Do magical shit in a few lines? What the fuck is in those packages? A wizard full filling whishes like "plz make this work"?

But don't worry you cum snorting unicorn as much as I hate you I'm more mad about me for not being a descendant of fucking slytherin!

> in da zone, headphones beating, caffeine rushing through my veins, snack-stack at 75%, code and commands flowing like campaign promises, I'm one with the keyboard... I can feel it ~(◉_◉)~

roomie: Hey J! J!
me: ಠ_ಠ I'm kinda busy, what do you want?
roomie: Dude don't forget to pick up bla bla bla
me: Okay
> Headphones back on, feeling the h4ckx0r fire resurge through my gut like a majestic phoenix (not to be confused with taco tuesday gut fire)
roomie: J...J! dude also make sure bla bla bla
me: ಠ╭╮ಠ I know, you don't need to be so specific with me.
> Headphones on...about to hit play again...
roomie: Dude do you happen to know bla bla bla

(ಥ﹏ಥ)
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

FUCK! just tell me everything at once so I can go back to ignoring you and the irrelevant world around me!

I hate when people do this.

Sometimes when I code, I plug in my earphones and listen to music, focused, in zone.

* I let everyone think that.
** I actually don't listen to anything.
*** Keeps the buggers away!

We called it "Project Hindenburg".

A huge planning and logistics app with hundreds of screens and dozens of interwoven subfunctions, suddenly needed to be able to support multiple time zones. Our project was to retrofit every area that touched on dates or times, to allow the user to specify, and work in, any time zone.

At this point in the story I can tell whether you have had to work with time zones in code. People who haven't are butting in with something that begins, "that should be fairly simple, you just need to..." followed by some irrelevant noise that betrays their ignorance.

People who have worked with time zones are nodding in shared pain, like fellow attendees of a survivors meeting.

You see, programmers tend to think of time zones as arithmetic; in reality, they are confusing, ambiguous, chaotic, and individual. You can't translate everything into a central time zone (eg UTC) because you lose the user's intent. For example, if you schedule a meeting for 3pm and then move it to the next day, you want it at 3pm even if the clocks have changed.

Project Hindenburg ended up using the entire development staff of the company for well over a year. It smashed our release projections to rubble, made an already tangled code base completely unmaintainable, introduced mind-bending edge case bugs that reduced staff across the company to tears (literally), and led to most of the mid-level and senior developers eventually quitting (including me).

I am @fuckfuckityfuck, and that was the story of Project Hindenburg.

How I've got my previous job?
Imagine you are in a wild techno club. Dark aisles, A dj from berlin behind the turntables blasting out hard beats, couples kissing on extasy pills.

And there was a friend I've didn't meet in ages. "how do you do?" she asks. "ah... you know i'm on a job hunt for a year i feel misrable". "really? my dad is looking for somebody, send him your resNZNZNZ!" "WHAT? can't hear you!" "Send him your resume!" "Ahhh! okay great!"

So on 24. december 5pm, snow outside, i've sat on wooden table in the kitchen of her father discussing the conditions for the job. It was the start of a crazy time. Dining with millionaires on their Castles. Shaking hands with top businesses leaders. Going to China and having dinner with the 500 richest chinese at once. Wild!

so my advice for you nerds, don't stay in your comfort zone behind the screen on weekends. Vistit a techno club sometimes. You may find a pretty girl/boy with a CEO as a father.

The next time you see developers wearing headphones, please understand that it's our most polite of saying:

"I'm in the freaking 'zone'. Don't you dare disturb my rhythm in coding and lose my momentum. Now unless it's reaaally that important, leave it in our group chat/email and I'll read it later."

Tap gently. We're at overdrive when we headbang to music while coding.

“No we don’t use the time zone info you send on each request. We get all the drivers for the store ID, choose one of them randomly and take their time zone. We have been assuming it will always be the same for all drivers for each store.”

This is my new favorite response to a Jira ticket in this company.

I may have to print it out and hang it on my desk

I contantly keep forgetting to turn on my music. It's like:
*open youtube*
"Wait let me just do this thing real quick"
*alt-tab to ide, start coding*
*get in the zone, coding intensifies*
3 hours later...
"Oh yeah let's turn on some music"
Rinse and repeat...

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

When I am in the zone and someone disturbs me

SHOUT OUT TO ALL FELLOW DEVELOPERS

It's been 4 days now, I haven't wrote a single line of code. Trying to get in the zone but I don't feel like coding.

Any Suggestions? Please help.

Task: A mobile Application in less than an hour

- Headphones [x]
- Zone Music [x]
- Fan [x]
- Linux [x]
- VSCode [x]
- Terminal [x]

Now, let's get into the zone

100% focused, balls-deep in the zone, not sure I could have recalled my own name if you'd asked me...
Suddenly out of nowhere, someone's asking me about a job I worked on over a week ago. I'm mostly answering in just a few syllables, struggling to surface from 20 layers of Call Stack.
This goes on for a full 5 minutes before they say, "sorry were you busy?"
No, I was just about to beat Solitaire.
Of course I was fucking busy jesus fucking christ, did you not see all that code and shit on my fucking screen when you suddenly and urgently had to disturb me?

You know you're in the zone when you're working on your laptop on the train and you miss your station and the two after that.
Your commute card are missing two zones and you get off with a stern warning instead of paying the penalty of travelling without a ticket...
#Developersdisease

When you are in the zone.

What the fuck!!!!!

Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.

But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.

2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.

Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.

It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.

What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.

Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.

I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.

One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.

For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

I’ve pretty bad ADHD (diagnosed) my entire adult life, so focus has been a huge struggle for me forever. Here’s my strategy:
- Noise-canceling headphones blasting chiptunes (Spotify has some, but YouTube has the best selection of old-school video game music) I’m usually way less distracted if I listen to music without lyrics.
- A chair cushion (I actually use one of those ridiculous donut ones, but I put a normal sized pillowcase on it. SO comfortable, even after many hours.)
- THE POMODORO METHOD. 25 minutes hardcore coding/debugging, followed by 5 minute intervals for breaks, like checking fb, etc. (Breaks are totally optional if you’re in the zone tho 💪) It’s a great way to reward your brain for focusing.
- And if all else fails, the looming threat of unemployment is always there to keep you motivated 🙃 (Sad but true— always crosses my mind when I’m starting to fall behind on a task)

I don't always listen to music while coding, but when I do, it's because things are absolutely unmitigably fucked and it's going to take some herculean effort to unfuck it.

I have this thing I've done for more years than my kids have been alive when shit really hits the fan and I need to show the staff the old lady can still lay waste.

Step 1: put on "the playlist," which consists of only the most aggressive 90s marilyn manson songs.*
Step 2: put on the headphones, which are noise cancelling and super bassy
Step 3: pound a monster (blue, obv)
Step 4: get super manic
Step 5: get in the zone and destroy several features or a flotilla of bugs in a single night
Step N: make absolute fucking magic
Step N+1: call in sick the next day and sleep til noon

What's your hero process?

*Content has less to do with it than the headspace I've come to associate with it and the fact I can't get drowsy with the constant aggression.

Whoever invented glossy screens for laptops should be shot! I can't get in the zone for coding while staring into a freaking mirror!!

FREE!!!! At last, my kids are out for the whole day!!!!!!!
No more nagging, crying, bitching from them while I'm in the zone!!!!

FREE!!!!!!!!

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

oh man... I just spent 12 hours in the zone and made what was originally meant to be made by 4 developers in close to two weeks(coding in free time)

Aaand I also drank too much coffee...

And I've done it in Node.js which I basically never used before :D ...I applied my coding standards and habits that I use when writing Java and it went like butter... ES2015 is pretty ok actually 😊

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

Worst: The guy gave me 5 minutes to code a given assignment on paper. I did all the logic and told him I was missing a function whose name I would just Google. He told me I can't always Google. Well... I won't be coding on paper either.

Best: I was given the assignment to clone a part of a production site. Assignment was intended for 3 days and I was given 5 hours. Completition wasn't important, only structure and coding style counted. I cloned everything and even added new features.

You just can't always be in the zone. I hope more interviewers would take that into account and design better questions.

For the love of buggery, stop watching bloody videos on your bloody phone with the bloody volume turned up.

I was thinking about something, just starting to get in the zone, when suddenly that tinny little speaker opened up a portal into the howling chaos of the underworld.

It sounds like cats fucking in an empty grain silo.

For the next half an hour, there is no room in my head for anything apart from the diabolical echoes of that bollock-wrenchingly hideous noise.

You have a question.
You google it; nothing comes up.
You read the documentation; no good.
You ask it on stackoverflow; no answer.

You are in... The Twilight Zone

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

I just got memo/warning for swearing too much.

Should i submit my resignation now?

Just to be clear, im not swearing AT someone. You guys know how it is when we're in the zone. Headphones on, focus intensifies, errors encountered, a lot of shits and fucks are uttered, most of the time shouted.

Just got a call about a site I made fo someone being down. It's 3am on a Monday morning. I have school in 6 hours. My client knows this. Go fuck yourself I'm not getting out of bed at 3 in the morning.

Note: we live in the same time zone.

Hey!
I'm new to devRant
I did not thought that there would be any community where people would speak a programmer's language (read humour) and would be so supportive and encouraging about almost anything. reddit is too informal and stackoverflow, too formal. devRant falls in the Goldilocks zone for programmers. Feels just right!
Thank You for making it so awesome!

When you skip breakfast because you're running late, forget to go to lunch because you're in the zone, go home, work on your latest personal project and now it's 10 pm and you realize you have nothing to eat at home, so you have to rush half across town to the only supermarket that's still open...

The worst part about being totally in the zone: looking up after a hour or five and realizing you really really really really need to pee. And knowing that as soon as you get up it’s all over. 😭

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

I worked for months staying up till 3am almost every night in order to collaborate with a team on another time zone. No one ever praised me or thanked me or gave me a pat.

Yesterday two members of that team stayed up till 2am once for the first time in their lives to make a release. They got immediately labelled as the most dedicated employees.

Okay, sounds fair.

Once I strongly hissed at my boss from that time in a "stop now or I start yelling" voice.
We had an emergency and I was already working late to fix it. 8pm, only the both of us were still in the office. I was in the zone, still searching for the source of the problem and he kept coming in every 2-5 minutes offering his help, ripping every shred of concentration right off my skull, but he had absolutely no relevant technical skills, experience or information. There was nothing he could do.
In the end I hissed at him "Get your fucking ass out of here and let me do my job. This piece of shit kills my day and there is nothing you can do besides to say 'go home'."
Then he finally let me do my job.

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

*coding*

*notices coffee is cold, puts it on stove with flame burner on low, to warm up*

*sits back down, goes back to coding*

*hears fizzing popping sounds... coffee overflows and boils*

FUCK - every other day for the past month ,every single time... lol

when you really must go to the bathroom but don't want to leave your code as you are in the zone....

Follow up to my (ignorant) previous rant.

Context: Eclipse vs intelliJ
Situation: Was too comfortable with eclipse. knew shortcuts in the back of my palm. Loved the light theme. Argued with anyone who blindly believed IntelliJ is better than eclipse.
Action: Forced myself to try IntelliJ. Stepped out of my comfort zone. Got a one day code block. Changed to darcula. My eyes struggled to read. My fingers typed usual eclipse shortcuts to discover unknown windows.
Verdict: after two days of learning and not giving up. I have started loving IntelliJ and I know why.
Moral: change is good. Get out of your comfort zone ;)

Rant!

When I'm in my "zone" working please for the love of god don't stand behind me staring at me and my screen, every time you do that you make me feel that my privacy is being raped and I can't do anything about it !!

I love to work in pubs/bars, this special kind of noisy environment works so well for me. I even go "into the zone".

Lets talk about this. Is anyone else the same? Just curious.

These are my 6 reasons:

0) Beer. 🍺
1) None of the activity in a bar actually interests to me, if you know what I mean. In my house, every single noise/movement will get my attention.
2) After some time all the noise blends into a kind of "homogeneous hearing blurb". Like a mantra. Maybe there are even white/pink/brown noise benefits (guess).
3) I go to places where I enjoy the music and atmosphere.
4) I like bars and pubs anyways. I feel good in these places.
5) Beer. 🍺

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

So I was using Coffee Meet Bagel to talk to a girl who is currently travelling. We noticed that the messages were sorted out of orders with incorrect time due to the different time zone we are in.

So naturally, I sent them a big report.

Their support team replied by telling me to do the usual. Restart, update, reinstall, delete everything etc (it’s their default answer!!).

I told them I have done those.

They then rephrased my bug report and told me this is expected as the chat was between two parties with a different time so the messages are sorted out of order due to the time difference.

I guess most developer will get ticked off by that... so I sent them a few pseudo code on how chat across different time zones should have been dealt with...

Life of a developer. Debugging and coding even when on a dating app... 🤷🏽‍♂️

I have to actually like what I'm working on to get in the zone, and a nice glass of water;

You can't forget the good 'ol " fuck off, I'm coding " sign though.

Tunes throughout the work day...

Someone's interrupting:
Queen, Don't Stop Me Now

Working on same bug for hours:
Muse, Supermassive Black Hole

Merge Conflicts:
Jay Z, 99 problems

In the zone coding:
xzibit, Concentrate

All bugs squashed, deployed, going home:
Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

-= Me in the zone hacking out code during meeting with customer for an emergency change =-

-ready to deploy just need to....-

Me to myself:

"Oh ... oh shit ... I forgot who the customer is / who this is for / what time it is ... how do I ask these people on the call who the fuck they even are....?"

(｀_´)ゞ

That feeling when you finish work on Friday having built something really cool, but don't want to stop working on it.

Partly because you were enjoying it, partly because you were in the zone, and partly because you're scared that you are going to forget how it works by Monday!

Just finished a 18 hour coding day (It‘s 5:30am here). I just realized that coding is one of the few things I really get in the zone (flow state). It‘s so awesome how I can forget everything around me and be 100% focused on what I‘m doing. And the best thing: I really feel relaxed now.

In the zone, and listening to music.
Manager taps me on the shoulder.
I turn off my music, and face him.
He say "hi", and then walks away.

... Why?

When I'm in the zone and a spam text interupts me... Fuck you!

I love beer. I like trying things out of my comfort zone. German and Belgian beers are absolutely delish, them mfkers know how to make a good brew. I also like my Japanese and Mexican beers, and even though europeans shit on them all the time, there are tons of American brands I love.

But......for the life of me.....every IPA I take tastes like fucking dishwater soap. From artisanal to regular market brands, everything in between. Fuck me man I can't stand the taste.

Anyone feels the same?

Friends of mine have a new flat.

It's a nice flat. Cheap. Noone wanted it. 100 square meters.

Reason noone wanted it...

Previous owners were bastards from hell.

Really. Every motherfucking room needed to be completely renovated by the owner.

Door frames were made of wood, nice and old - at least the part that was left of them. Splinters, scratch marks, partially broken out of the wall.

2 windows needed to be fully replaced. Rest of the windows needed to be bleached, PET abrasive cleaning solution and the frames needed repair with resin as they drilled into the frames. Then treatment with sealant of course.

Yes. There was no other solution. After bleaching you recognized the windows were white. Before... Let's not talk about it.

The previous owners even managed to destroy the bathtub.

The kitchen tiles... Fat cleaner. Bleaching. Abrasion. Polishing.

Soooo.

Day of moving.

The apartment is in the 6th floor / level.

Cran / lift was ordered.

16 people wanted to come.

7 people came.

2 including myself couldn't lift heavy stuff nor walk the stairs due to health issues.

Crane broke after first try.

Today. I want to murder the previous owners. After torture and crucification.

I'm feeling levels of pain I couldn't Imagine before.

Only hate and beer let's me keep my shit together.

I REALLY didn't think after renovating and cleaning the flat for my friends in the last several weeks that it could get worse.

Boy. I was wrong.

Thanks for letting me vent here. I really feel devastated currently -.-

And I need to help them tomorrow, too.

Bikini Atoll, tchernobyl and every other atom bomb desaster Zone combined looks better than the chaos in their flat.

Everyone who could lift shoved everything inside.

I solo carried everything that wasn't too large in the room and then, as every room looked like desaster, completely managed the kitchen (cleaning, unpacking, trash, placing everything where it belongs and so on) :( :(

!dev

I come from a small shitty valley where all that people want to achieve is getting approved for loans to buy more cows and shit.. My only friend comes from there as well but he’s different, more like me.. build a life, get out and pursuit something better and bigger..
We grew up smoking everything we could and drinking everything we got because what else are we gonna do, put shit on fire? Been there, done that.. it sucks growing up on the poop hole of the world.
We both left that shithole and started careers but he’s throwing it all out the window.. he’s getting caught with weed, DUI and shit. just a few years ago he got off of more serious drugs.. He built a career and shit for about 10 years but right now he’s just throwing it all away because drugs are in his comfort zone. But he has to go give Pias samples for a while now and if he doesn’t stop he is not getting his license back and the unemployment insurance won’t even pay him because (although he lost the job because of Covid) they said it’s because he smokes weed.
Without the license goes his career as he’s a service electrician.

So fucking hurtful to see, man.
And so hard to accept that he won’t listen and than I’m not his dad who can tell him what to do..

90% of the kids I grew up with who managed to leave that shit hole ended up as homeless junkies.. I guess I’m happy to have the mindset to not end up like them.. and that’s really all it is, the mindset is the only difference (which is complex in itself of course like parenting and stuff)

24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.

25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.

Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️

At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

How do you get in the zone?

Distraction behavior is my worst enemy. I'm productive once I'm coding, but I will do everything under the sun before I start.

Any tips or tricks you use to overrule your lizard brain?

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

I became a programmer so that I could have the privilege of working remotely. So I am at home, my mom's place that is. I can never get in the "concentration zone" first thing in the morning, because before I know it, my mother and sister are having some stupid heated up argument about clothes and shit, and it bothers me anyway through my headphones -.-

Now I think I'd rather work in an office.

Sitting on the toilet seat
.
.
.
Gets me in the zone

Fixing bugs in programming is like scoring a touchdown when you really didn't even know you had the ball, or where the end zone is.

When you're in the optimizing code zone

Hey DevRant Fam! Hope everyone is doing very well! Just would like to ask, for awhile now i have been focusing on languages such as c++, C#, Java, and little bit of python the others I mentioned before were mainly from Uni, but I’d like to step out of my comfort zone a little, I’m interested in learning things such as “NodeJS”.

I actually haven’t laid much of a finger on JS so i do not know much, and i also see things such as Nodejs, react are very popular and would like to step my foot in the door, what would you guys suggest and or recommend :-) I’m open to listen to you guys and learn more!.

Hope everyone is doing well wherever you may be!

Thank you 😊
Milo

Best/worst career choices.

Worst: working overtime and performing awesome feats of superhuman strength to the point of being burnt out and bitter. Turns out I'm just a human being. Cool.

Best: learning, implementing, pushing my comfort zone, and sharing/learning with others. Standing by my design decisions and seeing them blossom into elegant/robust solutions is so incredibly satisfying, and kinda scary. Believe in your abilities, yo.

Hmm getting in the zone huh?

Well a good poop
Mug of hot coffee
2 chocolate biscuits
Big glass of water on standby
Headphones , spotify and my metal mix

Two days ago I was so close to being single again. Reason? I was in the zone when my fiancée called, the ring of the phone jarred me so much that I contemplated smashing the phone at the wall. I didn't but just turned it off. I guess she must have called a couple more times because when we finally spoke she was so angry that she threatened to get her stuff from my place. Luckily I later got back in the zone, and luckier still, I have a girlfriend.

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

What's the point in having a relaxation/fun/chill zone/room in your company when you never have the time to use it except maybe on your lunch break? 🤔🤔

Dark-themed IDE + back-lit keyboard + coffee + headphones = best coding environment ^_^

Though there's always that one asshole who decides to talk to you Only when you're in the zone.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

Sometimes I spend entire days working dark-to-dark with my headphones on

... without even listening to anything

And if I happen to be "in the zone", after the whole day of having my headphones on and not listening to anything, I take them off and feel like it's so quiet out of a sudden. It feels like I was in a noisy discussion (with myself) whilst I was "in the zone".

Just sharing my observations :)

This is the poster I have on my door, in the hopes it would determine people from disturbing me and consequently taking me out of the zone and productivity streak I'm on. Sadly it does not work as often as I'd like it to 🙁 but I still love it 😆

So I'm in Italy, close to Milan, the biggest infected zone in the whole country.

I'm still going to work as we're in 2 people in the office and we're alone in a 90 square meters office, so no big deal after all.

My city is actually empty right now, so I'm just going from home to work speeding on my motorcycle (no really that speeding, since my motorcycle isn't that powerful)

So nothing really changed actually and I'm still working the same way I did before

When i'm in the coding zone i listen the same song on loop, is that weird?

Junior devs who are unable to use Google and don't respect your headphones, brutally pulling you out of the zone. There's a special place in hell for these guys.

Alright ladies and Gents, i find this topic very interesting but who cannot code without listening and who cannot code without silence

If your in the music listening category, what music genre hits that coding sorcery zone for you?

Seriously, a new guy joined out team and suddenly I'm out of my comfort zone and started following the pattern I used to follow. The thing he did, commented on my PR, a lot of comments.
I had this thing that hey now I can control anything right, new guy? less experienced? yes, so I don't need to be intimidated. But I realised today that I'm easily intimidated my intelligent people because I think now I am the inferior one.

I will push myself to think about it in a better way, by looking at it positively, to learn something from it.

when im in the zone and somebody says something to me and I'm like:
"yes, sure!">/dev/null

Any Stromae fans on devrant

His music get me in the zone...when code works and test pass 😅😅😅

Now, I started in a new position as a dev back in September 2020 - after some starting pleasantries like "how are you", "whats up", "how is your weekend" the working relationship with my office partner soured.

It started with asking me TOTALLY random questions while my headset was on and i was "in the zone". These were questions like: "where should I buy a car", "Why is the virus spreading so fast". I tried to answer politely but made it very clear that when the headset is on my brain and every fibre in my body is inside the code and f---ing it.

Then it escalated, she called me 9.30PM on xmas day and wondered if i needed the API we are using........ Which i most certainly did not.

Now she hates me because I asked to move to another office and was granted that request 15 minutes after asking....

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

I am not a shy person, but I still like to keep to myself, I am just not that into socialization.

Everywhere I've worked I've only made friends with those that sat very close to me, like in the neighboring cubicles or whatever, even if I didn't have any project in common with them, but my relationship with those that were working on the same project as me was strictly professional.

Recently, my employer installed a rec-room with table tennis, foosball and pool table etc. And ever since then the whole office's morale has sky rocketed, especially mine. Now, I almost always spend at least 2-3 hours down there daily playing those games and I have gotten to know and have made friends with a lot of my co-workers, something that I wouldn't have done ordinarily ever.

Now my point here is that, I've always found socialization to be a bit out of my comfort zone, I always thought it to be a bit bothersome, but it would seem that all I really needed was the right environment, it is very hard to get to know others around you in a strictly professional environment, so having dedicated places in your office for things like group activities that can help relieve stress and allow people to get to know each other better outside the work environment can be extremely helpful.

What is your GOTO song to get in the zone to code? Mine is Pagan Revolution by Elvenking 🤘

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

I wanna be a millionaire, so fuckin bad.

So, throughout this week there have been massive trials and tribulations regarding my lack of coding practice however through many nights and days coding I have almost completed the task I was set last week.

I didn't realise how out of practice I was so this posed as a big challenge for me. However I pulled through and tomorrow it will be ready to send for the interview!

I also have another test to do in vanilla php - Typical blog which would be such a doddle now I'm back in the zone. I just have to remember I'm not using Laravel!

The sense of accomplishment is real and I'm so relieved I've come this far. Maybe I will have this career of my dreams which I rightfully deserve.

Below is Stripe, doing random tests :)

So,

A) I suck at digital drawing.
B) They have not invited me to the third interview like they said they would in the second interview.
C) I am still working on the PhD application. Still think the CV is bad, the SOP sucks, and back and forth emailing professors about recommendation letters. I am not built for this, but who is. So out of comfort zone. So unrelated to actual research or brain capabilities.
D) Moving in with parents is all fun and games and "I can do this", until you get stuck inside with them for over a month because of lockdowns.

... I hope next year is going to be better...

*le me working hard, in the zone*

*a wild popup appear*

*logitech wants to update*

*I look*

*I'm annoyed, I want to continue with what I was doing*

errrhmm what was in doing again?

*Out of the zone*

Fucking update notifications

Great, I'm in the zone.
Typing like there's no tommorow.
The logic is flawless, design patterns and exception throwing everywhere
It's going to be gre.... DUN.

OH GOD A BSOD.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
Breath slowly... Just restart the machine...
PLEASE WAIT WHILE WINDOWS INSTALLS THE UPDATES

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

I'm living in the twilight zone...
These people upload and download an entire directory of files from microsoft teams as their way of version control...

And what's worse they're dragging their feet on changing over to git/github

God save me

I just felt like Google is the best player out there in terms of Companies.
Seriously, Well played Google.
This is not a negative opinion, I am just awe-struck at its tactics.
See, Google is currently the biggest name in terms of development in Android, ML and multi-platform software but no one can say it being a monopoly due to its dedication to open source community.
Recently Android emerged out to be One of the Biggest , most advanced, trusted and loved Technology . It saw great achievements, and up till 2016-17, it was at its peek. BUT when the market started shifting towards multi-platform boons and Ai, it got its hands into that too with its flutter and kotlin environment
One could have a negative opinion about this, But i can't seem to engulf the vast amounts of positive situations i see in this:
1) this IO18 (and many months before that) saw ML/AI being incorporated in Android (also the arcore, proje tango and many more attempts in the past) meaning that Android will not officially "die". It will just become an extremely encouraged platform( not just limited to mobiles) and a beginning of the robot -human reality ( a mobile is handling everything of your everyday life: chats, music apps sxhedules, alarms, and with an actively interacting ML, it won't be long when Android comes installed in a green bug lime droid robot serving you tea xD). Meanwhile the market of Windows games may shift to mobiles or typically " Android games" (remember, Android won't be limited to mobiles)
2)java may or may not die. The animations and smooth flow it seems to provide is always appreciated but kotlin seems to do so too. As for the hard-core apps, they are usually written in c++ .So java is in the red zone
3) kotlin-native and Flutter will be the weapons of future , for sure. they will be developing multi-platform softwares and will be dividing the market of softwares into platform specific softwares(having better ml/ai interactions,animations) and platform independent apps(access and use anywhere softwares).
And where does google stand?Its the lord varys of game of thrones which just supports and enhances the people in the realm. So it benefits the most . That's a company for you, ladies and gentlemen! If seen from common eyes they seem to be the best company ever and our 1 true king but it can also be a very thick fur cloak hiding their negetive policies and tactics , if any.

Well played, Google.

I've just come to my hometown for my brother's wedding. I didn't even deboard the plane and I had 10 messages from my manager to fix an issue.
Now here I am in the fucking smoking zone of the airport pushing code to gitlab at 12 in the night..!
FML

GMT/UTC
IST
ACST
CST
PST
.
.
.
.
.
Man Fuck time zones, I don't even know where I belong anymore while keeping track of all of them at once.
Fuck You In The Ass Time Zone

Today tragedy has struck, I forgot my ear phones

I couldn't get into the zone, had issues with bugs and had to listen to people breathe and make mouth noises in the train.

I had to resort to playing songs in my head which didn't draw out any distracting noises

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

I'm going to be that guy .... A lot of these rants are about code compiling first time .. Throwing away code you wrote because you didn't need it... Getting in the zone and writing a billion lines before you compile .... Am I the only freaking person here that does TDD ? My rant is wake up people ! People evangelize about it because it fucking works !

"can you please approve my PR?" yes, sure I'm happy to drop the context I built in my head, to pick up your totally different context, review your code and then rebuild my context.

I get an automated alert on slack whenever I'm requested a review on git, can't you fucking wait 20-40 mins when I'm out of the zone? Ffs.

I really hate interruptions when i'm deep in my code. Headset on and blocking out the world, then get annoyed taps on the shoulder from boss for not greeting people.
So now i'm out of the zone, browsing devrant and have pissed off the boss for being anti-social.

When you are in the zone coding and you get a call at work "asking if your busy?" :/ then being told it's not important it can wait.... So you hang up and cannot remember wtf you were in the middle of.

I am very drunk and in the zone right now for innovation.

And I just wanna ask if what can y'all imply for blockchain being integrated in agritech.

And yes I can still type like a sober mofo. Cheers

Headphones on, in the zone, deep into some heavyweight logic, blissfully unaware of the office surroundings.

Get tapped on shoulder. "hey, I've finished that easy task a deformed amoeba could have done. Want to see?"

NO!

Just drove home after working late at the office. Was kind of in the zone and didn't wanna stop.
On my way I see the police closing the road in front of me, because of a pretty bad accident that happened a couple minutes ago.
MFW Coding saved my life!

When you make a coffee, get in the zone, forget about its existence, take a drink it and find that it's gone cold.. Then chug it and go make yourself another.

Fucking corporate bullshit, I was coding (mostly creating bugs and pulling my hair off) all night on my free time (I'm on night shifts I keep the schedule when I have my days off) and at the moment I was making huge progress on my project, I gotta go to sleep to go back to work 4h later to follow a fucking 2h training on team efficiency and cohesion, in other words, how to waste 2h in a useless meeting and not getting it back + interrupting the only night I was in the zone, I'm so tired of this....

So, rant!

So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.

Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.

It's a big deal for the corporation.

And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...

Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.

To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...

Pointless.

It's pointless.

But I guess this is why you get payed.

Work.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.

I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.

Two brainfarts that resulted in... a lot of pain

I had been coding all day, ~6hrs. I was in the zone, so I hadn't saved to git. It was all uncommitted changes (you see where this is going...)

Brainfart#1: The code used the "Contact" class, but for some reason my hands typed "Product" in this ONE line.

Brainfart#2: I became aware of Brainfart#1, so I changed the variable from "Product" to "Contact". However, I instinctively pressed F2, "Rename Symbol", instead of just changing the variable I was using. Now ALL of the references to "Product" were to the "Contact" class instead, across all of our code.

I finished coding. I committed and pushed the changes, closed the IDE, and left the desk for a snack. When I came back, the automated tests were failing due to an import error. That's when I noticed my mistake. I couldn't do Ctrl+Z because I had closed the editor. I had to change the names one by one across all of our code. "Contact" and "Product" are probably our two most used classes 😭

IDK, man.. It feels like we're stuck.

Looking back at 19xx we got the Moon landing, basically, all the computer protocols that are the essence of what we have today, all the inventions' ideas patented (started even earlier -- 18xx), ...

To me, it feels like scientific progress was at its peak in the past 200 years and has now slowed down considerably.

IDK, perhaps I'm living under a rock, but all I can see is building consumerism on top of what's been discovered/created in the past 200 years and not actually creating/doing anything new and original and actually useful.

Don't you feel like we're stuck in the age where we're enjoying the fruits of discoveries made by our grandparents and are too lazy to make new ones?

If so, then what's next? When are we going to (if ever) get bored by the comfort zone we are in now? What follows then? Progress or regress? Or the MadMax IRL?

What do you lads think?

i'm so in the zone that i was expecting an algorithm when i saw "canon in C" today.

In the zone coding... oh what's this? A text from the wife? Apparently now's the time to resolve last night's fight.

When your in the zone and somebody interrupts you...

Funny thing the brain is.

TL;DR; being in the zone is nice. But there is another level of it and, fuck it, I'm loving it!!!

level 0: phased-out, relaxed state. Not focused on anything in particular. Just going with the flow

level 1: aware of the situation and of what's going on, not engaging too much

level 2: alert, ready to react. Constant concentration

level 3: THE ZONE. Time continuum is broken by concentration on the task in front of you - while working on it, time passes faster by magnitudes than when you're in any lower level. Surroundings and periphery do not exist. On;y the task currently in hand exists. Restroom breaks can wait.

level 4: body works on the task by itself. Any cognitive engagement with any of it will only make matters worse. The body knows it better, just let it do the work - let your consciousness sit back and relax, think about something nice. It's a sort of biological version of DMA (direct memory access), bypassing the CPU.

I've only reached level 4 several times, briefly and only while playing BeatSaber. The boxes are flying at me and hands just hit 'em the right way by themselves. Only after the hit, do I realise what my hands did and how cool it actually is. If I try to intentionally look at the boxed and aim for them, I mess it all up. And it's not like muscle memory - level 4 copes with any non-Camellia Expert level, regardless of whether have I played it in the past many times or just a few, several months ago.

I love that feeling!

"You're a programmer, dammit!" Damian Conway

I'm at a seminar given by Conway right now, so much stuff I wish I had heard before about how to be more productive and how to stay "in the zone" while programming without distractions. If any of you ever gets a chance of following one of his seminars (he also wrote books), it's highly recommended.

At night is when my creativity starts flowing like a motherfucker. The moment when all the tasks are done for the day and you can start working on your own projects and just lay back and smoke (or drink, whichever you prefer) and zone the fuck out with some good music. Oh and if I've gotten a good work out in that day, then there's no stopping me.

I had no plans to even create an admin panel for my own small project but last night I made one just to make it look professional. After that, I got an idea for a separate project which I started working on. I usually write my ideas down so that I don't get into a complete project cluster fuck with 50 half completed projects, but sometimes you get that golden one that you have to start (currently those are the only two unfinished projects I got).

Earphones on.

Notifications off.

A boss who is the most inefficient boss ever. No, yours is not, mine is, trust me.

In the middle of coding, never in the zone for obvious reasons. A workmate wants me to call him to discuss stuff as he is working from home, which I wish I were.
I keep coding and decide to call him later.

My boss interrupts me again to TELL ME IF I CAN CALL MY WORKMATE.
Whyyyyyy
FML.

Argh, time to drop out of the zone to go stuff calories in my face again. Just hook me up to an IV already and let me make cool shit!

Ps @dfox it'd be cool if we could take a picture to post straight from app.

Anyone have success dealing with nondevs and explaining the “zone” and to not interrupt if I’m programming and would like to share their techniques? I’m the only developer in the company I work for and all my coworkers/bosses don’t get it and even give me grief about using headphones in the office. I’ve actually gone into vacant offices off the open floor plan to try and program uninterrupted, but I don’t know how long I can keep that up without catching flak.

When you're in the zone, writing your genius down before you forget it, and you smartwatch reminds you to go stand and move around. 😑

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

The feeling when you're in the zone for some important tasks and your coworkers just come and seat besides your table, start bullshitting each other with their flights delay stories. I wish there is a dismiss button for this kind of occasions.

When you're clearly in the zone:

Excluding merges, 1 author has pushed 22 commits to master and 22 commits to all branches. On master, 70 files have changed and there have been 16,339 additions and 321 deletions.

I made a huge mistake

I got "in the zone", I was coding so nice and fast and everything was working, so I didn't want to commit every single minute and then have to go back, cherrypick commits squash them revert them etc.

So I didn't commit anything at all... Now if I were to commit the commit would modify 2 files, create 26 new files and delete 2 files.

The changes include moving from JS to TS, implementing a desearialization scheme, implementing a server class and wrapper client classes, with common type interfaces for different requests...

So now I need to save my changes somewhere, go back to the last commit and slowly incorporate the changes.

I'm dumb

At home: a glass of nice single malt whiskey, headphones on with some chill background music and that's all I need.

At work: First half an hour up to one hours goes into deciding what to do / waking up and having the first 2-4 cups of coffee.

Headphones on with some chill background music and I get into the zone for a quick moment before it's lunch time and it takes up to 1h after the lunch break to get back to the zone and multiple coffee cups.

In the afternoon I usually get into the zone and real speed with my work and quite often almost forget to go home :/

I work on many projects at work. There's divisions of teams and each team typically has one project. Each one of those projects have weekly Sprint meetings.

That's great! For the team. That means each team has one meeting a week so it's not too disruptive for those individuals.

Me on the other hand? I've got my hand in all the buckets. I'm on every team. I'm the only person on every team. This means I get to go to every meeting.

Let me rephrase that:
This means I -have- to go to every. Single. Meeting.

Which means I have a meeting every. Single. Day. Even if I didn't touch that project that week.

It is literally THE biggest waste of time. I sit there in a 1-2 hour long meeting saying absolutely nothing, not even being spoken to. I could be working on other projects.

And these meetings normally interrupt something I'm working on. Conveniently in the middle of me being in my zone. It makes me completely un-motivated to work for the hour before the meeting because why bother if I'm just going to get interrupted? And then it takes an hour to get back into everything after the meeting because everyone is fooling around or complaining about the meeting.

So that's three hours of my 8 hour work day completely wasted.

Oh man setting up postfix and dovecot (plus things like rspamd) is a pain in the ass.
But it's worth it, having your own mail server is just quite a good feeling.
Now I just need to find out how to get it to pass the spam filter of Google, despite the server and the DNS zone being well-configured (better than my school's mail server according to tests, but that one still manages to pass. I have no idea why.)

A little reflection on the relationship between me/my dad/computer:

When i was younger my dad showed and taught me how to work on his (10 - 15yrs+ old) laptop running windows xp. Soon we got a simple desktop pc (those ones that took nearly a minute to start). i remember my dad sayin something like "don't download anything cause (the pc will brake/it will be a virus/...)", I don't remember exactly ... but i know that i still did it (being fucking nervous😅) and it went well😌. later me and my little sister would go to "spielaffe.de" several times until getting some kind of "virus"😅😅.
Time passed and i got passionate about pc's (programming, trying Ubuntu, reading about internals of a pc,...). It didn't take long that i passed my dad's knowledge and so here i am studying CS😎.
In the end, regarding my dad:
first he was the master i looked up to, then he became the buddy i talked to and asked for problems, then ... he remained the light user who would like to return to his windows xp era and asks me first as his personal google when something happens out of his "comfort-zone"😅😌.
And sometimes i believe my dad is becoming incompetent for pc's😂😅

Playing ATM8 Minecraft modpack. I don't know if I have burnout, but I just want to play and zone out after work. On my breaks I look up ways to do things in the game. The game is like this huge lego set to play with tons of different takes on modded minecraft. I can solve the same problem a hundred different ways. Some of those ways will cause lag, some are slow, some are just fast. I can solve things in game using programming languages as well. It all comes down to creativity and experimentation. You can also blow up shit. That is always fun.

An actual text from my CS Human-Machine Interfaces book:

"How do users react when a vending machine "eats" their money and doesn't give the product? Most likely, they will kick the machine in hopes of it returning him the money. Therefore, if we build a machine which has a "Cancel" button which returns the money in the lower part of the machine (the "kick zone") we would be improving the usability of the system a lot'

1st reaction: Wait, what the fuck?
2nd reaction: It ain't stupid if it works, I can't argue with that 🤔

Just give me anything BUT coding to work on and I'm instantly in the zone for coding. End of Year Review, access reviews for Audit, any other kind of paperwork, which is most of what my job is these days, and I have some brilliant insight into a problem on my back burner, or a brilliantly simple way to implement a feature I've been stewing on for weeks.

It's my procrastinating nature to not want to do the thing I HAVE to do.

Maybe I should volunteer for more paperwork?

For the one I currently have. Spent about 2 weeks looking to get as much of my PHP skillset in the right place since I knew PHP was their main technology as well as JS, C# and VB.NET, we seldom use them tbh, and it is mostly extension or maintenance stuff, so I focused on PHP.

I was not panicking, I rarely ever do, but my body tends to disagree with my state of mind and I can feel myself trembling in certain situations, such as the interview.

The interview was on Monday and my last day of preparation was Sunday (obviously) so what I did was drank a lot of beer and played videogames, I just wanted to take my mind off things. I was, and have always been annoyingly confident in myself and could not understand why I was feeling so nervous internally.

Everything went away when the manager came to greet me, lovely looking gal with an awesome sense of style and a big smile, we clicked instantly and to this day the place is kinda like my second home, as hectic as it is to work in an institution of this size it is really my peace and quiet zone. The entire I.T department is a big family, before the pandemic we would go to bbqs together all the time, would go to a friend's ranch to shoot shit and just chill, parties and gatherings, it really is a nice place to be at and they take the "we are family" very fucking seriously, I fucking love it. The boss lady ain't here no more, but she recommended me for the position and well, here I am.

I severely hope everyone here finds the same kind of place, there are a lot of assholes in this industry and a lot of places that seem very into the idea of making you absolutely miserable with no chance of leveling up, I know because all other jobs previous to this place was the same way for me.

Have faith, keep them chins up, and don't ever fucking let anyone make you think you are something you are not. You glorious beautiful basterds!

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

I swear to god, the next time someone brings in sh*t to a meeting again that's totally off-topic, I'll grab a nerf gun and turn this place into a f*cking war zone!

Official documentation > StackOverflow.

StackOverflow sometimes has well-grounded and elaborate explanations on a question by well-meaning and knowledgeable developers, but oftentimes the answers also contain outdated or 'dirty' solutions and so it's always to be taken with a grain of salt.

However, in cases like the official Spring documentation, the IETF RFC's and the MDN, those provide a correct explanation to the problem, even if it requires some reading around. When it comes to serious and correct work, I favor these over the bro-zone that is StackOverflow.

I remember I couldn't compile a clean Xamarin Forms project on Visual Studio because of a System.TimeZoneInfoNotFoundException. The workaround?, changed my time zone to Central time USA-Canada. So apparently it is not allowed to use Xamarin in the third world...

when you're in the zone coding away and the coo comes into your office to kick you out because he wants to go home and he has to set the building's alarm before leaving

How do I get in the coding zone 🤔 I get buzzed off my tits with caffeine then loud music and code all night

Thought that's how we all do it

Have you ever thought "I'll listen to X playlist/album/song, but first I'll figure out this Y project related thing", but ended up working without any music for way longer than expected without even realizing it?

what music do you like to listen to when you're coding (or working in general)? what gets you into the zone?

our team are responsible to build backend restful API for other team to look up data in DB.
the consumer team just sit beside us.
the interface definition came from our pm in a different time zone. btw he did not have any programming background.
and he insisted that just build what he said and ignore the noise from the consumer team. because each interface change should be considered as new features and need him to prioritize and create user story and he will review the schema with the pm from consumer team and so called architecture who did not coding real shit for years.
we ended up with building shit code not useable by our real consumer.
yes he do manage to keep our team busy building worthless shit and accomplishmented lots of jira items to show we have value to change a useless shit into very hard to use shit

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for 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.

I don't have to get in to the zone as I'm in the zone all the time. I sleep and dream code, eat code, actually write code, workout code...

Ah, Visual Studio Code—our trusty sidekick in the coding trenches. But wait, what's this? A delightful new feature designed to keep us on our toes: the 'Disable All Extensions for This Workspace' command. Because who doesn't love a good surprise, especially when it involves disabling all the tools we painstakingly set up?

Picture this: you're in the zone, about to format your document as usual. You hit Ctrl + Shift + P, type 'for', and expect the familiar 'Format Document' to greet you. But no! Instead, 'Disable All Extensions for This Workspace' has decided to make a guest appearance at the top of the list. How thoughtful! It's as if VS Code is saying, "Hey, let's make things interesting by turning off all your extensions without warning."

And the fun doesn't stop there. Once you've accidentally disabled all your extensions, there's no magical 'undo' button to save the day. Nope, you get the joy of manually sifting through your extensions list, re-enabling each one like it's 1999. And let's not forget the mandatory restarts—one to unload the extensions and another to load them back up. Because who doesn't love losing their undo history and breaking their workflow?

So, dear VS Code developers, thank you for adding a dash of unpredictability to our coding sessions. After all, who needs stability and consistency when we can have random command roulette?

Anybody else sometimes do not like being a team lead?

I am the senior most person in my team (in fact took interviews of the rest of them). While I love the work and the team, I sometimes feel that I do not get to code that much. I am mostly assigning work, or helping others. Even if I get in the zone, there is always someone who needs some assistance or some meeting, which breaks the flow. Also the tension about non technical stuff like salary increments, giving feedback and assigning backups. I do love it mostly, but my ass is nearly always on fire. The team loves me though. I am still young, took this responsibility because the owner trusted me with this (he has no complaints). Thoughts ?

Been in the zone for a while..emm a long while...a pretty long while.

Need human interaction. So, umm Hiiii !!!

When I'm in the zone, someone comes to talk to me and my brain forgets how to make words into a sentence.

I lose all respect for people trying to schedule meetings with me when they write the time zone initialism incorrectly.

It is well into EDT. EST technically means you want to meet an hour earlier and that you live in a different time zone than everyone else on the east coast of the United States. But I'm just going to assume that you don't remember that really annoying daylight savings time shit we have to do twice a year and show up in EDT.