If I have headphones in
and I'm intentionally away from everyone
and it looks like I'm working
and you want to talk to me

Here's some advice:
DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME.

If you're curious why, I've compiled a list of points:

1) DON'T
2) FUCKING
3) TALK
4) TO
5) ME

Also, see Fig. 1 below:

(Fig. 1)
| DONT
| FUCKING
|
| TALK
| TO
|
| ME
---------------------------------------
Don't fucking talk to me!

Son of a bitch!

If only more manager would think like this! Constant interruptions are poison to the performance of any dev team.

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 :

When your music is just right and you're coding without interruptions and feel like a wizard.

So many interruptions!
So many distractions!

I just want to fucking finish this refactor. I dont' care about meetings, texts, bloody office game tournaments, lunchtime, gossip, or people trying to be friendly. Just let me fucking work!

If you see me rocking out with my headphones on and working furiously, seriously, just don't fucking interrupt. I'll bite.

Turns out my 4chan image scraper has been running for 6 months without interruptions. I now have 106k pictures and webms of highly questionable content on my harddrive. This is how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Attack is the best defence! I read my emails in the morning and figure out whether there's some action for me. When I go and get my second coffee, I drop by the PM's office and have a short chat with him.

Where I am in the projects, whether there's stuff from other tasks or unexpected actions, how long that might take, whether schedules are still OK, whether I need him to take care of some customer communication, these things. Usually less than 5 minutes.

The kicker is that he mostly doesn't interrupt me because I instead interrupt him - unless he is highly busy, in which case he just says "sorry, later", same as I would do.

It's a win-win because I can schedule the interruptions while he enjoys that he doesn't have to ask around.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

> 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.

Me: Alright today I'm going to work on X, Y, and Z because that's what we planned yesterday.

(10 Minutes into the day)

Boss: We need you to work on A, B, and C. These need to be done today.

Me: What about X, Y, and Z?

B: You have new priorities.

(30 Minutes later)

B: What's your status on X, Y and Z? You think it'll be done today?

M: (Forwards email about new priorities)

B: I'm coming down to talk with you.

WHY.

IF LIVES DEPEND ON A SYSTEM

1. Code review, collaboration, and knowledge sharing (each hour of code review saves 33 hours of maintenance)

2. TDD (40% — 80% reduction in production bug density)

3. Daily continuous integration (large code merges are a major source of bugs)

4. Minimize developer interruptions (an interrupted task takes twice as long and contains twice as many defects)

5. Linting (catches many typo and undefined variable bugs that static types could catch, as well as a host of stylistic issues that correlate with bug creation, such as accidentally assigning when you meant to compare)

6. Reduce complexity & improve modularity  -- complex code is harder to understand, test, and maintain

-Eric Elliott

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

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.

Developer vs Tester

(Spoiler alert: developer wins)

My last developent was quite big and is now in our system testing department. So last week i got every 20 minutes a call from the tester, that something did not work as expected. For about 90% of the time i looked at the testing setup or the logs and told him, that the data is wrong or he used the tool wrong. After a couple of days i got mad because of his frequent interruptions. So I decided to make a list. Every time he came to me with an "error" i checked it and made a line for "User Error" or "Programming Error". He did not liked that much, because the User Error collum startet to grow fast:

User Errors: ||||| |||
Programming Errors: |||

Now he checks his testing data and the logs 3 times before he calls me and he hardly finds any "errors" anymore.

Project manager: We have 13weeks for this project. We have promised the client.

Me: okay, why wasnt I consulted on that commitment?

Project Manager: yeah.... we have to do it

Me: okay, if we have 2 dedicated backend and one full time frontend - ONLY on this project.

Project manager: (with the face of lies) yes yes sure we can do that.

6 weeks later, after continuous interruptions. Frontend is behind because he was only on the project to an amount of 2 weeks of the 6 weeks.

Project manager: Are we still on time?

Me: *looks around for prank cameras* no the f#*k we not

Project manager: can we put in weekends?

Me: its 2019 bro, that ain't happening

*But because I am a nice guy, and dont like taking Ls, we will have it ready. Just not gonna tell the project manager, he deserves a few sleepless nights *

Heard a new euphemism today for interruptions: “spontaneous collaboration”
Laugh or cry...

PM had a bad habit of breaking me out of my zone so I had a talk about what that means.

I explained the idea behind how interruptions can cost productivity. He seemed to get it, or so thought. Said he'd message me as to not break the zone. Good good!

He messages me with a question, then walks over to ask if the message broke my zone.

🤔

Worst coding interruptions are, by far, instant messages. Especially messages I don't care about. People who tag an entire channel when they shouldn't. The Diversity and Inclusion channel that everyone has to join that tags the entire channel, all 2000 members, at least once a day to share some blog post nobody wants to read. Other employees sending "Hi" to me and expecting an immediate response even though I don't know what they want yet. People who think Slack is an alternative to our support ticket system.

I am often tempted to just sign out for the day, but unfortunately some of the messages are actually important...

Rant #1:
Why everyone and their toy cars gotta be jumping on the bed when I’m trying to sleep?

Rant #2:
For months now, I get bleary eyed and tired every time I look at work. Focusing and being productive is almost impossible. I’m cheery and alert, then sit down, open my editor, and find I can’t focus. Moments later I feel like I need a nap.

Rant #3:
I get interrupted an average of every 3-5 minutes, basically every day, all day long. The more this happens, the more tired and angry I become. I often have to resort to yelling, throwing toys that appear on my desk/keyboard, and blasting loud music I don’t want to hear through noise canceling headphones.

—————

Is it any wonder I can’t focus or think or do anything but feel like I’m falling asleep? Is it any wonder I’m perpetually angry and frustrated?

I can sort of fix the interruptions by locking myself away in my monster’s room. But I’m still so tired and bleary and can’t focus. I don’t know what to do, or even what I can do. Vacation didn’t help. Another would doubtlessly be just as effective, and certainly wouldn’t improve my boss’s view of my performance.

Ugh.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

-"it will just take you 10 minutes!" For the love of... stop timeframing my job a**h****s!

I think I'm falling in love. With TDD.

I used to be very skeptic about it. You know, the usual reasons: it takes longer to deliver, constant "flow" interruptions, etc, etc. But ever since I've tried it I'm nothing but happy about my choice :)

I'm moving forward, I'm not making any regressions, I'm no longer afraid to make any changes in my code as I know tests will show what exactly I break,.. And most importanty, I have all use-cases with corner-cases defined and "explained" in the code... No more do I have to search in Confluence for how this exact scenario should behave. Everything is here. Everything's in the tests.

It's amazing!

Yeah, it DOES take longer to deliver so if you're hardcore Agile living by "Ship it as soon as it compiles" TDD might be too slow. But if you prefer knowing when your code is covering all the use cases w/o any errors -- TDD is the way.

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

Worst codding interruptions? That's easy: fucking meetings.

You know they're coming up. They start to drain your focus. You double check the clock/start time. You ask yourself if you were supposed to prepare anything. You typically waste an hour of your time over something that could have been a fucking e-mail (or doesn't even matter at all). You come back to your desk, and your focus is broken and you wonder when the next meeting is coming up.

WHILE DOING SOME PROCESS, SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT INTERRUPTED MY PROCESS AND HAD ME EXPRESS AN EMOTION OF ANGER! DO YOU ALSO EXPERIENCE INTERRUPTIONS THAT CAUSE ANGER, FELLOW HUMANS?

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?

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

That moment when you enter the elusive state of mind where you're getting serious shit done aannnnnnnddd you're interrupted. FUCK!

!Rant

How do you deal with open space offices?

I find it quite difficult to focus, the constant chatting, the constant questions, phone ringing, surprise meeting, more question, arrays of interruptions and questions again. I believe I would be a lot more productive if left alone in the total, undiscontinued silence.

Have you found your escape, your zen, your inner focus? Please share, I need some ideas

In a previous job as a system developer I had an office with a door. Unfortunately, the boss of the company had heard of "open door"-policies, and insisted on all physical doors being open all the time so he could pop his head in unannounced every 15 minutes with random chit chat and to see how work was going... :x

1. I don't have to use headphones to listen to music. Can listen in speakers and avoid my ears being sweaty
2. No random interruptions from anyone. Interruptions are usually from slack messages and emails which I can decide when to look at
3. Have a solid 1 or 2 hours for coding (because of the above 2 reasons)
4. The time spent in commuting is instead spent on nap or relaxing

I've started to do some time tracking and just after one day of doing it I noticed that I can't get more that 10 mins working without someone interrupting me.

I love to help and hate to say no, but this is killing my productivity and delaying my work.

Most of the time my help isn't really needed too. "Did you clear the cache?" "Did you run yarn install after pulling?" "Let me look at the stack trace/error message." Sentences like these are all I need to say most of the time.

Did my coworkers get lazy because I'm there to help? Should I start say "not now" more often? Or should I just look for a better team somewhere else?

Most Incompetent co-worker. It was me during my first job. Not humble bragging or some shit. I was straight out fucking incompetent during my first job.
Hear me out.
I graduated my diploma course specialising in networks(from computer to cellular/telecom networks) but I did a few programming courses and my internship was at a lab - did iOT stuffs with raspi and arduinos. I am a A+ student so was giving priority to choose a better internship place. Fun time. So I fell in love with programming. As soon as i graduated I applied for a Java job. Got a job at a domain name reseller/hosting company using java EE. Remember my programming = very basic/OOP concepts/basic SQL knowledge. That's it.
I am that little childish fucker who thought he knew everything and I kept interrupting my coworkers with stupid questions.
Same time, I was under the darkest moments of my life with some family drama/tension headaches.
2 months into the job, one coworker really got pissed off with my interruptions and bluntly told me "*my name,you are stupid aren't you"
The manager was a really nice guy. I will forever thanks him for his advices. He knew I was struggling with family shits and gave me another 3 months probation period to redeem myself. But I gave up. That was back in 2015.
It was a great place I fucked it up. But I learnt precious life lessons. I was young,stupid and didn't know how to handle stress.
I thanks myself for not quitting programming after that experience.

Parents had asked me to assemble some furniture, fix the pc and so some other "brain" work

Furniture
Me: *Stops to check something in the manual*
Parents: Are you stuck? Maybe try assembling the door upside down
Me: No, it is the right way
Parents: *Ramble, ramble*
Me: Just let me work, shut the hell up

PC
Me: *Checks cables, checks logs, ect*
Parents: Maybe it is the problem with (insert random tech word there)?
Me: No.
Parents: W h y?
Me: Let me finish, it isnt that, (tech word) isnt even correlated to that
Parents: But, but, you never talk to me... (ramble ramble)
Me: Get the hell outta the room
*Argumemt breaks out*
30min later

Me: *Finnaly manages to fix it after the heated argument*
Me: I finished, everything works
Parents: Great, but you are mean
Me: I managed to finish the work in 15 min, you dont even have enough strengh to call for a specialist, (but knowing me i wouldnt allow it anyway because a lot of them make a poor job), so in order to make it properly and to relieve you from learning how to fucking google i want you to stay out of this so i can just finish my job. Your interruptions waste time and i dont need your help at all. Everytime you tried to fix stuff you always managed to fuck shit up when you tried to do anything.
Parents: (ramble)
Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP, LEAVE MY ROOM
Parents:
Me:
Parents: *Leave the room*

1h later i get 25$ for the job perfectly done

Sometime i wish they were tech independent, so i can save my sanity and time but money is nice.

If anybody tries to argue that i should respect them:
I tried talking to them nicely countless times through years, but they always force themself to a project and they always fuck shit up because of it. I tried telling them about my problems and they tried helping me but after it didnt work they retured to the old: "it is the pc fault" and similar. Even if they couldnt help me i juat wanted them to understand my situation, but no that didnt happened.

First i fix my life then i will fix the relationship

But but greeeeeg, relationships should be cared for always!
Eat shit. There is time for family and there is time for me especialy when my life can suddenly colapse due to my problems.

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

Does anyone else feel you have to do the coding part of development outside of office hours, because the interruptions + even anxiety of being interrupted prevents you from getting into the zone? If I have free time at the weekend I can get into work coding and it's great - I'm so productive - isn't this how work would want me to be 5 days a week? And yet, somehow, the work environment doesn't allow it.

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

Phone rings...
'I'm calling about the car accident you had recently that wasn't your fault.'

Me: 'Yup, ok. I'm surprised at how quickly you got through!'

Them: 'Could you tell me when the accident was?'

Me: 'This morning before work'

Them: 'And whereabouts did this happen?'

Me: 'My living room'

Them: 'That's strange. Were you driving at the time?'

Me: 'No, I was on foot, I generally am in my living room.'

Them: 'Were you injured?'

Me: 'I sustained some pain in my foot'

Them: 'So you were hit by a car? Do you remember the make and model?'

Me: 'Yes, it was a red Ford, but I'm not sure which model.'

Them: 'Did you get the registration number?'

Me: 'I'm not sure it had one. The car was quite small'

Them: 'Did you get the driver's name?'

Me: 'It was James Jones'

Them: 'Could you describe the driver?'

Me: 'About two foot tall, blonde hair, green top, dungarees'.

Them: 'Did you know the driver?'

Me: 'Yes, he's my two year old son'

Them: ...(click)...

It really is a great feeling to be able to put your headphones in and lose yourself in the code for a few hours without interruptions (except for devRant of course).

My best skill is problem is:
*** problem solving ***
Really, at least in all the teams I've been working until now, I'm always surprised by myself. How fast I am in spotting the problem root and find or suggest a solution. Even on things I have almost no knowledge.

My worst skill is:
*** problem solving ***
Being so effective make me everybody's slave.
Everybody always rely on me for any kind of weird shit. If I try to "outsource" the problem, after one day it will bounce back on me and I solve it in no time.

So I've no time for anything else that solving other people's problems.
Constant interruptions and context switching.
And worst, my bosses don't understand why I don't finish my tasks. And I cannot blame my team.

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.

It’s still WFH in India. So, everything at home is a distraction. Indian households are noisy ones. Heavy traffic, loud music, constant interruptions by family members.

Appreciating the fact that I can code in my pyjamas without people judging me though.

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!

Been sick all day, got to work from home. Kid goes down for a nap, my wife leaves to run her errands. Finally starting to get into my groove after blah-ing most of the day. So of course my kid decides to wake up earlier than expected. :P

Ability to handle context switching (jumping between tasks and interruptions) like it didn't even happen.

!rant

Yay!! On a well needed vacation... here's hoping no interruptions from work... :O

What's the difference between interruption and meetings?
Meetings are planned interruptions.

Was watching a movie with other people. But when it got to the climax....

Java. Flippin'. Update.

"20 million devices uses..." "Shuddup."

I'm trying to build VoIP into my browser-based game, and holy shit are sound processing people bad at explaining stuff.
Every stackoverflow answer has badly named variables, noone names the algorithms they're using (which makes research near impossible), and literally every single Web Audio API pipeline I have seen so far contains at least one unexplained effect with no parameters, but it's a different effect each time.
One guy had implemented some kind of smoothing for catching up with the stream after interruptions (where the playback speed is proportional to how far we're behind the intended latency), without ever mentioning it anywhere. And this is meant to be a basic example!

Spend nearly a full eight-hour day working on a piece of code that, while not at all trivial, would have taken probably two hours start to finish if not for the constant stream of interruptions bombarding me...

...but then, 10 minutes before quitting time, build and run it for the first time...

...AND IT FREAKING WORKS!

I'm never more scared than when ~1000 lines of code works the very first time it's run. Makes me want to check if I've signed any documents presented as a "deal" by a guy with a fiddle in a southern state :)

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "Yes! I can't WAIT for tomorrow to begin! I'm gonna make SO much progress on that personal project that I just KNOW is gonna change the world and make me a billionaire! My time is now!"

Next day, 9am, first call of the day: "Ugh, waking up SUUUUUCKS! But, fine, just gotta get through the workday, then it's beast mode time!"

5pm: "Ugh, that day SUCKED... meeting after meeting, constant interruptions for the few minutes I got to hack code, SO many emails, and hey, good day, only five new things pushed down from corporate to bang my head against! Feelings pretty mentally exhausted, but it's all good, I fortunately love this programming stuff, so first dinner, then a little exercise, spend some time with the family, and then it's time to COOOODE!"

10pm: "Ok, house is FINALLY quiet (fucking dog), just a little noise from my daughter staying up way too late again... kinda spent, but this project still excites me, and I may not get as much done as I was hoping, but fine, I can still make some tangible progress and that's what matters. Maybe just one last quick check of email, Reddit, make sure there's no new Hot Ones or Honest Trailers I gotta watch, update IDEA plugins and see what's new, then it's work time! Nothing can stop me now!"

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "SHIT! I GOT FUCK ALL DONE AGAIN! GO DAAAAAAAMN IIIIIT!!!!"

Working from home once a week, it's my most productive workday by far. No annoying interruptions; well except for my cat who insists on being in my face all day (but honestly, I can live with that).

How can I stop colleagues from interrupting me every 5 minutes while I'm working/debugging in a polite way? I'm really annoyed, and I'm starting to become rude, but even that does not stop them.

MORE WEBDEV ADVENTURES

Took a break for a while due to personal stuff. Just got a job (have to get a stupid work permit from school first to actually be able to work tho), had some shit happen with two close friends that now hate me. Right now I'm upset about something that another really good friend did. So I've been doing some webdev to distract myself for a bit.

So I'm turning my URL bar that I had into a little command bar. It'll be what I use to configure stuff along with URLS and shit. I was building a little config menu that I really hated doing, was just becoming too much of a mess. Currently changing the look of it just a bit, then I'm gonna work on the functionality of it later.

Made my weather divs dynamically generated. Turned like 65 lines in the HTML file to ~20 lines of JavaScript that makes that ~65 lines. And it turns out that it doesn't really affect the loading time at all, which was my original worry. My next task for that is to save the weather predictions so the script doesn't have to grab a whole 14kb file every reload (I know, that part's a little bad). The entire page with the icons and all comes out to ~30kb so far. The icons make up about half of that, but they'll never all be in use because only 5 are on screen at any time and there are 7 total. Plus the fact that one may be in use multiple times (like this very moment actually).

Then I want to have an RSS reader which I've been putting off for a while now. Trying to get everything else done before I do that.

At this very moment, the page takes about 1.4 seconds to load. I'm trying to avoid putting anything I don't need in it. Like I'm using vanilla everything. No frameworks or anything. But that's just my personal preference.

I'll make sure to share it with you guys when I have everything built and functional. I've had a lot of interruptions while doing this. My personal life tends to get in the way of shit I try to do, because I let it get to me.

Anyways I'm just rambling at this point. I fucking love you guys

I got a REALLY nice compliment from my dev team today. But first, the setup...

Tuesday night, I pushed some changes before I left that totally borked the build today when my team pulled changes (this is an off-shore team, so we more or less work opposite hours). Fortunately, my team dealt with it easy enough since (a) it was pretty obvious what happened, and (b) my commit message had enough information to help them know for sure, and they just reverted one file and were good to go for the day (they didn't fix the problem, left that for me to do, which is proper).

It was an absolutely stupid, careless mistake: I somehow copied the contents of a JS file into a JSP and pushed it. Just a simple case of too many tabs open at once and too many interruptions while I'm trying to code (which is typical most days, unfortunately, but this day it had an impact other than just slowing me down).

But, those are the reasons it happened, they aren't excuses. It was carelessness, plain and simple.

So, once I fixed it, I sent a note to the team explaining it. It basically said "Look, that was a dumb, careless mistake on my part, my bad, sorry for the inconvenience, it's fixed now."

I had a message waiting for me in my inbox this morning that said how I'm an inspiration because despite all my knowledge and experience, despite being a long-time lead, they (a) appreciate the fact that I'm human and still make mistakes, and (b) I stand up and take responsibility when it happens and then do what's necessary to reverse the mistake.

That made my day :)

To me, it's just the right way to be (I credit my parents 100%), never occurs to me to do otherwise, but the truth is not everyone can say the same. Some people are insecure and play the CYA game right away, every time. Some people act like they never make mistakes in the first place.

I don't care if you're an experienced dev or a junior, always take responsibility for your actions, especially your mistakes. Don't try and bullshit your way out of them. Sure, it's fine to explain why it happened if there were factors beyond your control, but at the end of the day, own up to them, apologize where necessary, and then put in the effort to make it right. Most people have no problem with people who make mistakes every so often - everyone does, whether everyone admits to it or not - but those who try and shirk responsibility don't last long in this or any endeavor (you know, putting aside the professional bullshitters who build their careers around it... that's not most people, thankfully).

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

Best experience: Sitting gleefully sipping coffee and typing away in VIM.

Worst experience: The constant stream of interruptions that refuse to be banished to another buffer.

Can we please invent a company where we don't have to endure the incessant ringing of Microsoft Teams? 🙉🔔 It's like a never-ending symphony of interruptions and distractions. I yearn for a peaceful workspace, free from the jarring sound of countless notifications. Let's build a world where productivity reigns, and Teams ringtones are banished forever! 🚫⏰

My work environment at the moment is pretty nice so I'm to blame for my own interruptions. Or to be specific, my stomach is.

Munchies. Coffee cravings. Physiological needs that hit just when I'm starting to feel productive.

Also, devrant and stackoverflow.

Hmm,
The first one was eons ago. I was coding in Pascal and discovered System interruptions. The “Ahaha” was when I realized it’s easy to store CPU state and invoke whatever the fuck I want on any memory pointer. I loved my 2 silly animations running side by side on 80286.
Most recent : Finally understanding how “Expression” works in C# and how it can be combined into a Lambda and compiler does the whole heavy lifting on types compatibility and more.

Eliminating distractions and interruptions. When focused and in the zone, even a "quick question" breaks my concentration enough that it becomes frustrating to get back into my train of thought.

I am also known around the office to stare you dead in the eye while you're talking to me and I'm still typing... and not hear a damn word you said.

My team is split on reviewing pull requests individually vs as a group.

Personally, I don't like being interrupted to come look at a projector for 20 minutes only to go back to work for an hour, and then get pulled into yet another review. Am I the only one that thinks this is incredibly inefficient?

I prefer to go over pull requests on my own time, asking questions/making comments as needed.

Ideal WFH afternoons...
Listening to the remake of old melodies or other soothing songs while coding without interruptions😌

How do you guys deal with interruptions / task-switching while you're deep into something?

Generally I don't mind quick interruptions if someone needs help with a shell command or a library, or some other quick ask.

But I had four full new priority tasks/tickets come my way yesterday, and for each one I had to pop open a separate workspace and juggle a separate conversation.

It's not the end of the world, but whenever I'm forced to juggle multiple tasks, I find I end up frozen and frazzled while I try to recalculate my priorities.

This is partially my fault, since I've sort of situated myself as the devops guy for a few systems, so I get regular tickets as well as systems/data tasks.

Any tips? Preferably I'd still receive the tasks, but just deal with them better.

Why QA should never be left "in charge" of marking priorities on tasks before "demo day" deployment and client handover of a product.

New and refactored, key, features need to be deployed by "demo day", and most developers and the PM (not me) have already been re-allocated to new clients and projects. There's several things being done in paralell to get it done.

QA: We need to be able to download CSV files showing affected users if i do extremely rare action X, and this should pop up in the system for the first 24 hours after doing X.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Medium
(Action X may never be used at all)

This is implemented, reviewed and deployed.

QA: I want a timestamp in the file naming, I'm experiencing duplicate files.
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

Develop, review and deploy timestamping for the CSV files.

QA: They are only marked with DD/MM/YYYY, I performed rare action X several times in one day, I can still get duplicate file names marked with numbers. This is #1 priority!
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

...Okay, this is nitpicking, this will never happen, but fine. Overtime to do the extra minor, minor adjustment, down to hours and minutes, get it reviewed and deployed at the end of the day.

QA: I managed to do rare action X 6 times in 1 minute, I have duplicate files. It needs to be down to seconds. This is top priority.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Low
.........

Constant interruptions, moronic priorities and voicecalls throughout the entire day.
Dear QA, you can be fucking donkeys at times.

I am building a Django app where a function needs to be called asynchronously. I need to handle any interruptions like loss of internet connectivity during that time. How do I achieve this? Can anyone help?

There are those few days in a sprint that could be extremely busy like these days.

Few days ago someone grabbed a chair, sat next to me asking questions and the chair is still there.

This week i have learnt that the chair is so dangerous, looking very inviting.

How would you deal with noisy neighbours that cause sleep interruptions every. single. night? Y’know, as an introverted person who’s scared of being stabbed by said neighbours.

The pettier the better.

Upgraded the company operations system system from AIX to Red Hat EL with near zero issues and no business interruptions. Platform and OS all in one. Been trying to repeat that with. NET 4 years into it and only 30% done with nothing but problems until we implemented CI & CD.

Time to grab your attention again with another socially inappropriate really old joke. Hey didn't you hear me with your headphones on?

Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:

1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.

2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.

3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.

4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.

5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.

6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.

7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.

8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.

9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.

10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.

My 10 cents.

Not sure, if worst coding interruptions, but these come to my mind as I'm listening to music while coding on Windows, because I kind-of have to.

1. Some shitty song coming next on the Discover Weekly on Spotify.

2. Windows freezing/slowing down randomly

3. IntelliJ freezing on Ctrl+click/Ctrl+B while I'm thinking on something complex, because our project is huge.

4. My video card driver crashing randomly at startup, so I cannot use my monitor through HDMI

Work instant messenger....I turn my status to "offline" to give myself relief from constant interruptions

Interruptions from production team because of a tiny issue that’s already been fixed waiting for deployment

Manage interruptions with ruthless efficiency: "I'll get back to you in 10 minutes." If I need to switch contexts, I'll make a note (physical or digital) so I can quickly get back into my task.

Sometimes I hate interruptions like
- what a nice video on yt
- great idea from 9gag
I just want to focus for few minutes, please.

All the goddamned meetings, calls, messages and other kinds of interruptions I get.

I'm lucky if I get a 1 straight hour of actual production, non interrupted.