I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

*burp* Me..Merry Christmas

I made a thing. It's called Claymore.

It's like lastPass, but with a bomb attached to it.

Its *burp* like, if you're like really paranoid about your passwords, you can just, you can just blow it all up.

Pro-Tip, if you run it on port 1337, it's extra sec-*burp*-ure.

Am I kidding? Maybe. I made this w/ booze, so.

Merry Christmas everyone 🙂

This year I didn't prepare anything for it, and family won't be visited this year. I think it's better this way. My mother didn't piss on me when I was on fire - back when I was homeless and begged her to be allowed back in her home, she told me to deal with it on my own. She's been homeless herself and knows how terrible it is. I dealt with it. I hate my mother because of that, and visiting her was always an act, a formality.

Not anymore. Half a year ago I cut ties with her.. and honestly, it's for the best. I don't want to get hurt anymore by visiting the house that should've been a refuge but wasn't when I needed it most. And I got rid of it, in favor of my own stuff. And a family of my own, a community of fellow developers with whom I feel a far stronger bond than a family could ever be. You are my new family, my dearest friends. And unlike those blood bonds that make up a family unconditionally, you can bet your ass that you've very much deserved my respect.

Merry Christmas.. unlike with my biological family, I've found refuge in devRant and its community every time I needed it most. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. I love you all.. thank you for being my precious family! ♥️

I asked for a raspberry PI not raspberry PIE! I don't even like raspberries! And it's not even Christmas yet and its gonna go bad! Who the hell gets a pie for Christmas?!

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

Why are people already posting christmas presents? Its not even december yet! BTW heres mine:

Getting told that technology is bullshit and that humans have forgotten how to interact with each other (meaning being social) by people from the same age bracket that throw a fit because they can't use said technology is both hilarious and infuriating.

Seriously, aren't these old farts more concerned with things such as starbucks not putting "merry Christmas" on their fucking red cups? Am I supposed to take their shit seriously? No the fuck I am not, and neither should you.

If your old ass can't work how your fucking smartphone works, or have a haaaaard time trying to select Netflix from your smart tv app selection then the problem is not my generation. Its your dumbass for not keeping up.

Its fine if you don't want to use technology, fuck if I care. But you ain't winning this shit because of your preferences regarding technology.

Also, telling me that I am wrong for wearing my headphones at the gym to shut people off. Wtf dude, not everyone wants to fucking talk to others all the time, specially during gym time. I am there to work out and get sexy af, not to ask you how your fucking day went, I don't know u, i don't want to know you, you already showed me how fucking close minded and uninteresting you can be, why the fuck should I give that shit a chance?

Fuck outta here with that shit. He went on to tell me that software is made by people with 0 social skills. Booooooy I would have your granddaughter(she is my age) any day of the fucking week and you can tell me if we lack "social skills"

Foh

I was given a 1700 nzd budget to make my own computer.

The mouse i threw in with my own money. I went 150nzd above budget and the rest is coming during the week.

Its going to be my first custom computer. And im fucking excited like its christmas back when i was 7 years old!!!

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

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

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

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

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

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

Finished our Christmas tree at work today. Featuring Zip ties, faulty burned blu rays, an old keyboard, a led stripe, cut IDE Cables and a 10m cat 5e cable and the holy Debian as topping
Sadly I cant capture all of its beauty in a single picture
I call him the GeekTree

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

Merry Christmas everyone.

I passed this day alone, in another country, away from family, friends and without anyone to hang out with.
On top of that my gf (she lives in my country) posted a video dancing with her ex.

So, enjoy your time with your family and friends, even they're not perfect they love you and care about you.
I m kinda sad right now, but I will fight this. I m gonna be alone and when the year change so i believe its time to strengthen my character.

Happy holidays boys n girls. 🙂

On Skype.
[tldr: #muhPrivacy;]

You know, people hiring via Skype.
Gaming, seeing family or having long range relationships.

It's become a decent tool.

Then there is the Skype employee.
Opening a court case because in his work time, evaluating Skype calls - ON FUCKING OBSERVING SKYPING PEOPLE - he has to look at too much flesh (as in porn) for his salary level.
Like : the payment category states that you gotta be classed like 1,2 salary categories higher for such work.

So the first instance did not recognise the employees case, because they said its a state thing, or even higher.
Later instance evaluated the employee was right and decreed Microsoft / the NSA (whomever direct employees they are) to properly categorize their employees.
Therefore cost relatively exploded and an algorithm to detect nudity was built.
Wich is operational way earlier than Skypes TOS renewal mid 2018.
That also bans bad language and auto bans given accounts.

Talking about social credit..
in PROC (or prod, as they're known).
And btw: complaining about Google while posting Christmas gatherings on Instagram.. You get what I mean.

Honestly, I don't recall the sources. It's been a while.

I'd really appreciate a little compendium of this for historical reasons.

They will ask: what has brought us here? What is everyone an ultimate right/left/center/agnostic/religious fascist?

And we'll have it on paper. Or papyrus,.. even stone. As I don't know how far mighty people will go for their fortune.

People caught using emojis in code should be driven into the sea.

Otherwise one day its gonna just be straight magic, without reason or understanding.

You're gonna type a bunch of moon runes into a glowing floaty interface, pour the blood of a chicken into a collector tray (totally not a pentagram) and "shit just happens" (tm).

And "scholars" (neckbeards) will spend all their time shape-in-wrong-hole idiocracy-style button mashing their mystical ouija board IDEs in the grim dark future, looking for combinations that do something useful.

Every time it glows red? Compile error.

Every time it glows green? Christmas is near, congrats it compiled.

Every time it sets off a mystical air siren (henceforth known as "fusrohdah"), runtime error. And probably explosions.

In the grim dark future of Apple 40k. A.D, there is only war, warp demons, and pending VSCode updates.

I went home for Chrismas, I got my laptop with me but forgot its charger in my renthouse. Battery is old and it takes about 10 mins for it to run out of power.
What am I supposed to do now?

Btw Merry Christmas!

We had a Christmas party at work. We did a traditional white elephant gift game. I stole some larping swords from one guy, somebody else stole them from me, and another guy named Bilbo stole them and ended up with them.

After the party I am at my desk. Bilbo comes over with the swords and gives them to me. He said, "You looked like you really wanted these." I said thank you. I was really touched by that gesture.

Bilbo had tried to get golf balls during the game and lost them. So I went to the store at lunch today and got him a 12 pack of Titleists for $25. I don't golf, but people I work with say they are good. I left these on his desk. He comes to me later and says, "I cannot accept these. It is just too much money." I said its not too much and explained I was touched by his gesture. He tells me to take them back and get something nice for myself. Which is another nice gesture. Bilbo said when we get back from Christmas break we can do lunch.

So I am a bit baffled. Did I cross a line I shouldn't cross? Is Bilbo just too nice? I was really hoping he would enjoy this. I get it. We are coworkers and not family. I truly respect and like the guy.

Anyway, I am unsure what to do with them. I didn't really want to take them back. I tried to give them to another guy I work with and he wouldn't take them either. One talked about paying for them then decided he didn't want them. I have more shopping to do so I can take them back then. It kind of weirds me out to say $25 is too much money. I can hardly go a day without spending that much on a couple of random small things.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

The overuse of something is designed to demoralize and discourage the very thing.

Vapid christmas jingles, meaningless consumerism, blackfriday shopping, keeping up with the joneses, decorations and tinsel bullshit so overloaded on homes and trees that it looks like a gaudy airstrip display, holiday-town-esque themes and festivals so frequent, overcooked and overcommercialized that its like you've stepped into a 40-year-old sterile suburban house-wives braindrain internal fantasy reruns of regurgitated hallmark christmas romance movies.

Alls fair love and christmas.

In other news, some strapping young and intrepid adventurer *lit a public christmas tree on fire*.

Its a shame really, when we can't just enjoy the simple things without some dickhead going and spoiling it. But also I can't help but ask

"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!"

A Merry Christmas to everyone here in DevRant community. I wish for you a season of goodwill, peace and happiness. May your frustrations coupled with depressions reduce! Also Happy Holidays. 😊😊😊

You know what you shouldnt do? Leave your bag with your work laptop at the stairs.

Woke up as normal today and helped the kids down the stairs without checking. Then I just heard how I stepped on something.

Lets say its a big crack in the middle of the screen and you see shit. But gladly it work with work with external screens so its just the screen that are damaged. So tomorrow I must either:

- Work as normal with an external monitor and simply wait to call the boss for fix until after christmas.

- Or call the boss and tell him how stupid I am and hope its okay and I van get a new one/fix this.

Right now I feel for the first one.

Hi all!
Its been a month now since I launched my first app on Play Store.
It has now got 2000 downloads with about 600 active installs. I also got some downloads on the paid version of the app (which is basically a donate version of the app).

I know there is always a room for improvement, but still, how am I doing?
And Merry Christmas to you all!

Had to fix all bugs of my colleague this night because our client was not happy.
Before he joined us he worked as a database admin and now he wants to learn web dev and coding. But he did so bad mistakes like endless loops or requesting api 5 times.
In so tired now, happy when its christmas

Oh here's a good one. When the managers realised one of our apps is a giant hunk of crap that wasnt thought through at all and was lazily thrown together, and their solution is "meh let's just rewrite it in Swift on our new platform. And those other guys can maintain the old one and continue to do hotfixes for it until we are done".
I've been telling them for the past year that its the worst codebase I have ever seen and the lack of tests is disgusting and not something we should dare to release to paying customers (especially when those customers work in healthcare!!!). The best part was when one of them promised we would all be working on the new shiny platform by Christmas. That was last year. And I'm currently the poor bugger doing the legacy maintenance and in the process of trying to get moved to a new project. So much for managers promises amirite...

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

The customer service dept at Koss Headphones sent me an adapter gratis for my Pro 4/AA headphones so I could listen to loud rock and roll on my pc. I've been using Koss exclusively since I rec'd a pair for Christmas in 1971. Despite the natural deterioration in sound quality on a PC, I found I could hear more on certain Rolling Stones soundboards [the ones in question are Philadelphia 1972 and New York City a week later]. So I penned a rather whimsical email to Michael Koss, who actually replied with a letter, the kind we used to lick stamps for and put in a mailbox.
OK, that PC died. And the HP I have somehow has a really loose jack so the whole mechanism will slide out if you move the least little bit. It happened so often I became shell shocked about listen to loud music on my headphones at night when my nabes were sleeping because I didn't want to wake anybody up.
Finally, after too much jiggling, the end bit of the adapter got stuck in the headphone jack. Koss sent me another adapter gratis. Last night, I got out my headphones, removed the new adapter from its envelope, and inserted tweezers into the jack to pull the broken off bit out.
Except the broken off bit slid deeper into the jack. On my own, I have been able to rig the pc so I can use the speakers. And a friend who can remove the bit of the jack stuck in the jack will be over in a couple of days.
I went online and googled the methods others have used to remove broken off bits. That was worth the keystrokes!
In any case, I just wanted to say something about the irony of expecting the problem to be over and then having a few days more to live with the broken bit.

Myself a few months into my new role.

I attend the Christmas work event (free bar) and got super drunk. I go the toilet for a piss...

During that time I strike up a conversation with the dude stood next to me and to cut a long story short I end up betting, stake defined, hand shook that the company we both work for will fail within two years due to some governmental reforms I knew little about.

Turns out the dude happens to be one of the board members. Its big company 100's of employees.

There were other employees in the toilet at the time too not 30 minutes later and everyone knew what I'd said. It was rather embarrassing I almost didn't turn up the Monday following.

Not my proudest moment, but thankfully I wasn't fired. Its been 1.8 years... I and still work there.

Hello guys, i need some advice:
Our school is having a "auto-management" (idk how to translate) period, it lasts 3 or 4 days just before christmas vacation, and in those days students get to organize courses about pretty much everything to teach stuff to other students (exept stuff like video games cuz the principal is closed-minded), some friends asked me to make a course about programming in c# because they are interested, i thought it was cool so i said OK.
Now i'm thinking how to structure it, it's going to be 2 "lessons" of 2 hours each, and it's open to everyone in the school.
I don't want to do a full blown course explaining everything, i just want to give them a kick start and point them to the right direction, I thought about explaining some "theory" in the first lesson, I'm assuming almost everyone that will come never did programming stuff, so i'm thinking of explaining stuff like how a computer works, why you need a compiler, etc.. maybe based on the introduction from learncpp.com without getting to much into the details and then explaining how c# works and its grammar.
Then in the second lesson i'll try to code togheter some stuff (We'll have just one pc attached to a projector).
So, how would you do this ? I mean i never tried explaining programming to someone else and i'm self-taught i looked at the guide on msdn but it starts directly by giving you an hello world, should i follow it ? I fear i'd get too thecnical and they wouldn't understand me, do you know some good guide i can use as a reference ?
ps: there's going to be max 30 people

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the airport, I was at the bars getting shitfaced before my flight. The people all held their luggage with care, in hopes that someone wouldn’t clog the line up for 20 fucking minutes.

The luggage was all nestled and packed with care
And I with my cheese its and Carmel m&ms, would soon to be snacking in the air overhead.

rantHeader = "Merry Christmas to me!"
subHeader = "How a phone survied a three stories fall but dropping it from 1 meter high shattered its glass"

And it's Christmas with my direct manager on holiday till Februrary the 33th 2085 meaning I will get a new phone in 1/2 years if all goes well...

Well at least I have a good excuse not to connect to work during my holidays as MFA app is on this phone...