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We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
Line numbers should be on by default on all editors for fucks sake. Why the hell it is the other way around??12
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I have a colleague who has a fear of closing any window. He'll let his Mac run for months on end without closing any of the windows he's opened. He also has all kinds of browsers with tons of tabs open. He's a designer so I get his urge to not do all the technical bits and bobs every day, but for the love of zalgo restart your computer once in a while. Or at least close windows you don't use. It's come to a point where non of us want to help him, because helping him out takes forever with his slow as shit computer. We've asked/told/joked about it too him several times, but he just doesn't want to listen. At one point when I was helping him everything took so long that I decided to reboot for him. And of course Mac had to go and reopen every window that was open during shutdown, which took another good fifteen minutes. Shite OS. And naturally he spent the next hour fixing everything the way he liked it. He hasn't turned off his computer since (couple of months ago), except for when we moved to a new building a month ago.
Just had to get that annoyance of my chest.8 -
Colleague started a slack channel for our team, management wanted nothing to do with it. We used it to work and have a bit of fun.
Some push / drive came form somewhere and now all the managers are on it. Yesterday I was told my screenshot and "snarky comment" are not appropriate for the workplace and to delete my slack message.
My comment was a joke about about a new app the company has to use "to increase efficiency" that broke and wouldn't let me do what I needed. It wasn't offensive, demeaning, sexist to anyone or even contain any bad language.
How petty and childish to be monitoring a private channel making sure everything is positive. We all joked that from now on our meme's must be about how awesome the company is and how much time we are saving on a daily basis.
God forbid we're allowed to speak honestly and openly or have a bit of fun.7 -
I interviewed to this small company. It was a position requiring a lot of experience they said. They did Microsoft SQL server and their technical interview questions were so easy it took me a lot of time to answer them because I was looking for traps, like for real. Think I might've answered too complex for them as well.
In the non-technical interview they joked about how they'd need to reserve two saunas in team events (Finnish thing) as they were all male and I would've been the first female.
Then they asked questions about my *children*. "Who takes care of them when they're sick?" Ummm, yeah, illegal much.
In the end they didn't hire me but they took two interns from the vocational school (or applied sciences). Yeah, so hard a job a Master of Science in Software Engineering with (at that point) three years of full-stack experience couldn't handle but some not even graduate interns could do?
Oh, and fun thing was. A couple months later a recruiter called me about the same company. I told *her* the story and she said she's gonna drop that company from her list and said no wonder they complain about not getting people for them. xD
I also send a tip to my unions discrimination department. They used my case as an example in presentations so suppose this experience served a purpose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯3 -
It's my first 'rant' so be kind :P
When I started my studies a already knew some very basic programming stuff. I went to the exercises with another dude I met. We always joked about the tasks we had to do and did other things while the others tried to fix bugs in their code. After the semester ended he asked me whether I want to work part time at his mother's office. I went to the interview which was weird because I have never been to one before but got the job straight away. I'm in my fourth year of working there because the team is awesome.5 -
Two of them, both are not very extrem.
Positive one first:
Meetings were usually not dead serious (unless there was a problem), everyone just joked around a little, made their actual points and got back to work.
Now the other one:
A client's QA staff commented "this bug is still occuring" on 5 tickets, without checking if they ever deployed the new release candidate.
They didn't deploy the new RC, so of course, the bugs couldn't have been fixed on their side.2 -
I've actually had mostly good instructors for CS. Or at least mediocre. The worst teacher I had was actually my Algebra II teacher in high school. She taught by reading, word for word, from our textbook. She would copy the example problems from that chapter onto the whiteboard. And then give us the rest of class to work on homework. She was basically a Text-to-Speech program for our textbook.
We all joked that she was drunk and the one locked cabinet in her classroom contained liquor. A year after I had her class she was fired. For drinking on the job. The joke turned out to be 100% true and they actually did find alcohol in the locked cabinet. -
I saw this picture and joked that the guy in the picture is in my pocket? Then I realized the guy is the NSA agent monitoring me. Ouch! Jokes on me...
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Customers thought it was funny that the obvious abbreviation for for a thing today was "ASS". They joked about that being a column in a menu.
So I did it.
They've got their very own "Ass" menu item in production.
7 -
So im in college right? I dont have a licence to drive yet so I wait for my ride after class. My friend usually waits for me but this time was different..
I went to his car with him while having our normal conversations, we get to his car he puts his stuff in the car..
then.. it happened.. (pretend this is italicized) he pulled out a fucking hacky sack. THEN WE JOKED ABOUT IT BUT ACTUALLY TRIED TO DO IT AND BOUNCE IT BETWEEN EACH OTHER LIKE ACTUAL COLLEGE STEREOTYPES
Im making too big a deal out of this but ive never actually played hacky sack and its most likely the highlight of my college career4 -
My killer PR:
I made a small feature and it was to be merged in my senior's branch.
So I made it, resolved all the conflicts and when it got merged it broke my senior's branch.
This is nothing new and it happens, so me and him sat down and got it working. After two days, his branch got merged and broke it's parent 😂, after investigation my code was the reason, got fixed and merged.
Same thing happened 3 more times, and every time my code was the culprit.
Now for staging we thoroughly tested everything and deployed it, after running for 2 hours the piece of shit broke again 😂😂😂.
A meeting was arranged for scolding the team, and after the meeting the architect comes to me and say "how did you manage to fuck things on so many levels, literally?". I handled it like a pro with an awkward laugh.
We exhaustively checked it for production. Deployed, it did not broke, we were happy. After a month of successful run, I just joked about the above incident while we were working on next release on morning coffee. That cursed thing broke on the same evening. I was like 😮2 -
OMG you fucking little cunt!
Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.
He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.
Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.
Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?
So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.
He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.
Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?
He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!
Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!
5 -
Epic code fight broke out today when one developer fronted himself for leader due to having beat all the metrics by a factor of ten. Claimed he could replace the entire department based on LOC alone.
Another developer told him to fucking zip it.
After almost coming to blows someone managed to explain to him that he had to put his code into a compressed archive.
As it compressed to ten times smaller than the next smallest contribution he declared victory because his compressed better. Another developer joked better call bomb squad.6 -
My teacher joked in class about trying to get #octothorpe trending. Two days later he's wearing a t-shirt that says it, turns out someone already thought of it and it's on a t-shirt on Amazon with prime shipping lol 2018 is crazy
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I just don't know what to say to a new employer anymore. I'm almost 40 years old and have not worked a day VOLUNTARILY in my life. I strictly do it because I must. To prolong a life I never asked for. Yesterday someone at worked joked I must be
weary of life. Yeah. I openly admitted that I am.1 -
At Rackspace there are lights on the walls that go off for things like ddos attacks, fire alarm, etc. The being a code rainbow. Meaning "evacuate the building".
Every time we deployed to prod I always joked one day that it would fail so spectacularly that it would cause a code rainbow.3 -
beware of font choices in chat apps; a coworker joked in the room that "well, sure, of course it's okay to update in production in the middle of the day" and for some reason, the other coworker didn't see the quotes because of the weird font they use, and also didn't stop to think, and went ahead and ran the deployment script. In production. In the middle of the day. With active users.
The good news is that those folks who logged back in got to use the new version a whole lot earlier than anyone was expecting. :\2 -
It's been about 3 months since I've become a lead dev. I've been working with this company for more than 6 years. And many of my teammates have also been working for 6 - 5 years.
We've been friends for all those period who joked, ridiculed, worked all nighters and everything for the last 5+ years.
But ever since I became the lead, I've been attending a lot of meetings. Some of it team related and some of it company related. The amount of meetings is so much that I cannot focus on coding. If I have to, it would have to be at home, which I don't want to do anymore.
I sort of feel that my teammates can share the responsibility of coordinating tasks within the team, but no one is stepping up. Even when I ask 1 person to do it, (s)he isn't interested in doing it. What should I do? I asked as a friend and not as a lead. I can talk to my manager and ask him to assign responsibilities, but just wanted to know if there is something else I can do.14 -
That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.
And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?
"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.
"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.
"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.
What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?
What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?
What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?
What if you've used more languages than you can remember?
What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?
What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.
What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?3
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