Boss: "I don't want to comply with the GDPR"

Me, DPO: "I've told you the house rules. You must comply, stop arguing"

Boss: "But I don't want it. Bobby doesn't have to, and Eve doesn't have to, their moms are cool"

Me: "I don't give a crap about the other kids, you're going to be GDPR compliant. Bob and Eve will end up being raped in prison. It's that what you want?"

Boss: "What if I just pretend to do it."

Me: "I'll take away all your marketing toys. No more mailchimp for you young man."

Boss, crying: "You wouldn't touch my Facebook pixel!"

Me: "Especially your Facebook pixel. I'm so sick of that thing...."

Me: "...Look, you can still play with your toys, all I'm saying is you need to be honest and ask your buddies for consent before you put your pixels up their various holes"

Boss: "But they will never agree!"

Me: "Maybe that is good thing"

Boss: "But how will we get people to like us if I can't feed them pills and insert probes into their holes to measure their responses?"

Me: "Maybe you should focus on being a nice kid, someone people like to play with. Your buddies will tell other kids that you're a nice guy. Now, I'm not going to lie to you, it will be hard work. Much more effort than what you're doing now. But you know, those friends will stick with you for decades, instead of just until the marketing-drugs wear off"

Boss: "I think I want a new mom"

Me: "You signed a contract. You're stuck with me for the next 2 years. And as long as you're living under my roof, you will follow my rules."

"Coding is solving puzzles".

I think everyone has heard that platitude. But it's not exactly right.

So I grew up in a very poor environment, a moldy building full of jobless addicts.

And in my town there was this shop where super poor parents could take their kids to borrow free toys and stuff.

So as a kid I remember being frustrated by these second hand jigsaw puzzles, because there were always a few pieces which had been teared up or chewed on, or were even completely missing.

That is what development is.

You pull in this seemingly awesome composer package, and that one super useful method is declared private, so you need to fork the whole thing.

Your coworker has built this great microservice in python, but instead of returning 404 not found, it returns 200 with json key/value saying "error": "not found".

There's a shitload of nicely designed templates for the company website, but half of them have container divs inside the components, the other half expect to be wrapped in container divs when included.

You're solving puzzles, but your peers are all brainless jigsaw-piece-chewers. They tried to mend a problem, but half way through got distracted, hungry and angry, started drooling over the task and used a hammer to fit in the remaining stuff.

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

How to offend potential clients with sales emails:

“Hey again, <name>!​

Don't understand TikTok? Don't worry - you're talking to a Gen Z now.

I wanted to follow up on my previous note and see if you had any availability this week or next week to connect.”

Apparently not interested and not responding means you must be too old to understand those meddling kids and their internet toys.

Theres a method for speeding up diffusion generation (things like stablediffusion) by several orders of magnitude. It's related to particle physics simulations.

I'm just waiting for the researchers to figure it out for themselves.

it's like watching kids break toys.

Just learning Rust and I quite like it but the first thing the website says is that it's "BLAZING FAST" and to me this is a red flag up there with someone having toys in their car but no kids and a padlock on the boot.