I've always tried to live by the philosophy that you should never burn bridges, but my god some recruiters make it very difficult. I've had a handful of occasions where I've had to type out a nasty email to a recruiter and then just not send it after I realized I wouldn't want it getting around/you never know who they known.

The latest incident where I did this was with a recruiter who emailed me 3 times within a week. But my issue wasn't with the amount of emails or even the fact that he was shopping me frontend positions despite my resume clearly stating I'm a backend dev/data engineer.

My issue was... THE GUY FUCKING REFERRED TO HIMSELF AS "BATMAN". That's right - an adult human being so desperate to get the attention of developers that he set his email name to "Batman", signs his emails "Full name - A.K.A. Batman", and lists his phone number like "BatPhone: xxx.xxx.xxxx"

If I didn't find him so pretentious and he actually sent me a kind of relevant position, what would I do? Pick up the phone and call him and say "hey Batman." Jesus fucking Christ. What an absurd gimmick. Maybe I'm overreacting but it seems so childish.

And you know what, if the guy read my resume and sent me relevant stuff I probably would have said "meh, he's doing good work, if he wants to stand out/be silly whatever." But no, he didn't even look at my skills. Instead he thought 3 shitty emails where he called himself Batman would convince me to write back to him.

I was close to sending him a ridiculous response and signing it "Robin", but decided it wasn't worth it.

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

A few days ago I went to my local bank again to check my balance and see whether some transfers that I've been waiting for have been completed.. as I was walking there - headphones on, music full blast - I was zoning out a bit. Of course I was, not like I have to mind cars in the middle of bumfuck here. There's hardly any in this town. So meh.

Now that day there was one.. I was just about to cross the road and suddenly looked left, and there it was. A mindless meatbag behind the wheel of a killing machine - an average driver. Visibly startled I suddenly stopped and waited for her to drive away. At this point she was about 20-ish meters away and already stopped. Come on bitch.. I already stopped and I am not going to cross this road as long as you're here. Hit the fucking pedal.

So she accelerated again.. and drove to the parking spot at the other side of the road, then stopped there. Oh, cool. Maybe she needs to be somewhere in this town. … Not at all. Bitch accelerates again, and stops yet again 2 parking spots further. What the fuck (ಠ_ಠ).. and I thought that I was an idiot...

Then she accelerates yet again and drives away. Looked after her, astonished by the amount of brain damage she just caused to me. Must've been a Facebook user.. holy fucking shit. Through what kind of black magic do these people get a driver's license?!

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

I'm so tired.
Got enough sleep but tired nevertheless every day.

Situation in the company isn't helping, would really like to get a review as I'm really close to a 'final' version for productive use, none given.
Didn't think far enough and didn't include various OO-things when starting to program this application, so I had to rewrite lots of it. It certainly got better by the time but as it's a grown structure I'd feel happier if someone other than me had seen and cursed the code.
Coworker that has most experience in C# only once implemented something with multiple threads, couldn't help me there.
Could not test the code yet because the hardware was inaccessible and is now potentially broken.
I really like working independently, nevertheless I feel a little bit lost at sea - I can deal with that, but it's exhausting.
Also, trying to get an answer from the colleague who should act as my supervisor whether or not I can work remotely during a CS related course in the semester break for > 2 weeks now. Course admission is the mid of January so I'd like to have an answer this year so I can repeat the basics I'll need if necessary.
Also, Midterm is coming.

It's a lot of little things piling up right now I wouldn't mind if there were only 1-2 of them.
I'm just so damn tired.
I'll go to sleep now.

(In happy news: my internet connection is working pretty decent now, technician that fucked it up apologized and said that he probably needs glasses, he misread the connection number. :D)

On one side I fucking hate waiting for the internet technician. I would've liked to go to work (especially as there is an event right now) and not sit here during "That-5-hour-window-because-scheduling-isn't-a-thing-the-german-Telekom-will-tell-you-about" and nurse my impatience.
On the other side, I have idle time and I like programming when everything's quiet in the house and only the heating and my PC cooling system are whirring quietly, so I've got that going for me which is nice.
Only too bad there's no internet right now.

I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.

Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.

I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.

Just remembered that I still had a foobar invite link in my email inbox 😋

The challenges are odd though, first challenge was super easy (basically an idiot check), but while I was able to convert 3 cans of energy drink into a functional solution in half an hour, the verification utility is not very verbose at all. So in Python 3.7.3 in my Debian box it worked just fine, yet the testing suite in Foobar was failing the whole time. After sending an email to my friend that gave the link (several years ago now, sorry about that! 😅) asking if he knew the problem, I found out that Google is still using Python 2.7.13 for some reason. Even Debian's Python is newer, at 2.7.16. To be fair it does still default to Python 2 too. But why.. why on Earth would you use Python 2.7 in a developer oriented set of challenges from a massive company, in 2020 when Python 2 has already been dead for almost a whole year?

But hey now that it's clear that it's Python 2.7, at least the next challenges should be a bit easier. Kind of my first time developing in SnekLang regardless actually, while the language doesn't have everything I'd expect (such as integer square root, at least not in Debian or the foobar challenge's interpreter), its math expressions are a lot cleaner than bash's (either expr or bc). So far I kinda like the language. 2-headed snake though and there's so much garbage for this language online, a lot more than there is for bash. I hate that. Half the stuff flat out doesn't work because it was written by someone who requires assistance to breathe.

Meh, here's to hoping that the next challenges will be smooth sailing :) after all most of the time spent on the first one (17.5 hours) was bottling up a solution for half an hour, tearing my hair out for a few hours on why Google's bloody verification tool wouldn't accept my functioning code (I wrote it for Python 3, assuming that that's what Google would be using), and 10 hours of sleep because no Google, I'm not scrubbing toilets for 48 hours. It's fair to warn people but no, I'm not gonna work for you as a cleaning lady! 😅

Other than the issues that the environment has, it's very fun to solve the challenges though. Fuck the theoretical questions with the whiteboard, all hiring processes should be like this!

I used to love the hero treatment I got long ago in my previous company. Appreciations and what not for conducting events, contributing to open source. I think I burned out later. Later the hero treatment stopped there and I craved for it when I wasn't doing the stuff I used to do - basically I was previously keeping others happy I guess, instead of keeping myself happy. Contributing to open source or conducting events was not even part of the day job and was mostly considered outside the working hours and hence one had to stretch to do all that extra stuff. I over did stuff I guess and burned out

In my current company, I see heros and appreciations so much for contributing to open source though not all our roles are completely defined as open source roles and we instead have to work on closed source or yet to be open sourced stuff. My role is contributing a very tiiiiiny testing bit in an yet to be open sourced project, but a few other colleagues of mine work on closed source paid advanced version of the open source core project

Seeing all the hero treatment where I'm not the hero and seeing all the appreciation, I wonder how it doesn't seem right. Surely I'm jealous, lol. But I also felt the treatment also shows some sort of Special treatment for some people. It's "Special" and not exactly for all and only for open source contributors or people doing all the popularly so called as "cool" stuff. Fortunately for them their job role kinda mentions that I believe. And people working on closed source are now trying to contribute there. I'm stuck with some of my main day job work and dying in guilt for burning out, and not being able to contribute to open source and also kind of starting to hate open source for it's dark sides. Reminds me Batman dialogue "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.". Open Source dark sides - of course the possibile dark sides of companies funding open source, the people behind the companies and also of course my company being one of them possibly, though if you ask anyone they say "Community comes first". That's full of lies is what I would say.

Inclusivity gets thrown out the window. Heroes get to talk. Heroes get worshipped. Others are not even noticed I think. I guess the only way to get noticed is to imitate the heroes

At some point I realized I'm envying or idolizing a crazy set of people, or like putting them on a pedestal. I'm trying to fix that in my head. But oh my, you should see all the treatment, the respect, etc. Surely some people just are there to do meh or grunt work or even good work or whatever without much appreciation, and then have to move on. No respect or consideration for opinions, thoughts usually. Some of them don't even have the time to care to check what people have to say. Top down hierarchy but they say it's flat hierarchy. They don't even wanna listen to some of us I think, that is during team meetings. Only very few care from what I have noticed

One good thing is I have to come to realize how much I'm like them in some behaviours and feeling damn guilty. I sometimes spend time thinking how to change myself for the long term. And how to avoid the toxic behaviors in the team and also control my anger and control my response to their behaviours. I'm also trying to understand where I'm climbing the ladder with my assumptions and also trying to see the "real" thing instead of assuming or being blind or imagining etc. But it has become so hard because idk if people are faking it, it's become very hard to always assume people are telling the truth 🙈 though it makes to assume or believe that by default. If people are okay with themselves lying, who am I question that huh