toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

My SSD goes bad and I file for an RMA. WD asks me to send in the faulty device in return of a replacement. So I pack everything up very nicely, put the labels on and hand it over to the courier.

Except for one tiny little problem, its been 2 days and it's only now that I found out that I forgot to put the faulty SSD inside the package.

So I basically just paid for a neatly packed empty box to be delivered to them. God! why do these SSDs have to be so freaking lightweight??

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

As a developer in Germany, I don't understand why anything related to development like IDEs, git clients and source code documentation should be localized/translated.
Code is written in english, configuration files too. Any technology, any command name in a terminal, every name of a tool or code library, every keyword in a programming language is written in english. English is the language of every developer. And English is simply a required skill for a developer.
Yet almost everything nowadays is translated to many other languages, espacially MS products. That makes development harder for me.

My visual studio menus are a mess of random german/english entries due to 3rd party extensions.

My git client, "source tree" uses wierd translations of the words "push" and "commit". These commands are git features! They should not be translated!

Buttons and text labels in dev tools often cut the text off because they were designed for english and the translated text is bigger and does not fit anymore. Apparently no one is testing their software in translated mode.

And the worst of all: translated fucking exception and error massages! Good luck searching for them online.

Apple does one thing damn right. They are keeping all development related stuff english (IDE, documentation). Not wasting money on translations which no developer needs.

I need to render point clouds in OpenGL for a project I'm working on. The problem is it just becomes too damn slow when the point cloud size increases. So I'm trying to use LOD methods and nested octrees to speed things up. Also, I need to render text too in my OpenGL scene. So now I'm stuck trying to show proper labels using Qt and OpenGL which is completely pissing me off by the way. And I'm not doing the actual speeding up thing I was working on earlier on and before that I was working on the actual function of my program. So I'm now deviated from the deviation.

Fuck my brain.

Am I the only one here doing this? (especially when the internet is down)

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

!dev

That moment that your favourite YouTube channel (I only use YouTube from google and mostly through hooktube.com) announces closing soon.

I’m genuinely very sad. This channel was awesome because it allowed for beginning raw producers to get feedback from raw fans and even get in touch with the top raw labels!

Some top producers which are around now got into the game because of this channel and I was hoping that that’d be me one day as well.

I’ll miss you, RawstyleNation 😥❤️

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

Managements definition of an MVP:

- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.

My definition of an MVP:

- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.

Can someone explain this shit?

Dev lead on another team: Ok we can build that API for the mobile apps, we'll generate everything, generate printable images for the labels, persist it all and do all the relevant lookups and checks. Do you need an SLA?

Director: Yes, 9ms

*silence*

Lead: Sorry .... 9ms?

Director: yeah, its a must have

Lead: ... the speed of light wouldn't even let us transmit it that fast

Working with a delivery ordering API. Response:
Shipping label type: PDF
Label: base64encoded string

I was like, that's easy, literally two lines of code. Proceeds to convert and save the file. Then on open, bam! Format ubreadable. What the actual fuck?! Found an online converter, and tried to convert it to pdf, to see if I was missing something, but the results was the same.

Then checked the decoded string. First 3 characters: GIF

Well fuck you too! This carrier uses GIF's for it's shipping labels for 2years at least, how hard is it to change that in your fucking api response, you pice of shitbag.

Fuckbug client has no brain but worse is fuckbug has not one bit of understanding.

I am a fucking developer not a fucking DESIGNER.

You are supposed to give me your fucking information. Information as in text and photos and documents that I can use with minimal modification for your FUCKING website.

It was fucking stupid of me to help you out with non-dev work in the first place. My fucking stupidest mistake of 2017.

Just for the fucking slider, this whole goddamn project is dragging for the whole 2017.

I even helped you out with taking the fucking product photo at your office with my camera so we can have decent images to use.

I stupidly helped you out with doing photoshop of those images with your product labels and stuffs.

But in the end, you fucking dare give me 1 properly designed image to use in slider. Then ask me to change the rest of sliders with similar design like that one. If you have that image why the fuck cannot you do the fucking rest by yourself and come and fucking ask me.

I fucking hate you.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

If you like purely electronic music, try drum'n'bass, more specifically neuro(-funk). Believe it or not, it really boosts productivity.
I can recommend:

For getting used to it: Noisia, Teddy Killerz, Neonlight, Zombie Cats

When you are used to it: Current Value, Pythius, Hydra, Jade, Machine Code

When you need the next level:
Billain

Generally good labels: Eatbrain, Blackout Music, Terminal, Bad Taste Recordings, Invisible Recordings

So I'm wrapping up for the day and right before I leave a coworker comes up to me with a problem. Our company uses barcodes to track some of our products through their development and we recently switched over to a new system for producing them. The barcodes for this particular product are supposed to have 8 digits, but the last 200 we printed have 9.

I immediately panic because I wrote the script that generates the bar codes and there had been a bug in the past where the script would add extra leading zeroes that weren't supposed to be there. I scramble and check the database, it would be a huge headache if our production database had been compromised with junk barcodes. Nope, all the new barcodes there have the right number of digits.

Next place to check is in the code that writes the barcodes to a text file for staff to print the physical labels from. Nope that's all fine too.

I ask the person who printed out the recent batch of labels to show me how the printing software reads from the text file. She seems confused by my question and shows me how she manually enters in the barcode range to the software. As she does this I watch her add an extra zero to the numbers. 🙃

Even worse there was an option to import all the codes from a text file literally RIGHT BELOW the manual option.

TLDR; Thought my script had screwed up our database, ended up being the fault of a coworker who didn't know how to import text files.

That moment when a client is all upset about a tiny bit of cutoff of some text, but they haven't noticed they've been missing labels from their map for who knows how long...

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

"You know what really grinds my gears?":

Please stop saying your a coder!!!
Also don't say others are 'coders'…
This irritates me so much...
Sure you write code... Your a programmer not a coder...
Damn horrid term coder! The correct terminology is programmer!

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

Not only is the documentation only in Chinese, but also the labels used in the components are. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Oh well time to get my hands dirty.

!rant

<curious>
How do you guys format data like this? Using js framework? Or pure HTML tags?
html labels? invisible table?
</curious>

Can I just say fuck Xcode? How the fuck have I been working on an app for over 3 hours and only now when I do the first compile do you feel like showing me an "Internal Error" message which has caused all of the buttons, labels, text and just objects in general to disappear

TIL one of the first few issues on the ISS was that they had a laptop that wouldn't boot. The (pirated, some say) copy of Norton Ghost they had on a floppy was also suffering from bad sectors, so it wouldn't boot. These guys had an entire floppy image beamed up from base to replace a copy of Norton Ghost. (Some say this was a pirated copy of Norton Ghost, as none of the floppies had the official label, instead all had either hand-written or custom-made labels.)

Then they had codepage issues.

So I downloaded the handwritten character dataset from EMNIST, took an hour to extract. Found out it has 814k + pngs. I haven't optimized all of them with Gimp 😕 change them to idx3-ubyte format, or make labels for each char in a c++ automation.. While Gimp was frozen in bulk process, I started hearing crackling sounds from my desk 😨😨 I'm like fckkk shits gonna blow..

That's when the poorly taped 0x7E2 calendar fell from the wall.🤣🤣🤣

NO MICROSOFT FOR FUCK SAKE NO!

I have a fucking 15inch screen and that left side menu is eating 25% of it! IF you gonna throw in a new "Creative" design, make the damn menu re sizable, NO I DO NOT WANT TO HIDE THE LABELS AND MEMORIZE YOUR STUPID ICONS!

At least do what Gitlab did, a nice small menu that DOES NOT EAT HALF THE DAMN SCREEN!

Oh, did I say anything about sub menu hell that pops up whenever your mouse hover over any of the items on the left? Yaaa... that goes to a brand new rant!

For some reason GMail removes the Inbox label to some mails (usually receipts or communications from shopping sites) so sometimes I miss important mail and not realise until days later when I go "why the fuck is there no update?" I removed all filters and disconnected all services from accessing Gmail

Does anyone else have this issue?

So anyway... Finally got pissed of enough to build an IMAP program that looks are all Unread emails (with no labels) in All Mail and then moved them to the Inbox.

Part of me is wondering is this a test? Does Google like pissing me off to see what I'll do about it?

Legit Apple Interview
There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?
Those who got it answer it directly on Saturday/Sunday until then good luck

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

i think im losing my mind.

i swear i placed like, 10 labels on my VB form, the designer even shows it's there! but when i run it for testing it all disappears!

i think i need a break.

I'm a C++/Obj-C programmer finding it ludicrously hard to switch to Swift.

I find that the constant ability (leading to very poor programmer code) to reduce syntax and add tokens reduces readability and nowhere is this more apparent that with closures.

I'm working through (to my shame) Ray Wenderlich's Swift course and the closure chapter has this:

PS I loathe K&R as much as I do Swift so it's all in Allman formatting for clarity.

let multiply: (Int, Int) -> Int =
{
(a: Int, b: Int) -> Int in

// do Something else

return a * b
}
Why oh why isn't this more simply and elegantly written as:

let multiply = (a: Int, b: Int) -> Int
{
// do Something else

return a * b
}
The equals sign shows clearly that it's a closure definition assignment, as does the starting 'let'. But this way all of the stupid excesses, like the 'in' keyword, the repetition of the params / return type only this time with useful labels and additional tokens are removed and it looks and reads much more like a regular function and certainly a lot more clearly.

Now I know that with the stupid ability of Swift you can reduce all this down to return $0 * $1, but the point I'm making is that a) that's not as clear and more importantly b) if this closure does something more than just one line of code, then all that complicated stuff - hinted to by the comment '// do Something else' means you can't reduce it to stupid tokens.

So, when you have a clousure that has a lot of stuff going on and you can't reduce it to stupid minimalism, then why isn't is formatted and syntactically better like the suggestion above?

I've mentioned this on the Swift.org (and got banned for criticising Swift) but the suggestions they came up with were 'use type inference' to remove the first set of params / return type and token.

But that still means the param list and return type are NOT on the same line as the declaration and you still need the stupid 'in' keyword!

Why does XCode take like 10 minutes to show or clear a syntax error? It doesn’t help that the language itself is verbose as fuck as well with its ever-changing method names and sometimes optional parameter labels with each version of the language

You constantly see these professional profiles with labels such as 'Expert'/10 years experience/senior/CTO/CIO/Consultant.

Isn't it funny when you go and work with these people in the field, they appear to be frauds? How can these people legitimately have these titles and know less than a snotty freshman year student? Their knowledge is so poor, a 14-year old with basic Windows and Javascript knowledge could outmatch them. If only this weren't true.

I think it's very unfair because they attract employers and they even get hired, while some of us with veteran knowledge in several fields don't get considered for a job.

May I add that it's always the funny guys who get a job. Apparently being a relatable frat bro at an interview is more important than having priceless expert knowledge.

Went to steal a tool from my father's office. That was 3 hours ago..
Didn't find the tool (more labels for a label machine, I'm marking everything), still found lots more stuff, filled the space in my office that took me a week to open and now I have like days off stuff to unmount, reuse,... And didn't find the fucking labels...

DevRant-Stats Site Update:
A little Christmas Present for you!
-> Graphs!

Added two Graphs now to view the stats of the last 30 days.
Unfortunately the system is running since yesterday and there is not much data...

Little tip:
If you click on the labels above the graph you can disable them!

How can I make such labels to appear on my GitHub repo Readme.md file

Finally I got the green light to migrate to Git. Now to plan and execute the migration of our ClearCase repo with roughly 1k++ labels and 14yrs of history in the next 6months

Tutorial: How to get rid of your dev?

1. Find a very old (2+ years) jira task that took a lot of sleepless nights to get resolved.
2. Make sure that your dev is still on the watchers list.
3. Reopen to 'change some labels'.
4. Forget to close the task again.
5. Remove the body. Heart attack will get classified as a natural cause.
6. Close the task.

Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.

This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.

Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).

We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.

It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first.

We are currently refactoring our application in order to use multiple languages. The application startet 1997 and later it supported 2 fix languages. So it's one defined language or the other, this was used in uncountable places. Now a team of 6 developers has to refactor all the code of the last 20 years, where labels are used and an old translator was magically used out of nowhere..
Turns out it's a ton of work to get the software ready for really multiple language support.

In the latest update of firefox, the dev console shows all tabs as labels instead of the icons that never really made any sense to me, and in Swedish too! This is a great improvement, I love it! :)

So as a student developer with years of background in web development (including both front and backend), c++, java and c#, I was more than surprised when I found out my Informatics assignment hadnt received the proper excellent mark. In fact both me and a friend of mine who has been working with C++ in particular for years got a --mark.

// The assignment was the most simple Windows Forms Application with 2 buttons and a textbox

When we asked about that the teacher said we hadn't labeled the buttons and textboxes, though we had actually taken our time to put labels next to each UI element that would need usage directions.

Though what she meant was renaming the actual variable names, those being textBox1, button1 and button2.

We of course got really mad, because w both follow the accepted naming conventions for each of the languages we write in. Arguing was to no avail. Even telling her that variable naming was not in the assignment instructions was pointless as she said it had been self explanatory​..

The others for whom computers are powered by magic, did their assignments as they had memorized everything that teacher had shown them. Why? Because she didn't teach them how to code in the first place. So they copied what would work.

Fucked up educational​ system, sadly nothing new..

Oh and btw, the naming she uses and teaches students to use is:

button1 - btname
label1- lbname
textBox1 - tbyear

These labels are useless.

Which one will be a better user experience ? A or B ?

0:
A ) user scrolls in the main activity for most of the features
B ) user selects very basic features in the main activity and finds the others in the sub menu

1:
A ) long text in one page
B ) shorter text in number of pages

2:
A ) brief walk through at the beginning
B ) very clear and detailed labels
C ) complete help section

3:
A ) separate rating section
B ) ask the user for rating every time till the user rates or presses dismiss

4:
A ) inappropriate billing
B ) show ad

So we map conditionals based on the form labels that the client can change and don't autoupdate them.

It is this time of the year that I get to work on a shitty project to add some new functionality to it, it is a front end part of the project which before was externally developed, so now I have to deal with this BS Marionette mess where nothing they wrote comply to standards, like the fucking router.js doesn't look anything like the Marionettes doc, the bootstrap they used they fking decided to override classes in custom css and turn the 12 col grid system into 5ths or shit, then they created some autmated tests with bunch of intricated selectors selecting by 'labels' instead of !!!!FUCKING WHAT ARE THIS FOR IDs!? - fuk me - so I better decide to procrastinate on this project since luckily enough we don't have a deadline and I wouldn't care if we had either! My job is java developer, and yes I feel good about learning new things and learning front end. BUT NOT THIS CRAP DEPRECATED MttehorseShit!

Always nice coming into office with 4h of sleep, realizing you're the only developer in today, so all support stuff falls on me. Which is evenmore fun since I'm still a trainee and don't know everything yet.

Oh and I also spent 1h explaining the logistics/IT director how to generate a label to send off a package and then scanning said labels in.

FUCK YOU SYNCFUSION, JUST FUCK YOU!! TRYING TO USE YOUR FUCKING LINEAR GRAPHS AND THEY NEVER FUCKING WORK!!! THEY DON'T ADAPT THEIR OWN BOUNDS, THEY DON'T SHOW LABELS EVEN THOUGH I'M FUCKING TELLING YOU TO SHOW THEM AND EVEN WHEN I ADD HEADERS YOU REFUSE TO SHOW THEM!! AND FOR SOME GODDAMN FUCKING REASON, WHENEVER I USE A TABBED PAGE YOU JUST GO UP AND FUCKING THROW AN "UNKNOWN EXCEPTION" JUST FUCK IT FUCK YOU , FUCK YOUR GRAPHS, FUCK EVERYTHING!!!!!!

The last ten days i’ve been working on some animations for this website. Basic stuff but when you make elements move on scroll, people go wild.

The designer had a big opinion on this ofcourse.
So big she hád to scroll through the page herself.

So, multiple times a day, for the past two weeks she came over, checked animations, and gave a bit feedback on what could be improved.

She never mentioned the labels that where only appearing on scroll. Everything was just fine after 9 days.

However on day #10 i got a bug that the labels had to be appearing “just after loading the page”.

Like what?! Are people to dumb to scroll 2mm on a page? Damn ho. Wtf do you mean with “just after loading the page”. 1sec? 2sec? 10sec?

Hello all, I know we can search in git lab for the labels(easy, first commit etc) to find open source projects that suit me, but as a rookie it gets a bit frustrating not understanding the project and so on. Does anyone know a better way to contribute to open source and learning at the same time?

Marijuana growers are looking for a good name for the labels they affix to their product marking it as their brand.

Hashtag is already taken.

speedrun.com completely destroyed itself today.

Apparently they thought it was funny to change all kinds of labels, links, images etc. around for April fool's, so now the site became completely unusable. In a game that I identified as Minecraft by looking at the URL, over 10 moderators were added and minutes later, a 5 minute world record of getting all achievements was verified, which didn't even have a (complete?) video. Context: The previous world record was over an hour. I would check what the correct previous time was, but I can't figure out what any of the labels are supposed to say.

I already wrote them a mail saying that they should revert it as soon as possible, because the site is completely unusable, and that they should consider that there are people who don't like being blocked from doing anything just because it's April again. Hopefully they made a backup recently, because they might as well reset to yesterday's data.

Is it "goto" still a thing?
Ran today into a 1k lines haywire method which calls itself (not recursive) with "goto" on labels within it. A little hell.

I used to hate the tediousness of "busy work" e.g. changing labels in forms or running unit test procedures. But damn does it make the day go by quicker. I missed having something (anything) to do.

I need to pick one terminology for shipping so I don’t forget my function names, css classes and labels.

I’ve used a mix of “Shipping”, “postage” and “delivery” and now I’m confused :-/

Labels: HEAD, ->, master
ARC-47

Hmmm. Is that a Trouble SHOOTING commit?