Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Arghhh, rant time :|

So yesterday I completed a database migration of 167,000 products from an old ecommerce system to a new one. Everything was brought over, orders, customer addresses, everything, really chuffed :)

The only thing the client picked up on was the lack of his spammy "meta keywords" data that I intentionally did not import. I mean the tag isn't used and a list of 40 comma separated random words you'd like to rank for isn;t going to help the sites SEO on bit.

Anyway, the client is now moaning a lot and insisting I add them in. Even after I explained that the meta keywords is gone for good reasons he insists on keeping the data.

Soooo, pointless :|

(note the tags for the sake of satire :) )

Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.

Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.

I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.

Come in at 36 hours.

Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.

My exact response was:

"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"

They did not let me know.

Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Our most senior and most competent backend developer got fired, he got told he "wasn't committed enough". This dude did the most complex tasks really quickly (and competently), could configure the most boring stuff off the top of his mind, and brought great culture to the company from his previous 20+ years of experience. He was about to implement some cool automation stuff, and improved our processes a great deal.

Now he's being let go. I was fearing *I* would get fired because I'm much slower and less knowledgeable than this guy.

When I talked to him, he figured the so-called "lack of commitment" was because he had missed a few standups the last few days, and got late to today's standup.

Now the boss (who is a less experienced than this dev who was let go, but co-founder of the company) was changing the database credentials (which we somehow have access to) and had the product down for like half an hour because of it.

I don't think firing this developer was a wise decision at all, and that's putting it generously. What a shame. Now I'm also a bit scared because the responsibilities of this developer might likely fall upon me. But generally I think we're worse off without this guy, and getting someone as good as him will take time.

Got together with my old dev team (5) who all left the same company at the same time almost two years ago. (Thats a whole other story).

One of them told us he left and went to a new company that measured performance by the amount of commits a dev would to per day. Of course he didn't know that when he signed on.

Three months into the job he had a week where his first commit wasn't until a wednesday and he got called in by the manager to explain his lack of commits and how he was going to improve.

He quit on the spot. Had a new job in less than a week.

Other devs at the company were fixing typo's and just commiting them one at a time to create a lot of commits.

One of my favorite quotes:

"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"

Had to apply this liberally at my last job. Even had it posted at my desk for a time.

Our manager is not a developer and he has no idea of what we are doing most of the time, but he thinks that stand-up meetings are the coolest way to control us.
Sometimes coworkers joke about his lack of knowledge and today I think we reached the highest jerk level: «Yesterday I opened a new branch on the git repository and today I'll continue on this task».
I struggled to stay serious on my turn.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

So, I was participating in a competition, but little did I know that you could only participate in pairs. Seeing that a lot of famous indie devs were participating I was extremely hyped. But since it seemed like I was the only idiot who didn't have a partner I felt like kicking myself. Then a guy about whom I had never heard of before, probably a newbie, comes out of the blue and asks me to be his partner. Since I had no choice, I reluctantly agreed to pair up with him. The rules of the competition were to create a game based on a particular theme in a period of 1 week. To get started, I asked him about his skills as it would be better to know what our strengths and weaknesses were. He said that he was good at art and proceeded to show me some of his "previous works". I was genuinely impressed. Honestly speaking his drawing seemed a bit off but was but for a newbie, it was good. So we decided that he would take care of the art and I would code, create some basic music (nothing too fancy because of the lack of time) and if time permits, refine his art(correcting ratios, colour combinations, shading, etc.). On the first day, he would like to work in privacy and would show only the finished products to me. It seemed a bit fishy, but hey, I am all up for respecting the wishes of fellow team members.
So all was going well, or so I thought, till on the fifth day the guy confesses that he didn't get shit done. Apparently, his "previous works" were random stuff taken from the great land of internet and that he had to leave town the next day. He just wanted to "experience the life of a game developer" and "meant no harm". I flipped out, half lectured half screamed at him then asked him to get the fuck out which happened to be the only fucking thing that he was able to do correctly. I thought for an hour or so, then contacted the staff and informed them about my situation. They said that if I was okay with the handicap, I may continue. I then pulled three all nighters with about 3 hours of sleep (that too in parts of about 1 hour) everyday and was barely able to submit my game on time.
I secured the fifth place, which was pretty good if I may say so myself, but it an important lesson in my life that taught me to never trust anyone blindly.

When will Google understand what an ecosystem means ?

Love it or hate it. What makes Apple devices homely is the ability to build a banded and consolidated associative user space that feels the same anytime on any platform. Crafting an ecosystem might be a daunting task , and requires adaptive and perfective rework through a long period. But it pays of , just like apples utility app suite does today. It was a journey to get it right.

Now we have Google , a company that is confused most of the time , releasing new apps everytime they have new feature in mind. According to me , Google did a phenomenal job in building hangouts and Allo , hangouts was a huge step forward from gChat , and Allo was way ahead of its time for a fun and innovative IM app. But what's the need for 2 different apps ? One has video calling , text messaging , group sharing , everything the Allo had.

Then all of a sudden you get Google Duo " The best ever video calling app " Why wasn't this integrated with hangouts and marketed the same way ?

Trial and error is one thing , this seems a lot like the lack of effort in architecting coaction and a well designed internetworking application framework. A lot of unnecessary choices have led to the shutting down of majority of their apps. Allo and hangouts included , but all this would have been unnecessary if the goal was to always build upon iteratively.

While I believe Allo was marketed as a cross platform chat application unlike hangouts , an integration plan could have always circumvented this issue.

I have to talk about another one of Google's failed efforts in recognition of potential , the hello app , but this rant has gone a bit too far already. So I'll post 6 hours later 😅

Well I'll always have the hope to see Google integrate the best of their ideas in a more relaxed and realised structure than what exists today. :)

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

Dear "managers,"

Stealing credit for something you have not done is real theft.

When I come up with an idea and a detailed outline of how to build and deliver it, you do not get to say "oh I also had this idea." You did not. How could you? It uses tech you don't even know exists.

When I then proceed to build the whole thing on my own without any of your inputs (then again, you have no idea of how it works, what would you bring to the table), you don't get to parade my project in front of the board not even mentioning my name.

You see, it's not the first time you pull that off, you have taken full credit for every thing.

it's not just my wee feelings getting hurt for lack of recognition: it has real world consequences.

You get the promotion, you get the salary raise and you now live in a flat with a balcony and a view, while my wife and I share a studio as my salary has not budged.

You're a cunting thief, I hope your mom dies.

Best,

X

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

got a mail 10 minutes after I finished a 10h shift that my contract won't be refreshed after 4 years ripping my ass off for this fucked up organization. apparently not because of lack of competence but of personal reasons. that's what you get for not being a sheep and having an opinion. my (ex)boss didn't even have the balls to say it to my face.
fuck them! I don't need people like that around me - neither in my spare time nor at work - and I wish them all the worst.
happy holidays motherfuckers!

So I worked on getting a server ready for about 30 hours last week to be ready for a deploy on Monday Night (last night). Not only did I work on it for 30 hours, we had two other architects and a senior engineer working on it too. We got everything done Friday and it was ready to go with a simple cutover on Monday night.

The only thing left to do was deploy a link change Monday night on the existing landing page. My part was the backend servers and application that had the complicated SSO system and the other part was just a link to get to the SSO. I asked the person responsible for deploying the landing page's link if he was ready about a dozen times. He kept saying he was deploying X (the code name for the project deploy) and that is all he was doing.

Now jump to that night. They have decided that a single landing page wasn't enough and they were going to deploy a full CMS. Well no one knew what the hell was going on and they didn't realize that the landing page was hosted externally on another host. After arguing for two hours they delayed the deployment for multiple days. 24 hours later they are still trying to figure out the CMS on a host.

30 hours and four senior engineer's time wasted to get everything done for the deadline all to be canceled because of on jackass's lack of planning. WTF

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

If you ever cooperate on a feature like this as a developer, I will find out where you live, drug you just enough to make your body limp, and mutilate your genitals with my keyboard.

Fucking sexist pricks, assuming I want to play with the blue robots and not the pink dolls. Fuck all of them.

Actually, fuck all your retarded cablecutting VOD services with your awful recommendation engines. Fuck your lack of proper playback features, fuck your bloated mobile apps, fuck your vendor lockins, fuck your region locks.

I'm back to pirating, and I'll just buy a pile of merch, trot proudly through the office with an Adventure Time backpack and a laptop full of Steven Universe stickers.

Recruiter: are you interested in a client side java role?

Me: yes, here is my client side resume please submit me

Recruiter: sorry the hiring manager said they are looking for more of a back-end engineer

Me: you told me it was a client side role, please resubmit me with my back-end geared resume

Recruiter: yes that's correct, it's client side, we'll keep you in mind for the future but you should know there is a difference between mobile devs and web devs

Me: what you just said is not relevant to this conversation. I would be happy to discuss the diff between front-end and back-end, client vs server, etc.

Recruiter: I'm just relaying what the hiring manager is saying to me

Me: your [lack of] ability to relay technical information is quite apparent :/

*lesson learned*: interview recruiters before they start interviewing me

Unbelievable waste of time, how do these people even make a living? FML!

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.

Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

I need a break.

A break from stress of endless expectations
From school
From work
From being made fun of
From criticism
From criticizing myself
From not being able to do fun things
From vague instructions
From a lack of sleep
from inconsistency.
From unclear objectives
From financial/medical/emotional stress
From life
From hatred
From destruction of my emotional stability
From a lack of confidence
From unfulfilled decisions
From trying to hide under a mask
From jealousy
From lists
From repetitive obliteration of any hope I have
From me crap talking myself
From pleasing people

Oh well, at least after tomorrow, I’m on full-time break...

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

Got a call from Google!

Asked for two months to study: Discrete mathematics, Calculus, introductions to algorithms, design patterns, CTCI and linux/unix OS workings in general.

I know I'll be banging my head against the wall and I don't have my expectations too high. But regardless I feel like this is a good excuse to speed up my studies and push myself in the direction I want to go already. It'll be a win-win even if I don't land the position because I'll definitely gain a ton in the process of preparing.

I will be expose to all of this material (except for calculus because I've been learning it for a couple of months) for the first time so I know it'll be a challenge and I am looking forward to it.

If any of you have any tips on good study habits that'll be much appreciated; I currently like to read most of my material and supplement with videos/tutorials... Khan is great but they lack material on discrete mathematics unfortuantely. Thanks in advance!

Wish me luck (:

We live in a world where portability is more important than usability.

I've got to buy a fucking adapter just to get enough USB ports to use a mouse and keyboard with a monitor, as well as ports for other things like my laptop fan.

It's also becoming evident with the lack of headphone jacks to save that 0.000001" of phone size. It's fucking bullshit that adapters are required to charge phones and listen to music at the same time.

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

I remember my first "Software Engineering 2" class at University. The teacher, a pompous son of a bitch that later on gave proof of his vast ignorance, greeted us with
"so ... You call yourselves programmers, right? What's the biggest program you have ever wrote? Something along the 100, maybe 200 lines of code? ..... If you've never written at least a MILLION lines of code software, you're not a software developer"
Even at that time, with my lack of experience in software development, I had that feeling in my guts telling me "writing myself a 1M lines of code software .... Brrrr that's something I hope I'll neve have to do in my life"
Turned of he was one of those dinosaurs stuck with the love for gargantuan monoliths of software like they used to do.
Just to dive you the whole picture, the course had ZERO software development and focused only on how to manage wonderful waterfall projects, how to write all types of software documentations and the final project was ... Writing a ton of documentation so boring and useless that even he didn't care to read through.
we still laugh at the episode when another group asked us to borrow one of our documents and after one day they asked "hemm ... Have you really sent this to the teacher?" "yes, why not?" ".... at page 23 someone left a comment saying 'what the fuck is this shit?'"

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

Best carrier choice: leaving the old company I worked for...

TLDR version: I yelled at owner/director to shove it..got layed off the next day. Never regreted that day!! EVER!!

Long version: I was asked to implement storing of CC numbers (yes, the whole lot) & their matchig CVC numbers..plain text, no encription.. company didn't even fulfilled standards to store last four digits.. so I yelled at the 'big boss' that he is crazy and that I won't do it.. Next day, I got handed a letter that said they have to lay me off due to lack of work and that my position is redundant & no other workplace for me.. Never been happier in my life!!

I wanted to quit for some time, due to crazy stuff they asked me to implement & how!? & toxic personel. I was called Hitler (& am actually proud of this!!) cuz I was work oriented & didn't kiss mrs.Director's ass.. I wasn't slacking like the rest of them did, so of course, I was the bad guy..

Anyhow, fast forward 6 months, got the best job ever & am now here for 5yrs+.

That moment you realise why you enjoy the dev life again.

It's been a long time since I've had a solid day of coding, just coding..., no meetings, no wild requests, no crazy issues, no data fixing because someone can't type a number correctly, just me, myself and that keyboard going on a field trip of quality coding time again.

Ah, it's a good day to end the week on!

Devs online be like "I started learning to code when I was 2 years old and submitted my first application at 5, since then I've made a few simple apps and pull in 2 million a day, not much but it pays the bills"

So discouraging to come up with a novel idea for a simple product and spend a lot of time just to realize you're absolutely lost and severely lack the knowledge to even produce a working product of any sort. All the while some kid makes something "simple" 10x more complex than what you failed to do, and in like a day nonetheless.

How do people just pick up so much knowledge so quickly? How do they just figure out information they couldn't have possibly known like it's intuition?

Life is hard man.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

I'm currently rewriting perfectly clean and functioning Scala code in Java (because "Enterprise", yay). The amount of unnecessary boilerplate I have to add is insane. I'm not even talking big complicated code but two liners or the lack of simple things like a range from 5 to 10.

Why do I have to write
List<Position> occupiedPositions = placedEntities.stream()
.flatMap((pe) -> pe.occupiedPositions().stream())
.collect(Collectors.toList());
instead of simply
val occupiedPositions = placedEntities.flatMap(_.occupiedPositions)

Why on earth does `occupiedPositions.distinct` suddenly become a monstrosity like `occupiedPositions.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList())` where the majority of code is pure boilerplate? And this is supposed to be the new and better Java8 api which people use as evidence that Java is now suddenly "functional" (yeah no, just no).

Why do APIs that annotate parameters with @Nullable throw NullPointerExceptions when I pass a null? Why does the compiler not help prevent such stupidity? Why do we use static typing PLUS those annotations and it still crashes at runtime like every damn dynamic, interpreted language out there? That's not unfortunate, it's a complete waste of time.

Why is a simple idea like a range from x to 10 (in scala literally `x to 10`) not by default included in Java? There's Guava's version of Range which does not have a helper for integer ranges (even though they are the most used ones). Then there's apache.commons version which _has_ a helper for integers, but is strangely not iterable (wtf I don't even...).

Speaking of Iterable: How difficult could it be to convert an abstract Iterable<T> into a concrete List<T>? In scala it's surprisingly `someIterable.toList`. I found nothing like that so I took to stackoverflow where I found a thread in which people suggested everything from writing your own ListUtils helper class, using Guava (which is a huge dependency!) to using the new Java8 features inline (which is still about three lines long). I didn't know this was such a hard problem in computer science, TIL.

How anyone can be productive in this abomination of a language is beyond me now, even though I've used it for many years while learning to code (back then I didn't know there were much better ways to do things). The only good part is that I have to endure this nonsense for only about 3 days longer then I'm free again!

My home feels like $work owns a corner of it, and I can’t walk near there without feeling this this intense psychological dread.

Lack of time boundaries is pretty awful, too.

The biggest passion of them all, for me: music.

In my case this is rawstyle/raw hardstyle/hardstyle but especially the most brutal rawstyle.

I love the energy it gives me and to listen to the techniques the artists use and also that, after a while, while the kicks all sound the same for many people, immediately identify the artist behind a kick when even hearing it for the first time (90 percent accuracy).

I'd love to produce it but I lack the skill set to do that as for now 😥

A tattoo related to this music genre is coming soon :D

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foh

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

The last person who might have taken offense at this recently quit, so time for a consequence-free rant. I just want to say...

Fuck absolutely every single one of my teammates who quit this year. Fuck your shitty, undocumented spaghetti code from hell that the rest of us will have to rewrite because it's utterly broken and functions mostly on prayer and luck. Fuck the 1000+ git repos we'll have to rename so we can even begin to tell them apart. Fuck your complete lack of any sort of processes or procedures or standards. Fuck the person who hated tickets and decided we could just have hundreds of people ask us for help on Slack whenever they need it. Fuck the people who quit because we got a new manager who told us we need to support the applications we build. Fuck the person who said "I'm leaving because I want to move forwards instead of backwards" as if fixing bugs in the code YOU WROTE TWO WEEKS AGO is really moving backwards. Fuck the two people who designed their own separate pipelines and then used both without bothering to debate and pick the better one (spoiler: both are completely undocumented and broken as hell).

I hope your various new employers figure out that your strategy of covering shit with gold paint doesn't change the smell.

Now the rest of us have to fix it all, and we're probably going to start by demolishing most of it so we can rebuild it from scratch.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

Every time I have to deal with my boss code and lack of convention and everything that makes a clean code I just want to scream like a bitch and punch him in the face without minding breaking my own hand.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I worked someplace once that fired a person for lack of quality output. Before that he sued the company over a labor dispute. After they fired him he went and founded his own business. A year later the company decided to recycle his old laptop to another developer and discovered the source code and business prospectus on it. The company took it to court and said it was actually their business because it was created on its own equipment and the time stamps confirm during business hours also. Courts agreed and they got possession of his business and then fired him again.

Ok, I’m over windows. Done with it.

I have been a long time windows, I’ve used most versions since 3.11, and have used Linux for a few years on the side (not as a daily but have needed it for work and servers) but with yesterday’s update, not only have I lost audio for the countless time again, as far as Windows is concerned there’s nothing fucking wrong with it, besides the lack of sound and all.

Drivers are reinstalled, deleted and reinstalled, redownloaded from manufacturer, different drivers installed.
Ran a system restore back to before the update and just dropped the hdd into another laptop (it’s identical model) and still no fucking audio (to exclude the audio chip as failing)

So fuck it, I’m spending my weekend finding a distro that will work, I’m fucking done!

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

Yeah boss, lets study Scrum extensively so you can:

- Create variable length sprints
- User stories that are meaningless like 'fixes'
- Tasks that should be User Stories
- Duplicated tasks/stories that are on the fucking backlog already
- Cross sprints on projects
- No meetings at fucking all to determine who will do what
- Assign people on vacation to current sprints

The list goes on...

An when I point things like that out lets just look at the guy who spent 6 months studying this shit, taught you ( at least tried... ) as if he is saying nonsense while our projects get delayed and our code spaghettifies because we are always in a hurry for lack of time to plan anything :)

a little confession: i've rarely used test suites in my projects (due to laziness and lack of time).

i've started a new project and now i HAD to write tests in order to make my PM happy.

Then i had to refactor a lot of code.

IT WAS SO EASY WITH TESTS.
I WAS A FOOL.
STUPID PAST ME, STUPID!

!rant && rant

I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.

I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).

About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).

For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.

A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.

I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.

I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.

Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.

Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...

I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.

Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

Are developers working at Google really this incompetent?
Seriously, during the years I've been working deeply and for long time with many software products developed by Google, like the Android SDK or TensorFlow for instance, I can't find a single feature in them that isn't foundamentally wrong and badly designed starting form the basis, clearly due to an evident lack of the most basic programming knowledges... Am I missing something? Are they secretly making anyone out there think they are dumb on purpose for some occult reason? Or is it truly a dumbness matter? I don't understand.. :(

Conversing with developers can be frustrating.

Here is a good one from today. 2 people 1 women (let’s call her W) and one man (let’s call him M)

W: “Hey guys! Our team is looking for lots of great developers. Front end, back end, data, dev ops. At above market salaries with a great team! Reach out to me is you want to chat. I would love to hear from you.”

Translation: I have a great offer and want to help others achieve and strive in their careers.

M: “also, guys/less-gendered-alternative plz” proceeds to chastise this women about using the word guys.

Translation: I have no level of social awareness, but I have a need to feel big and important. So I’ll take offence for those who aren’t offended to make me feel better about my lack of fucking personality.

————

I’m not really concerned about opinions about the gender issue. It isn’t about that.

It’s just tiring dealing with these people’s bullshit.

It’s time to grow up folks, stop arguing on the fucking internet.

————

I also once saw a developer chastise 2 women we worked with while we were out for drinks for the exact same thing; using the word guys.

He was so busy “defending” them from themselves that he ended up making them uncomfortable and then they left.

He was saying “don’t exclude women” while fucking excluding the only women there.

What a fucking douche.

I secretly wish everything at work fails because everyone is so fucking stupid every time it makes me cringe when I have to talk to someone or watch someone explaining something to me.

Everything seems to lack planning and focus, our PMS act more like clients than like managers, its a total fucking mess and I have to clean some of it this week.

It's getting so much on my nerves that I had to open my whiskey for the first time this year, damn.

I am just thrilled about the new employees! They are so talented…

O-M-F-G!

Who hired these people!? It-is-incredible! (Actually, I know who hired them!) Just unbelievable amount of wasted time holding their hand on every step of the way. 10 years experience? I-think-not! This will not working out!

Don’t even speak understandable English. Just difficult to know what they are asking since they lack the basic principles of the english language.

Beginning of the end.

Imbeciles!

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

My life didnt go as smooth as i expected. Everything happened as expected, i knew what going to the uni requires, i knew everything...
But i didnt accounted for my mental health. Since forever i have thought that im lazy or something like that, that i can do everything i just have to do it. Oh how wrong was I. It went from my projects being frozen for a long time due to lack of motivation to neglecting important living activies. Even my health suffered a bit. Everytime i failed, even the simplest task no matter why i always felt even worse. Even the most basic tasks were unimportant for me. Even some minor tasks that i failed gave me huge guilt. Not to mention that my family wont help me with my mental health at all, (they cant see what is realy happening they always think im lazy) (but maybe they could fucking figure out that being sad liteary for years is bad). My contact with friends is limited, im always scared to go or more often scared to ask is they have time to meet because they are ALWAYS busy...
So that was my life, alone, against people who were demanding (and my mother who thought that her hard work was everything i needed, but no. Money, food and clean house isnt everything that human requires to propely function!). Now I have scheduled a meeting with the specialist, i hope the uni has better ones than the other ones i had. I hope he will help me and i will get out that life downwards spiral.

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

User: "Why isn't this process updated? There's something wrong with your system."

Me: "Did you submit the request?"

User: "Uh yeah I'm sure I did..."

Me: "Go submit the request again." (they never did the first time)

User: "I don't know how. Will you show me?" *shows user how to do it* "Ok I did it now."

Me: "You did it wrong, you need to resubmit it."

User: "Ok I resubmitted it."

* a week later *

User: "The process still hasn't shown any progress."

Me: "You didn't resubmit it like you said you did."

User: "Will you show me how to do it again?"

* fuck me *

Me: "Sure..."

Process works as expected and everyone lives happily ever after, except the developer that knows it is just a matter of time till the next user blatantly lies, has no respect for anyone's time, and demonstrates a complete lack of desire to care about their job at all and just wants to bitch and complain like a typical lazy ass-hat.

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.

Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...

Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!

How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.

Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.

You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.

I don't get people..

He is a good person and and realy tries..

Tries what?! To annoy coworkers that have to fix every single thing he does?!

Some people will justify anything with 'he is a nice person and tries hard'. WTF?!

So if someone is a nice person, likes to talk a lot, has 'good' social skills but writes crappy code he doesn't test at all.. or tests and see that it's glitchy and still doesn't fix it.. so he is a good worker for that?! Dafaq?!

So if he is a 'lovable' person, he deserves to be here, doing more damage than helps.. he deserves to have a job, with same pay (or even more) than me?! WTF?! How?!

Why is this ok?! If we were heart surgeons and he killed a person or two due to lack of skills or negligence, what would happen?!
He'd get fired on spot!! Why can't it be the same with devs?!

Why on fucking earth do we need to put up with people who try their best and fail?! Especially if their best is lowest of all, lower than the 'I don't give a fuck, just doing sth so the boss stops nagging'?!

Fuuuuuuuu!!!!

But ok, some people are not cut out for some work, I get it.. but why the fuck do other people justify that with 'he tries'?! Dafaq?!

Maybe next time 'I'll try' to perfom brain surgery on you..and you'll end up a fuckin plant.. is that ok with you?! I'll be trying (not really) and do my best (well I will try not to use a chainsaw when cutting open your head).. will that be ok with you?!

Fuck!!

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

Had an online programming interview for a start-up, writing code into a shared Google doc while on the phone with the interviewer.
Specifically told that I could just use pseudocode, so I did, without worrying about access modifiers, full variable declarations and use of "new" for making objects, or specific type declarations, etc.
Got told at the end that I "lack experience, and really should have defined access modifiers, declared types, and so on, and that they needed someone proficient in Java. That was the first time I knew about their Java requirement.

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

I just realized with this pandemic it's better to live in a dirt-cheap country, in a house you own, have a second hand car, work as a dev from home, become good with tools in your spare time, grow your own food in the garden.
Fuck this impossible system with it's promises of finding a cure and it's high pay but high taxes and expensive rent for living in a shitty rented apartment with no friends around, nothing to do than watch YouTube and play video games and be depressed half the time, then die because of lack of phisical activity.
I used to think countries that had good infrastructure were the best. Now public transportation is the worst idea around here, since no one wears masks and pretends all is well.
This is actually a decision I need to take next week. If you believe things will "get back to normal" please give me your input as it is valuable to me.

Dear Client,

You said it was of paramount importance that this software work flawlessly. I've worked hard to make it so, even when your indecision and lack of attention to detail indicate you don't care as much as you say and have made the project late.

Yesterday when I handed you a step-by-step user acceptance test plan, you delegated it to someone not as familiar with your specific requirements. You said you don't have time for such things.

I will remind you of those words when the project launches and you find something you dislike.

Sincerely,
Me

Time for a soap box rant.

I just found this in one of our projects. I've simplified the example to make it more anonymous.

When I see code like this it automatically means there is a lack of attention to enumerations and/or understanding of what they are.

One may argue that in a certain execution of code it's a minor performance hit and therefore insignificant. It's still a performance hit. Furthermore, it takes even less time to do it the right way than it does to do it the wrong way.

Every one of these lines will enumerate the list from the beginning to try and find that one element you're interested in. Big O notation, people.

Throw that crap into a dictionary or hashset or similarly applicable data structure with direct reads at the beginning of your logic so that it only gets enumerated ONCE when the data structure instance is created. Then access it however many times you want.

Soap box rant over.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

I'm tired of the lack of competition. Open source and public code is supposed to bring people together but a lot of the time it just puts people down and makes them think "why would I recode that if it's already made?" It's going to kill the amount of people actually learning to program because their ideas are just crushed by people who already made them.

The people who are going to be more successful are going to be the ignorant ones who don't bother looking if it exists first and that is kinda sad.

Mate; I've been reading for over a week to understand some concept.

All I have after all this time, is existential dread, lack of self-esteem and a fear of being too stupid to ever understand this concept. 😤

Woo crunch time! The 3 panic attacks a day, no sleep, massive guilt complex, caffiene addiction, lack of seeing my wife, phone breaking(calling doesn't work), lawn needing mowing, upper management bothering all of my team, more guilt, more panic, inferiority complex, theory that coworkers think I am slacking, and technology just not working because the machine spirit decided I pissed it off is starting to get to me a little.

!dev
I used to read.. A lot. Long and complicated stories, where the plot would only unveil itself after a long time. I used to dig myself into a book, learning about the writer's thoughts and mental image, reflecting on our differing viewpoints on the question at hand. I didn't expect action or beauty, merely thoughts which, by themselves, constitued a value to me.
But pulp and especially social media had lowered my attention span to the point that even reading through a short story without getting sidetracked takes a lot of effort. I still value what I used to value, the only thing that's changed is that I no longer have the patience and I feel discomfort due to the lack of sensations.
What do I do? Had anyone solved this problem before?

Dear project managers.

Go fuck yourselves, stop hindering me in my ability to do my job. My job is to get the job done, I know exactly what exists where. If I request something, fucking get me it you useless cunts.

You're wasting time and resources with your lack of technical knowledge and making life difficult for the rest of us.

Sincerely, Frustrated Developers everywhere.

Want to be likeable or get your way through people?

No need to sell ice cream, just validate those insecure souls.

Wide majority does not want their fragile bubble to be broken even if they are suffocating within.

All they seek is validation. That's fucking it. That's the secret.

If someone asks you for some opinion or support, most of the time they are just want to hear how great their mediocre thought process is.

Someone's lack of ability accept criticism and grow is the sole reason they are stuck in quicksand situation and only drowning further.

An unethical social skill but this will take you a long way and also help you stay sane from the insecure narcissistic scums by avoiding toxic interaction.

JUST VALIDATE THEM.

Finish all my on-going side projects that have been left to gather dust due to lack of time and resources...

They may not be any good however they are fun to work on when I can.

I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.

And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.

I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.

After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.

I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?

I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.

Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.

Oh well 🤷

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

In my three years experience so far I can honestly say that 100% of the developers I've worked with are narrow sighted with regards to how they develop.

As in, they lack the capacity to anticipate multiple scenarios.

They code with one unique scenario in mind and their work ends up not passing tests or generates bugs in production.

Not to say I'm the best at foreseeing every possible scenario, but I at least TRY to anticipate and test my code as much as possible to identify problems and edge cases.

I usually take much more time to complete tasks than my colleagues, but my work usually passes tests and comes back bug free. Whereas my colleagues get applauded for completing tasks quickly but end up spending lots of time fixing up after themselves when tests fail or bugs appear.
Probably more time wasted than if they had done the job correctly from the start. Yet they're considered to be effecient devs because they work "fast".

Frustrating...

Making my own game console.

I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.

But, lack of time. Sigh.

hey dickhead, you could, at least, test everything is working after you merged your branch.Now you have leaving the company, i'm the one in charge of cleaning up your shit.

Hope you will eat a dick every time one of your program fail 'cause of your lack of test

Not at all dev related but I don’t have a social life so I share with you guys:)

I’ve been fat for all my life. You might say it’s my own fault blah blah but I quit sugar over 10 years ago, I don’t snack and eat 1-2 meals a day, not much more than others do.

The first time I was in good shape was when I was 16. I was growing, I started boxing and I was happy-ish with my body for the first time. I got down from 110kgs to ~87kgs, which is a good weight for me, I have heavy bones and wide shoulders I guess.
I insured my shoulder and couldn’t do boxing anymore but my weight was still pretty much stable. After working in the office for a few months I started gaining weight again, I think mainly due to the stress and lack of sleep.
In 2017 for the first time I hit a new high with 120kgs. I quit my terrible, stressful 24/7 job and relocated and got down to ~115 which I maintained for quite a while (still going to the gym and stuff).

And then the lockdown started..
I went up to >120 in no time.
(Sounds really bad but as mentioned, I’m heavy anyway so I’m not THAT obese, just fat.

Seeing my weight was really scary to me so I started a keto diet again, which I did before but with limited success.

Warning: Controversial topic coming up..

I took it a bit further and tried 0-carb (carnivore diet) instead of low carb and I lost 6kg within a month. Then the next plateau at 114, then at 112 etc.
Went more strict and removed seasoning and stuff and started eating more nutritious meat, liver, heart, tongue etc and my weight started dripping again.

Yesterday for the first time in ~a decade I got down to 105kg.
My end goal is 90, so I made it half way through.

Just really happy to have achieved this. The 1 good thing about lockdown I guess, I had so much time to be on my own.

Before you say eating no greens is bad, keep in mind that most not old people die because of obesity, not because of a lack of fiber.

It’s a big achievement for me and I hope that I can get to 90kg in another 3 months..

Story over

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

Today may be the day I walk the fuck out... Almost done with the 3rd revisions of the fucking website and guess what?

To - “Anony”
Subject - website

Hey, here’s a list of changes we’d like for the website. Instead of following the theme of “WhateverTheFucksHopsital.html” we’d like for it to look similar to “AnotherFucksWebsite.html”. The board would like to see this up and running in the next week.

How’s about you sit and spin. You haven’t given me any information on a website only that you want it to look like some other hospitals. Then, you add photographer to my fucking job description as well as information hunter. You can fuck yourself and higher an outside company to create your website from scratch again for the now 4th fucking time. Then, you’ll understand and see just how fucking expensive it is... Nor will that company take your shit with the lack of information coming from your end. You can kindly, suck my dick.

Lack of concentration.

"Oooh, look, it could be Baldur's Gate 3 time right now!"

Im forced to work with c++ on windows for a course.

0) c++ is fucking unusable without a central repo for managing dependencies. Maybe im just too used to maven but you shouldnt be downloading dll files in 2018.

1) visual studio can go suck a fat one. I got a fairly fast pc and it takes fucking forever to load anything. For comparison, eclipse with all my plugins (and i have a lot) loads in ~10 seconds, vs2017 does in 35.

2) why the fuck is there no cross platform compilation for c++? Its supposed to run on everything right? Whats so hard about porting a fucking linux compiler so i dont realixe i have .exe files when i want to work with my laptop on the bus?

3) c++17 (? Or whatevers the newest) syntax is like a deep barf on a hot summer day after eating a whole watermelon. Its fucking unreadable and autopointers simply dont work. And its not even my lack of skill this time, its the code that the other members used and it worked for half of them.

My boss:

Doesn't manage the fucking agile board..

Doesn't call for meetings when we need...

Decides randomly for sprints duration.

Decides to do whatever he feels better with an obvious lack of thought.

Decides what to do based on assumptions instead of FUCKING ASKING THE FUCKING CLIENT!

Oh you stupid piece of shit how many time do we have to go over me explaining you how planning works and you pretending to agree?

Unless you're editing actual fucking JSON and not a JS object, do this:
{
name: 'John Doe',
phone_number: '12345',
}

Not this:
{
name: 'John Doe',
phone_number: '12345'
}

Note the presence or lack of a comma after the last field. In this way, when you add a new field, you only have one line change in version control, because otherwise you'd have to add that no-longer-last comma and thus make two line changes. Not to mention you can forget to add it and spend some time figuring out what is wrong.

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

!rant // deprecated but who cares

I just wanted to write down something i realized. I realized that that I stopped growing as an individual a while ago.

Being a student put me in constant stress situations. I had to do things quickly. Lern things fast, drop things I don't understand immediately, move on, and repeat. I think this corrupted me, turning learning into something that it's not supposed to be. Even making me reject other people's opinions sometimes, which disgusts me every time I think back to it.

When I started programming I'd always try to read the code, until i completely understood what exactly this code was doing. Something I stopped doing a while ago because of the mentioned time constraints.

But today I got the hit by the consequences (German: Ich hab Retourkutsche abbekommen)

I was implementing an algorithm today, while my partner was writing the main program, which acted as indirect test cases. And the errors were discovered one after another because of my misinterpretation. Or Simply put, my lack of knowledge. Because it was already late, we stopped soon afterwards but I wanted to solve this problem by tomorrow. I really wanted to get my head around this algorithm, so that i could solve it with confidence. After getting my head smoking I felt something I haven't in a while: the feeling of achieving something. Making me finally realize not only how the algorithm was actually meant to work but it also made me again realize what learning is about.

Use your damn head.
Don't look away from the problem, solve it! Learning is about challenging yourself!

Sorry for stealing away so much of your time. Like i said, i just wanted to write this down. Maybe to burn this into my mind, to keep me on the right track from now on. But I also hope that i could deliver my message to someone that needed it as well.

Also it's late and i should have gone to sleep long time ago. 😴😵
I just hope my grammar didn't suffer because I'd that

Sooooo

First of all sorry for lack of ranting
But this people started to behave.

UNTIL YESTERDAY. You gonna love it.

Junior coding front end. HE NOT TOUCHING BACKEND THANK GOD.
He realises his suggestion made him to do some changes in the code. Apparently that is the end of the wolrd "a developer proposing a change and then the code must be changed??? No no" that's how his brain works. Check this.

He decides not to do two pages for creating models so he combined two models in one page. TWO MODELS IN ONE PAGE. Sooo modelB depends on ModelA. Fine. front end:" so backend has to change because im doing this in one page"
Me:" mmm no, you said treat them as separate entities besides they are on the same screen"
He:" ok, but then if I create all together the modelB is going to raise an error"
(Let me tell you he says this with expert voice, because he said "raise" and "error" so he got technical now)

*my boss said some white noise irrelevant to the conv but he is happy because he contributed and is involved*
Me:"the way data is sent has nothing to do with the way data is shown"

He:" whatever crap he can say trying to prove his point desperately "
Me: "yes, but the backend is not going to change every time a form/page changes the way to display data"

He"i dont think u understand "
Me:" i think i do"

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

Welp, here it goes:

High school is feeding me a huge amount of shit that I do not care about. This, causes me not to have enough time to carry on my own programming and infosec studies due to a lack of time, despite the fact that I'm pretty organized. Among all that, is the fact that I have 3 weekly martial arts training in the evening, which equals to even less time.
I am starting to feel quite shitty about this situation, and no, I'm not going to wait precious years of my life before continuing with my studies.
Let's hope I'll pull through. :(

!dev
What I feared is happening.
I will barely see my gf for some time (until summer).

I just feel like crying, wanting to do a lot of things with her, barely getting to do so.
On one hand, I have a gf, on the other hand, fuck my life for worsening good things that happen to me.

P. S. if any of you fuckers unironically complain about the fact that I have a girlfriend (and you don't), go to hell

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

I'm trying really hard not to be sensitive, but my manager is making it difficult with their "constructive criticisms" ...

Just finished up a call with them. And I'm so tired. I'm not even angry or upset, I just feel so tired of their bullshit.

I set up a meeting as a courtesy to get them up to date on all the code changes I made. Last night I stayed up late to try and get things in before the deadline and this morning just killed me when they say.

"I don't think I should have given you this."

"I was right, you weren't ready to start doing this."
(Then don't even bother giving me anymore tasks then, I don't fucking care.)

"you clearly don't understand how branches work"
(Absolutely fucking false, I fixed that shit and am very familiar with how to understand the structure of the fucking repo)

"you are rushing and I don't need you messing up the website"
(I'm being proactive you twat, not rushing, making it very difficult for me to do the work and being productive)

Like seriously bro! Don't fucking patronize me for the work I was trying to get out. And trust me this fucking meeting is done in order to get ahead of potential issues, not a time to be condescending of my skills or lack there-of as you seem to so keenly think.

If you had this much doubt about my abilities then why give me the fucking Sr. title? Fucking trust that I'm being honest, and I'm trying to get us to a good spot, not fucking sabotage the company. God fucking damn.

Hi, my name is bohr and I'm a recovering distro hopper.

It all started with Ubuntu, out of my frustrations with the unintuitive nature of DOS I gravitated to a Unix environment which Ubuntu naturally solved. But I quickly became annoyed with the laggy nature of it's daily usage. So I switched to Linux mint. Loving the HTML/css/js configuration aspect of cinnamon I thought it was the answer to all my problems. But I became annoyed with apt and it's lack of a few programs I wanted. This got me to look into an arch based distro, because pacman seemed like the answer to my problems. Unfortunately there are way too many arch distros to use. I experimented with antegros' many DE options: gnome, kde, i3, deepin, openbox... Always finding something wrong. I tried manjaro and it's many flavors, still being annoyed with minute aspects of the os. Out of frustration, with the deep configuration settings I was getting into and the need to actually focus on the work being done on the computer I crawled back to Linux mint. But now my friends, I have decided that maybe it's time to just use a more established distro? Maybe gnome isn't actually that bad? Maybe I need to give it another try? And that is why, I promise, this is the last hop for me. Arch Linux, Gnome here I come and I'm ready to commit this time!...

But have you guys seen POP!_OS? Woah, I bet it would solve all of my problems....

I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:

I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'

Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.

I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.

But it ended and I let it go.

In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.

I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.

And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*

And that's how I got my current job.

*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.)

Features of any software product development: there is a catastrophic lack of time to get rid of bugs, but always enough time to make them even more. 🤦‍♂️

Funny topic. I normally am very understanding of incompetence when it comes from nothing more than lack of experience. Happens to all who at one point is a junior dev.
As long as people have the willingess to learn I find myself being very understanding.

I take a lot of effort in helping others, I don't mind at all, and I would rather take them extra 10 mins to explain how to do something than to slap people with rtfm and then blame them completely when their lack of experience messes up stuff. I also take care of providing isolated environments and giving explanations. Even when they screw up, it is isolated from the rest and I can teach them what was wrong, most of the time they figure it out themselves. It has made my coworkers respect me more, rather than being a total dick that believes that what I do is sacred and should be spared from newbs (like all the idiots in S.O) i take the approach of a very patient mentor.

But I am a hippie, shit works for me.

But I do not excuse shitty attitudes and arrogance. I find that not knowing is fine, but acting as if one knows all and then fucking shit up makes it bad.
Which is when I change, I am a hippie but can get violent pretty quickly.

I have been screwed over shitty attitudes more than incompetence.

This is the last time Microsoft! I'm getting my old Arch image out and removing you from my life forever! Never again will my linux distro randomly uninstall itself without telling me in the middle of implementing new components and crash my development server. Never again will I have to deal with an update that refuses to STFU and go away until I, ME NOT YOU MICROSOFT, decides it's a good time to run the update. No more lack of customization and poor support of common dev tools. I'M DONE WITH YOU, WE NEED TO SEE OTHER PEOPLE.

1. Find a decent, entry level job at a company for full time
2. Graduate from my two year tech school with my degree
3. Apply/start at a university for my Bachelor's degree.
4. Start actually building my database application project. Its been on the back burner for over a year.
5. Try not to be so doubtful or unsure of dev skills. Try being less anxious to ask for advice or explanations, and dont let lack of knowledge discourage or embarrass me from growing my skills.

So.. I have raised a PR 2 weeks ago.. it needs approval from 2 of the senior Devs on my team. The first one reviewed it within 3 days, without having to follow up. Then comes the second one, who is senior than the first one. I have been following up with him on a daily basis for the past 1.5 weeks, each time I request him to review my PR he sends me a "sorry" followed by a stupid smiley. I have tried tagging him on Jira, setting up a meeting with him to get it done, nothing's working out. He has already looked at the code and I have explained him the code and the context, but he is just not adding comments/approving/rejecting the PR. I have missed the release date for the feature because of his lack of concern and petty excuses. So done with him.

Whenever I want to type the shrug emoji, I copy it from a Google note ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can type emojis just fine, enjoy a 🍓, yet there is a clear lack of accessibility for ASCII-emojis input on any device.

How is this fair!?

PS: I do know that this shrug is actually utf8 and not ascii. But that's beside the point. Also try saying “utf8 emoji” three time in a row.

I would have to say the first start-up I worked with had the worst recruiters. Albeit they were seniors of mine, and not full fledged professionals, but this was pretty ridiculous.

So at the interview(which I won by winning a hackathon in college), they asked me the standard questions about my current knowledge and what I hope to achieve in the company. When they asked me my tech questions, one program that they thought was tough, I solved in 2 minutes. I was interviewing with 3 other people whom hadn't gotten the answer. Naturally I doubt myself due to the lack of answers being produced. The recruiters themselves didnt understand my answer initially. So much so that they were convinced I was wrong(at this time the others were coming up with, and submitting their answers, which the recruiters naturally expected from us). So to give me the benefit of the doubt, they whip out a laptop to run my code, and guess what? It worked, and had NOTICABLY lesser computation speed.

Needless to say I got the job, but the look on my recruiters' faces after exclaiming I was wrong, then they themselves being proven wrong? Priceless. xD

So, I'm still not certain if it's actually a bug or merely my lack of experience, but I've been working on a 2D platformer game (using only C++ and SDL2) for roughly 2 years now (on and off; sometimes off for months) and I'm extremely embarrassed about this, but for the life of me, I cannot seem to get the player character's movement and collision physics working properly. It's driving me absolutely insane.

I've read articles and tutorials, referenced books, and posted about it in game development communities (e.g., gamedev.com, Discord servers, etc.), but even though the fundamental structure and explanations made sense, getting the code to work has been unsuccessful, albeit not completely so, but if I get one thing working, another thing breaks. It feels like I'm trying to repair a vase that fell off of a skyscraper and turned to dust on the street below.

I've always been a very tech savvy person with a fiery passion for programming, electronics and game/software/embedded/web development, but to be honest, having such a difficult time with things like this that — in theory, at least — seem like trivial bumps in the road have made me feel like I'm never going to be successful in this field. But regardless of the depressing thoughts of worthlessness, my passion doesn't let me stop trying. Who knows, maybe it'll have to remain just a hobby. 😕

Last night, while under the full belief that I could write a very simple lisp interpreter, I was awake until stupid o'clock and to my credit I got the tokenizer working and produces an output of parsed code. It's really basic but I was pleased to have gotten anything correctly parsed at that time.

But I'm also sitting outside my apartment waiting for a locksmith because lack of sleep left me unprepared to function correctly today and I'm now locked out...

Well done me!

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

Was going through old photos from university time and...I present to you the result of deadline + lack of sleep + boredom + shitty university project because somebody decided that CS folks needed to learn webdev in old ASP.NET.

Yes that is one query. I wrote the entire thing out as a string in my C# program in one go and tested it by running it from the program. Must've worked properly because I got them grades so eh. I recall I had one nested seven levels too (this is just 5) but I can't find a photo of it. These two queries did all the business logic. Yeah.

Apologies for the poor quality photo of the screen, I don't have the code so no screenshot, this is just from my photos archive

I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).

Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.

A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.

In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.

All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.

Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon.

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

Biggest sin
Due to lack of time, I named all the variables in my project without logic,
Like temp1,str1, function dojson etc

Lord be with the dev who's gonna work on that project

PS I am not a bad person, it is the time that made do such things

Agreed to help out these 2 guys on a minecraft mod pack idea they had... stipulated this is a side project for me and I'm not going to dedicate too much time to it. They were fine with that

Fast forward a few months main 'idea guy' loses his job so spends more time on the pack and starts hounding me for progress and updates and throwing more and more things for me to do. He's also getting progressively angrier at my lack of substantial progress

Like fuck dude i told you this is s fucking side project to me. I'll work on it when I fucking want to. Hell I'm one more shouting match away from telling him to fuck off and find some other dumbass to be the only programmer in this group and get ignored when it comes to fucking anything else

Their idea of 'source control' is a fucking multi Mc instance that gets shared by the main guy every time HE changes anything. Any scripts or configuration edits I do I need to walk him through so he can update that instance

No clue why I put up with it so long. Maybe because other guy was a cool friend back in college. But at this point they both can fuck off

So, I worked away from our software teams and directly with engineers for a few months to examine the capabilities of a new piece of hardware we expected to integrate with. It wasn't necessary that I be shut out from all the other software projects, but my boss decided that I shouldn't go to them. When pressed, he said he didn't want the meeting to be too full.

I studied this hardware thoroughly, and even know the engineers who designed it personally. This is, in every sense of the word, my project.

... So when the product owner asks to meet to discuss another feature around it, my boss decides he should invite the rest of my software team to meet with the engineers. There's some non negligible engineering background behind the tool and associated workflow.

When asked why he invited them, despite me being concerned about lack of focus in the meeting, he said he "didn't want anyone to feel left out".

This is the same man that cost me an entire week of work (and is now costing me my time with the systems experts) because he doesn't want to hurt the feelings of my junior colleagues. He's shown repeatedly that he's just fine excluding me, but heaven forbid my junior colleague feel junior.

I don't think he'll ever realize how much he's playing favorites here. Ugh.

Software Development:
Too many problems, too little time.

!dev

I have this urge to get better at coding and software architecture and design. But fuck me if I'm not lazy about it.
All these crazy good books and lectures and here I am, doing jackshit to improve. Can't even finish my own personal projects. Bah.

I know how I'm supposed to go about it, how to keep engaged in a cycle of personal betterment. I lack self-discipline to do it though... Tried meditation for a time, but haven't really stuck to it. Currently trying to follow stoics (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and some others), but the mindset is not so easy to adopt, and the practical philosophies even harder.

Oh well. Life is hard. Blah-blah-blah. Thanks for reading. Just wanted to vent, really.

I am Graduate student of applied computer science. I am required to select my electives. Now i have to decide between Machine Learning (ML) and Data Visualization. My problem is Machine Learning is very theoretical subject and I have no background in ML in my undergrad. In data visualization, the course is more focused towards D3.js. Due to lack of basic knowledge i am having second thoughts of taking ML. However, this course will be offered in next Fall term. And i am also studying from Coursera to build my background till that time.

I know there is no question here but I need a second opinion from someone experienced. Also, please suggest any other resource that I should look into to build my background in ML.

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

I landed myself an interview with a really great company for a DevOps intern position tomorrow.

Im really hopeful about this. The company truly seems like a great place to work with incredible opportunity to grow, and I desperately want to pursue a career in DevOps, but Im worried that Im underqualified. I lack true professional experience, and have really had no adequate time working with CI/CD tools, but I am very interested, excited and willing to work hard to become proficient.
Ive been prepping myself as much as I can in this last week (trying to gain familiarity with tools like jenkins, artifactory, chef etc), and so I ask to you, my fellow ranters (particularly DevOps), are there any final tips or bits of advice that I can take to really impress my interviewers and better my chances of getting this position?

Also, hello again to my old devRant pals~ I miss hanging around here and conversing with you great people

I don't know if this is exactly a rant. But - I am sure somewhere out there has run into this situation before.

I've been a developer (professionally) for a 3 years. And in that time I've stayed with that same company.

Over that time its become incredibly apparent that my boss (senior developer) isn't exactly keen on new technologies, source control (I had to push hard for this. And even then he doesn't use it properly), or any kind of project management. It's only he and I.

I've started interviewing other places and while I have no problems answering their technical questions. I'm worried my lack of experience in a team is becoming a problem.

We don't work on projects together. We don't do code reviews. He does not ask my opinion on anything. We are basically two separate teams. I want to improve as a developer. I love the rest of the company and I enjoy what I'm working on. I just feel I'm hindering my growth as a developer.

Anyone have any advice? I know I can find a project to contribute to on github or something. But honestly that's intimidating to me for some reason. I am self taught. And don't have any experience in working with teams.

I work as pharmacist, but code as hobby and recently change job. Have far more options to improve work enviroment, but IT guy sucks balls so much.

Better no password, because you have to remember them.

Some users don't have privilages to do some things, but everyone knows boss password with all privilages.

It guys connects via teamviewet whn I check prescriptions with quite vulnerable data and after my step in he responds that he creates this Pharmacy store and has deal with boss to access database and others.

Due lack of controls there is working against law all the time

Small city so everyone knows everyone and you have to be ultra polite to doctors and after my little unpleasent situation doctor starts to be mad at all employers.

It guy was asked to change disc space on OS drive, but he replies that it will takie at least 2 hours and he doesn't have time, but it takes me 15min top and he was mad at me.

Ffffff....

If you're a PM, don't complain about the lack of documentation if you only gave your developers 20% less time than they needed just to write the code.

New in my job
Start to work on a abandoned project for one of our client not very happy cause the lack of update
Go for a critical issue which exists since 2 months where everyone was telling me that they passed a huge time working on it with no answer
*check error*
*check code*
The code is so fucking much not DRY so I was able to see the same 4-5 incriminated lines elsewhere
*see that the request is lacking of one parameters just has the error suggests*
*copy paste the missing line*
*it works*

I’m now a hero for them but they become fucking peasants for me

(In addition, when code reviewing, some one had the nerve to tell me that “haha it was nothing much finally, it was easy”
To him : fuck you, eat my 💩)