I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

So my school's wifi doesn't support my TV or something, all I know is the wifi doesn't appear as a potential connection for the TV. (Even then, when I plugged the TV into the Ethernet cable, it still gave me an error message.) Well I figured out a loophole Saturday night.

I plug the Ethernet cable into my laptop. Then activate the hotspot on my laptop. Connect to the TV through the laptop's connection. Problem solved.

Loopholes are one of the best parts of life.

-_- every time I use windows recently, I'm reminded of why I haven't for years... I swear, the simplest things are so freaking hard to do. It's like, windows doesn't support W, but blog post A references program B, which converts Z into Y, and after spending 3 more hours googling I find programs C and D, which convert Y into X, and then X into W. Were you able to follow along? Yeah, neither can I. The logo comes up and I immediately get PTSD and start falling down Alice's rabbit hole only to realize I've just wasted 5 hours of my life...

Unfortunately, ASUS is horrible and refuses to make even the most basic, minimally-functioning Linux drivers, or provide anybody with the resources to do it themselves, and they put everything on GPIO chips capable of frying the laptop!!! I'm so freaking done...

I feel like an adult locked in a child-safe playroom full of baby toys...

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

So guys you all remember or know or will know how it is to be a student. Not that much money around, have to be responsible for the first time of your life and I don't know since we're all programmers here our Desktop/laptop that we invested our money on for the university is our life.

Recently I have found out that something is up with my laptop. My Ram should have been 8GB but it shows only 4. I almost fainted, I thought the seller caught an idiot (me) and sold it like that. So I decide, for some reason, to buy 2x8gb ram so I can have 16 since its the max support of the system.
I open the laptop and what to see but my laptop had 2x4gb in there.

Regardless I installed the new ones to find out what else but my PC is now showing just 8gb.

"Calm down Nick" I said maybe GPU uses it but no it only shows 4gb ram, the same amount the laptop came with so I guess it's integrated.

So now I can only think that the problem is occurred because my Father, dropped the laptop when I specifically told him to not have it in dangerous high places. I Googled around but everyone is talking just swaping the ram chips well yeah I did that 100 times, still the same.

Tl;Dr I'm freaking out because theres something up with my laptop

so, this is gonna be a little long question regarding life as a programmer . hope you can bear me.

so, the situation where i am is that i spend all my day in laptop cause i want to change the world and make better living for the poor by the support i can give to them using my knowledge. but eventually nothing is happening that way. my parents and siblings complaint that i spend all my day in front of the screen coding apps and doing some kind of programming. but the fact is that nothing is coming out of that . sometimes i feel depressed about it and it's kind of like i start hating YouTubers and promotional spammers who show how you can change life and earn billions with just your hello world apps. i had an app on play store which was doing decent but this year my publisher account (developer account) got terminated because i breaked some policies about whom i didn't knew exist.for now i just want to earn enough money and wanna help out people in my twenties.

How do all you other devs deal with sleep? Because I am losing my fucking mind I work for myself so I don't go to work at 9am leave at 6pm.

I normally work until 6am and then sleep till 12 drink 3 strong coffee to start functioning again try and do something productive which at the moment involves catching up on the NBA playoffs and then starting work at 6pm.

Due to resent baby I thought shit my life is fucked I haven't left the house in 3 days I need structure routine I need to work 9am to 6pm become human again but I just can't FUCKING sleep it's now 1:30am and I'm trying to sleep.

I know what your thinking why are you on devRant but I've been trying to sleep for the past 3 hours but all I can think about is work code, refactoring, new languages, security, support shit that can wait but I can't get it out my head, keep thinking "ah your not tired you could work", and YES I have a list which get bigger every day wish I had a drug dealer or was still in contact with my old mates so I could get some Valium but it's hot milk and sleeping tablets for me, life is so much easier when you can just fuck of home at the end of the day and forget about work, not having your laptop next to you trying to trick you into opening it. How do other people who work for theirselves deal with the life work balance?