About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

!dev

It was late night after work I went into Macdonald's take-away:

Me: Can I have a Maharaja Mac Medium Meal with extra regular fries?

Guy: Yes sir, that will XX.XX amt.

Me: Gives him my card.

Guys: So what's the pin?

Me: What??

Guys: The Pin sir.

Me: Are you ok? Who the hell shares a pin with you?

Guy: Sir, we don't have a wireless swipe machine.

Me: So why is it a take-away if I have to come inside and drop my pin anyways?

*Guy looks awkwardly at other employees. :/

I had to finally get out of the vehicle and I took another 15 mins seperately explaining him why cards have a security pin and that the word security isn't a joke before the pin. With this, I might have also slipped in some GDPR cookie policy along with it. and why Microsoft bought GitHub. Good Lad. He will learn.

*Late night at office*
Was rewriting my stack from angularjs 1 to angularjs 2. Got drowsy and slept.

*Wakes up and opens Hackernews*
Angularjs 4 announced.

How long was I asleep !!

My grandma saw me programming for one whole day and she started to rant.

Grandma: "She's been sitting all day infront of her computer doing computer stuff! Electricity bill's getting higher!"
Mum: "Well at least she's not out late at night getting drunk and partying!"
Grandma: "Computer girl"

(!Rant) My Programming cave.
A clean environment has always been one of my 'must have' tools for development.
Keeping it clean keeps you calm while busting down on some difficult problems.
And you better believe late night programming marathons are a treat.

When you are working late night on Windows

Came home late last night and told my wife I'm skipping dinner to take a 1hr nap as it's going to be a long night of bug fixing and testing. Woke up, my wife and 1yr old son are already asleep. Saw the pic below posted on the wall above my work area at home. She's a teacher, she's never heard me mention it, and I don't use this method (I prefer music on my headphones). But she does know I lurk devrant so she must've browsed here while I was napping. Feels good. Code fixed, checked-in, unit tested and released for user testing.

Sharing a short story.
Time: 1:30 am
Conversation between me and a night watchman in my society.
I was walking and this watchman suddenly stopped me and started asking questions.
Watchman: Isn't it late at 1:30am. When do u sleep?
Me: I sleep very late (replied in a very uninterested manner)
Watchman: Which year are you?
Me: Final year of Graduation
Watchman: Which branch?
Me: (a bit annoyed now) Software Engineering
Watchman: So you know programming?
Me: (little shocked that he knows what's programming) Learning
Watchman: So, do your university teaches C, Python and UNIX?
Me:(completely shocked by his knowledge) Yup. Except UNIX, others yes.
Watchman then asked some fees related questions and placements scope.
I was annoyed when he approached me for a little talk.. But had a wonderful experience talking to this person. It's great when you meet such unexpected person having such knowledge.
When I asked him how he knows all these, he said he talks like this to many students and learnt it.
His last line to me when I said that you know a lot, was:
Sir, you are the ocean, I am a needle in it.
Truly awesome moment... Never judge anyone by looks or his occupation... Knowledge is something that anyone anywhere can gain...
Respect to that watchman...

late night coders be like 😎

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Love late night working like this 😍

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

Stayed up late enough last night that the cat decided to go to bed without me. 😭

Must. Obtain. Maximum. Symmetry! Now I just need an extra eyeball 🤓

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

My freelancing horror story?

I remember like it was yesterday. It was late at night and I was doing some freelancing. (You know... the good stuff...)

All of a sudden the light began flickering, it got really cold and I felt like something was watching me!

OMG! SOMETHING JUST TOUCHED MY SHOULDER! I TURN AROUND AND...

...nothing. Nobody was there.

"I really need some sleep", I think to myself and turn back to my monitor.

Wait a second, what's that?
"10%..."
"20%..."
"60%..."

Oh my god...
How could this happen to me?
Those bastards got me after all!

I just witnessed...

A WINDOWS UPDATE!!!

The end~
______________________________

I don't feel responsible for pants that need to be washed now.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

I've resigned 3 weeks ago. I have also completed my handover process.

Yesterday I was told that I have to work in the weekend and at night because project delivery date is the following week.

Kindly I responded that I have resigned and working on weekends and late nights won't benefit me in anyway now actually I wasn't benefiting from working on weekends and late nights even before my resignation.

Project manager is pissed off at me.

Oh well, it is what it is 🤷

It’s been a mother fucking Monday... Couldn’t sleep last night and by the time I did fall asleep it was already 4 A.M.

Then this morning, my fucking car locked me out. When I bought the car, it didn’t come with a spare key or a manual key. I finally was able to unlock the fucking thing and boom, won’t start because “they key isn’t in the vehicle.” Replaced the battery and still the same shit... FUCK!!!!

Walked to work in -12 degree windy ass weather.

Lost my cash somewhere between here and there. Haven’t ate lunch..

An hour late to work.

Get to work, boom server down for our Xray images and we’ve got two patients needing CT scans before we fly them out.... Get another back up computer going and low and behold 168 fucking windows updates!

Fuck today, I’m so far done with this bullshit.... oh and it’s starting to fucking snow.

Spelling and punctuation, I don’t give a rats ass if it’s not correct at this point. If someone would like to come and knock me out, that’d be great.

I relate

Saturday late night wisdom.

Software developers you need to work on communication skills.
Everytime LinkedIn says need a problem solver. It means a guy who can understand what non technical guy is asking for and translate that to a software or at least come up with a example of why he is wrong. Explain them. They are not dumb fellows for asking that feature. You might think the feature is stupid. Don't assume this. Sit with them. Understand thier user flow, understand the frustration your software is causing them. Then you'll see why are asking for that X feature.

Every feature request made is basically my opportunity of understanding of product. Don't wait for users to tell you requirements. Understand and suggest, implement prototypes and show them, a causal question such as "Hey would you think providing a keyboard shortcut for this submission is great?"

Understand our job is not just to write software.

Our job is to solve thier problems using software knowledge.

Don't you agree ?

So I said I'd rant this yesterday but a long night of server management came in the way!

Yesterday @trogus mentioned in a comment that he thinks everyone deserves a place where they feel like home and this is that place for me along with some sub-places which derived from here.

So in this linux/foss chat yesterday I was trying to get into an IRC chatroom (all people there (or at least a lot) are also like minded on privacy/security). I don't want to use email signup if not absolutely neccesary (don't judge me, everyone there own thing) and I found out very late (after 20 minutes of instructions from a fellow devRanter) that this thing required email signup. I didn't wanna do that so I said that and started typing a whole essay of why I'd rather not do that and what my reasons are (privacy partly) but then the guy said: "haha you got it man".

For one second I forgot that I don't have to explain myself over there on stuff regarding privacy that a lot of people would find paranoid. Man, that feels like being home :).

Well today I got a fantastic surprise (truthfully). We hired a dev some months ago, who was on 6 months probation and, to put it politely, he was not going to pass it.

*side note: for details of some of the above, read my last 10 or so rants. They are pretty much all him.

Anyway, management put him on an improvement plan to make sure everything was fair, it wasn't working out, but they said we had to finish it to be fair.

So we had another 2 weeks left when he announced last night he's leaving for a new junior role, technical but not a dev.

Months of stress, heartache, bewilderment, late nights and weekends all just came to an end.

The English language fails me to express my overwhelming joy at this moment. The only way I can come close to it is to say that when he made his announcement, a colleague told me I should stop smiling as it could be taken as being rude.

I'd like to take this moment to thank the community for supporting me over the past few difficult months. Without you I probably would have tried to kill him with my dev rant stressball.

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex

Nothing’s better than late night coding (I took it yesterday and forgot to upload)

Late night programming with pops.

This man has taught me most of what I know and I have a terrific amount of respect and debt for him, and his work.

Here's to a lot more years cranking that genius brain of his! 🥂

Late night coding

Late night thought :

Google is a search engine company having with an operating system(Android) as a side product.

Microsoft is an operating system company having a search engine (bing) as a side product.

Late at night
"Your eyes look red." said the cop.
"Have you been smoking weed?".
"I am a developer" he replied.

Modified from Reddit

#Avicii was a programmers late night friend.

So my girlfriend was complaining about the lights late night. As a regular dev I code until about 2am in the morning.
So here I present the ultimate dark theme. Darkroom red. No additional light source required, just your monitor(s).

My apparently my friend's wife gets suspicious whenever his Snapchat goes off after 10pm, always wants to know who it is.

"It's [algo], it's always him sending me pics of his code late at night. That's is the only person that Snapchat me this late"

And it's true.

At least my friends understand me !

When you remember code from last night in the middle of your day and you know exactly where you fucked up.

I really hate it when I am sleepy all day, can't overcome it and so the day goes unproductive 😫😣😞😖

🤔
I think "Velop" should be a word.

Velop - to break software
(velopers would be muggles/stupid users?)

This would give the word "developer" a new meaning.
No?
Okay

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

No Girl can give the pleasure of coding late night😂😂

Im not sure if this is a thing or not, but candle lit coding feels very nice

My second year of high-school, we started having class in computer science. I was really looking forward to it cause I always wanted to learn programming.

On first sight it appeared that the professor which taught the class knew something, he looked like a genuine geek with those dorky glasses, briefcase and pants like Steve Urkel, but after couple of his lessons you could see he had no real dev experience and just basic understanding of programming in theory. He was more reading stuff from the book than he was trying to explain them to students and give some real world examples.

So it was just one these days, everybody got back from vacation, it's hot outside, the guy is just reading sentences from his book, half of students talk with each other and other half doesn't give a fuck about him or his class. Pretty sure I was the only one trying to listen to him and learn something from his recitals.

All of a sudden he notices the atmosphere in the classroom, slams the book shut, gives out couple of F-s to the loudest students and yells out loud "NONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM WILL EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, BARE ALONE IN PROGRAMMING"

At first I felt like shit, but soon after that I started thinking "who the hell are you to tell me what I could or will accomplish in my life". Couple weeks later I've bought myself a first book in programming and started learning C++ late at night since I understood that I won't learn anything about programming in that school. Two years later I was correcting this same professor with his claims on a whiteboard in front of a whole class.

Today, seven years after his words I'm a developer living in foreign country with what I could say somewhat a solid experience and understanding of how both software and web are build, while that same professor still recites to his pupils difference between assembly and object code, while praying nobody asks him where and how these are used. For maybe a quarter of my paycheck. So much about his psychic powers..

Late night programming, the best :)

For a developer 07:23 AM does not always mean early morning, it can also mean super late night coding ;)

Who sits there so late throughout the night?
The developer it is, with his code so bright;
He holdeth the mouse tightly clasped in his hand,
He holdeth it safely, he keepth it dragging.

"Oh bug, wherefore do you seek to hide?"
"Look, developer, the sysadmin is close by our side!
Dost see not the sysadmin with his usbchain?"
"Oh dear, 'tis the blur increasing its radius."

[to be continued...]

Late night coding and my last git message is "changed a shit load of stuff...don't worry I got this"

Good thing this a personal project haha

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

It is with a heavy heart that I said aufwiedersehen to my mom last night. She passed peacefully in her sleep, and is now resting in the fields and forests of heaven. She was born in 1932 in Hamburg, Germany, and at age 7 the world around her exploded into one of the most horrific wars that Europe or the world had seen up to that time. By the time it was over, she was thirteen, and had spent many of her formative years witnessing how low humanity can get in the treatement of fellow humans. She survived the post-war years, and came to the US in the late 1950's, and met my dad while in nursing school. She had four chidren, Tim, Chris, Tanya, and myself. She was a doting and caring mom, who dedicated herself to raising her children. She loved to cook, loved animals, especially dogs, and love human beings in general, and had a compassionate and kind heart. There is a small, empty space in the world that she filled, but heaven is a little brighter with her smile and her laughter. I miss you mom, but I know I will see you again some day. Aufwiedersehen, lieber Mutti! Wir sehen uns bald.

Overheard 2 colleagues having an interesting telephonic meeting late night at my room.
Dev 1: Wait. I am trying to fix it.
Dev 2: Ok. Take your time
Dev 1: Shit. I found it. I knew I was doing something wrong here.
Dev 2: Oh. Nice. What was the bug?
Dev 1: It was a super silly mistake. Don't want to tell. Folks will laugh at me.
Dev 2: Don't worry. It happens with everyone. Come tomorrow at office, and whisper it in my ears. Noone will know.

So some ass**** stole the battery of my scooter over night and I got too late to work and missed an important meeting. Nice. Thanks for nothing?

I am so fucking sleepy. Haven't slept since the last 20 hours.

Trying to change my habit of sleeping late. Have tried to fix it but it always finds a way to go back to late night.

Late night coding with my kitten 🙂

I found my people. We're going to start late night drunken security certification studying. Germany is fucking awesome. I haven't had anything to rant about since my flight here.

Also, celebration: my terrible boss declined the job offer from the company that bought us out. Life fucking rocks

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Late birthday dinner $32
Gas to casino $20
A night without server problems Priceless

!rant
This is the second month that I'll actually earn money from developing software at my job, I'm so happy to finally see all the (self-)studying and late-night coding shed its fruits 😍

Late night rant

You've been coding until 2 am. The moment you're about to get into bed (one leg already under the duvet) you have an epiphany about the code. Huge interior dilemma revolving around the "what to do now?" question.

F*cking Samsung's alarm clock.

I really needed to wake up early today so I added secondary alarm little bit earlier. It was supposed to ring at 5:20 and second one shall ring 5:30. But Samsung said no.

Update came thru night and phone was restarted in process. Why it can't keep memory unlocked I don't understand, but OK. But it effectively means it was not able to trigger alarm clock. So I woke up at 6:35 and came more than hour late.

Why such basic functionality failed? My old Sony Erricsson T290i can ring even when powered down. Same as my Nokia and after that Lumia with Windows Phone 10. Why can't Samsung just be normal.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

Not a rant, but...

Friday night. Birthday party of a girl friend. I'd rather be configuring mi Raspberry Pi at home.

Those are my late 20's nights.

The wife is asleep. The two year old wrecking ball of a boy is asleep. Wanted to finish a library to run kafka/grpc for nodejs microservices with plug and play functionality.

Make some tea. Figured the caffeine will keep me up. Maybe work late night. It'll be fun.

Then diarrhea hits. Now, staying up late because apparently I ate something I shouldn't have. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Past few weeks, I have started to work late night and sleep whole day. I go to office at around 7pm and returns back next day 8-9am. I found it super productive.
But, my manager wasn't happy about it and now, she shifted daily scrum at 1 PM and emailed me to make sure I attend it daily.
Now, I have to fix my sleeping cycle... Nights are so great to work. Silent and nobody around.
Now, from tomorrow, I got a new challenge everyday to make it to scrum daily.

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

Installed Miami Street earlier today.. some random free Shaftgame.
Late at night now, I figured "let's try this out".

> Logging in...
*crashes*

*goes to the settings for this crap game*
> *crashes*

Fucking worthless piece of Microshit.. yet another data collection hook that REQUIRES your shit to log in just to fucking work? Fucking Shaftfuckers, 5GB of internet traffic I spent on this?! Just to see it be a worthless data-hungry paperweight?!! Luckily my residential connection is unmetered and has some decent speeds.. but still, FUCK YOU MICROSHAFT!!!

Coincidentally, keyboard input completely broke when I wanted to do a minor edit to the drafted rant. Microshit can't even design a decent keyboard driver anymore, huh.. I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS SHIT FOR A SECOND TIME, FUCKING REDMOND MICROCUNTSUCKERS!!!!

I love programming late at night, If I do something wrong I can blame it on the fact that I was tired.

It's official...my brain stops working @ 2:26 AM

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

When you stay up late doing a personal project the night before a workday -- knowing damn well you're going to be too tired to do anything the next day -- and have no one to blame but yourself 😁

I worked for months staying up till 3am almost every night in order to collaborate with a team on another time zone. No one ever praised me or thanked me or gave me a pat.

Yesterday two members of that team stayed up till 2am once for the first time in their lives to make a release. They got immediately labelled as the most dedicated employees.

Okay, sounds fair.

There was a pretty big bug that I spent all day trying to pinpoint. It was getting really late, so I called it a night and went to sleep.

That night, I dreamed that I was still at the computer, debugging. I kid you not, in the dream I both found the bug and realized what the fix needed to be. In that moment, I woke up.

I ran straight to the computer down the hall, and sure enough, that was the issue and that was the fix.

Shoutout to the capabilities of the human brain.

Thanks, brain!

Probably should goto sleep soon.. *stays up all night writing php*

Worth it.

!rant

I am so proud of my dad :D Last weekend I went to Minecon and spent most of my time with other modders. When I posted on FB a friend replied "I didn't see you", to which I said "I was with the modders". My dad then replied what are modders. It was late at night so I didn't get to respond and forgot about it.

This morning when I talked to him he said he looked on the online dictionary and found the definition by himself. That made me really proud, considering he is not computer savy and always relied on me to answer IT questions 😍

It's near enough 1 AM right now.

So will someone please explain to me why my thick shit of a housemate is cooking burgers WITHOUT OIL and setting the FUCKING FIRE ALARMS OFF, WHEN HE KNOWS I CAN NEVER SLEEP AND HAVE TO BE UP AT 4.30.

If they go off again, I'm pressing his face against the frying pan

... late night coding session ...
... me, tired as hell committing last porting of changes ...
... git refuses my attempt for commit ...
....
$ git vommit -am ........

It's time to go sleep when you vomit instead of commit.

!rant
Working late? Try installing an application like flux on your PC and save your eyes from pain.

Last night I was exploring the feasibility of cracking the WPA2 key of my own router at home. I set out on a late night adventure, set up a couple devices and, knowing the default password convention of the manufacturer, setup a Hashcat instance with the relevant masks on my laptop, created a Crunch wordlist and ran aircrack on my Raspberry Pi 3, and thought "Hey - maybe there's something for Android too."

Hashcat on Android is a cat based social media app. I'm a little scared.

What's your favorite IT podcast, and do you listen while programming?

I follow:
Linux action show,
linux unplugged,
late night linux,
home assistant podcast.

Most of the time on about 1-1.5x speed.

That awkward moment when you stay late night in the office to catch up some delayed work and suddenly remember that story you heard during lunch about the ghost that appears in the office at night

Isn't it just nice to throw away hours of work because you were given wrong requirements?

I worked late last night to finish a project with an incoming deadline, and for what? That's right, for fucking nothing. Hours wasted. Just because I was told the form was to be submitted to an endpoint that I would receive later on.

Turns out that what I actually need to do is embed some form from a third-party service. So the form that I already implemented (with styles and logic) isn't needed. What's worst, I have to redo all the styles to match this embed form.

Thank you so much for that. 🖕Never again will I work late. I should have known better by now...

Got a coffee grinder from my grand parents. Pretty old school, but I like it!! 😍
Just brew a big cup of coffee. It just tast delecious. ❤

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

What is it with these companies and mandatory updates?

Microsoft with windows 10. Sorry your doing work? Nah, we've decided your going to update now! Sorry, we based our default update time on people not working late at night.

Philips hue. Wanna turn on your lights? Sorry, mandatory firmware update. You'd better install that before being able to see.

YouTube app on ps4. No sorry, can't open this, mandatory 80mb update.

FUCK SAKE PEOPLE.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

I think that office belongs to a programmer.

Late one night I realize that Visual Studio has an update available.

> Might as well. Maybe they finally implemented that auto bug-fixer.

I download the update and it warns me that I must restart my computer. Fair enough, I was just about to shut down my computer anyways.

I turn off my computer for the night.

Boot up the next day, try to open Visual Studio.

It says to me: "No, I mean, you gotta RESTART. Not just re-start, or whatever shit you just did."

Ok. Restarted the machine.

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.

(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.

**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**

Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.

After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...

Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?

Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.

Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.

Today I decided sleep earlier and not to code late night , But when I checked time It was 12.20AM. And after that I was just checking rant, It's 1.00 AM now..☺😁

Background: Since last 3-4 months, was working with a senior engineer remotely on a project.
Present: Currently, I am Out of Office and yesterday late night, I opened my official mail and after sometime I got an email with subject: GOODBYE!

It was from him. The same senior engineer with whom I was working. I thought it was a joke. But people don't joke when they send such emails to a huge group of people.

I never knew he was going to leave so soon. I wanted to learn so many things working with him. I used to ask him the silliest doubts ever.
I still wonder why he left the company. I have so many questions to ask him.
I am sad. I am feeling left alone.

It's awkward that today, this very moment, I can't ping him anymore forever.

It's obvious to be more professional and such things are normal.
But, I am fresher and my first project was with him. So, it's kind of tough for me too.

I know this will help me to grow up stronger and teach me that time isn't constant and we need to always be ready and use the right time preciously and deal with the "constant change".

And also, wherever he goes, my best wishes to him and I hope I will meet him some day.

Finished coding an hour ago, it's 4:35 AM. Just one more scroll....

Staying up late night and sacrifice on sleep to complete the task at hand. A good night's sleep will result in good quality code.

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

Late night programming

I've been working on a proof of concept for my thesis for a few days and the async query calls drove me nuts for quite a while. I finally managed to deliver all query results asynchronously while still very much relying on a strong architectural design pattern. I am filled with caffeine, joy and a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Its 1:30am (South Africa) just had my 8 drive raid 50 fail on one of our main servers after 3 sudden drive failures at the same time after lightning struck our network and blew 2 Cisco 48 port switches...

Its gonna be a longgg fucking night.

My girlfriend hates programming lol

8 hours sleep aren't fucking enough if you slept less then 8h days before

So when does it get less annoying when someone assumes that you play video games every day just because you spend until late night programming?

Spent yesterday and this morning working on a project my boss pulled me away to do.

Just got told it's not needed anymore
/(ò.ó)┛彡┻━┻

Thanks for wasting 1.5 days...

It was actually decided on a late night meeting but he forgot to inform me this morning...

When it's late at night and my wife and child have gone to bed and I pull out the laptop to start some code/specification I question my life choices.

Does anyone else wonder why they're driven to do what they do?

Working late nights for the most productivity because you're a night owl and don't have to interact with a new colleague/coworker/manager/client every 5 minutes

I fucked up.

In my career, colleagues always looked up to me to solve everything. From day 1.
Hell, I have nicknames; « The Dad », « Machine », « The Beard »... when I meet a new group of devs at the bar they use those nicknames even if I have no clue who they are.

Result? I'm not allowed to fail and even if I do and try to take responsibility, no one ever blame me.

They see me as a fucking zen programming monk, all wise, patient and kind.

Oh boy here we go. I screw things up all the time and can never let go the guilt since I'm not allowed to take responsibility of my mistakes.

Once again I wake up after a night of stress working, trying to overcome analysis paralysis. I'm late. Supposed to have meetings with some fucking PHDs, fueling my imposter syndrome.

Can't even learn anything in those conditions.

Fuck they should call me the fraud.

One shouldn't use 'rm -r' late at night -_- just deleted my entire NAS storage thinking I was in another directory

You know that feeling when you're coding late at night and you get an error that you just can't parse with your tired brain, and go FUCK IT ALL, FUCK IT ALL

I'm having that feeling right about now...

-10C winter is unpleasant. -20C winter is dangerous.

-40C winter is cruel. This was the reality of living in Komi Republic — the place I was born in.
Winters there combine extreme dryness with extreme cold. Steel on steel always sparks — gotta be careful at gas stations. Because there is no wind, you don’t actually feel like you’re freezing until it’s too late. If you’re drunk — and everyone there was drunk — you’re walking home, you see a bench, you think: “I’ll just rest for five minutes, no big deal”, and you’re found frozen to death the following morning.

My grandpa once forgot one year old me on the street at night, while — you guessed it — going to get something to drink. I spent something like three hours out there.

I barely made it. Now, my legs don’t feel cold anymore.

Nobody Unit Tests.

So it's already 1:15am late night and I am all tucked up in bed watching Roy Oshrove talk on unit testing and ways to write correct unit test. My friend walk in and finds me in bed watching this. He seems surprised as what are you doing ??
I replied it is an interesting talk on unit testing.

He says are you mad? Who the hell does unit testing ?
People out there are spitting on unit test code base. And they don't write unit tests.

Nobody unit tests.!!

I stay calm. I know there is no point of arguing. I said I'll sleep in some time.

And he works as developer, a job that I applied an never got because of connections.

I am optimistic someday I'll find a job that I deserve. The developer world is in danger. !!!

When you talk to your terminal late night.

Me : % sleep with me
Terminal : bad character

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

I just experienced near death because of high blood. Super strong blood pressure. Avoid coffee, playing games, and sleeping very late at night. This is my advice as a survivor developer. I want to share this to help you. For fast deadlines or hard user stories, always negotiate reasonably with your SM or PM or PO or client.

Thank God he have me a 2nd chance at life. Take care of your health. Don't worry about deadlines. Health is more important. Always pray. I deleted all of my games especially my beloved call of duty mobile and clash of clans. I'll forget all games that I know because those contributed to my high blood pressure.

When you have a headache or head pressure or eye twitching . Stop what you are currently doing and relax, measure your blood pressure and contact your family asap. Take it seriously. My wife saved me.

When I thought I had bricked my HTC Hero while trying to load a custom ROM and it just didn't boot. I had a real eureka-moment late that night when I understood the whole process and successfully flashed it in a non standard way to get it back working.

I haven't thought about this for a while and it wasn't really dev-related either more than problem solving. That moment was also realisation that I both love and hate technology.

late night programming + 🥃 == DevRant

Big hugs 🤗🤗 to all here, thank you for being real.

And some advice to others...

🍸+ twitter == personal damage.

When the 🥃🍸 comes out, close twitter, snapchat, linkedin and facebook. DevRant is your "safe place"

(you didn't use your real name here did you?)

One of our politicians at the late-night-show

Q: who wrote La Traviata? Giuseppe or Verdi?
A: ummm.. Ammm.. Well.. *confused af*

Q: so do you know it or not?
A: I know it! I know. I know but I won't tell you. *in all the seriousness*

[true story]

somehow reminds me of IT guys who pretend to know everything just to look cool :)

Spent 2 hours last night (leaving an hour late) with the IT guy hunting down a problem that affected at least 12 other teams. It didn't crash the app, but did prevent MANY scripts from working, and thus nothing could be committed.
I found the culprit, made a solution, and posted in the email chain my solution. (it required a code review and a client-side update)
Someone responded asking for another dev to confirm my report. That dev did and them dumbed it down for those who can't understand programming talk. Then EVERY EMAIL after that thanked that dev for "fixing the root problem" and "solving their scripts".
And just now, the PO for the bug was replaced to that dev's team. (previously was my team's PO)

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

Random story, I was working on a project a few years ago that had a very tight deadline and a lot of code to write. I had been working late in the office most evenings but one night myself and a colleague had stayed later than usual as we got carried away with supporting peripherals​ in the epos.
The cleaner came in on evenings and we had seen her that night, but had not heard anything for a while so when it came time to leave we figured we best lockup the 2 offices.

After making a quick pass through the building we couldn't see her so proceeded to lock up. Fortunately before setting the alarm we spotted her motorbike in the adjacent car park and decided to have another look.

I'm not quite sure why I decided to look in the tiny supply room/closet but fortunately I did as I found the cleaner standing in this tiny room​playing games on her phone 😂

That late night sunday before sleep feeling, when your are almost eager to know what crap the next day is going to bring you.

When you find you should use `$("#id").html(response)` instead of `$("#id").innerHTML = response` and it works just fine out of a sudden.

So, how was your day?

Company: people are not taking holidays, let's have after work party midweek so they have to take a day off.

Employees: (next day after late night party) I'm calling in sick

Installing Windows on a laptop, it's late in the night here, so I kept that laptop aside and was programming away on my primary laptop, when suddenly-

"HI THERE I'M CORTANA!"

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Seriously, Microsoft, I like the recent stuff you've been doing but please get rid of that. It's extremely annoying.

I stay up very late. It’s gotten later and later as life goes on. I’m tired of being tired. It’s so exhausting.

*coding at 1AM*

Result: wrote a whole feature in what was supposed to be a git merge 😅

But hey it turned out to be very well documented 😜

I have to comment, how the fuck do you guys stay up so late and work for so long into the night? It doesn't matter how much caffeine is in my system, my productivity eventually just reaches absolute zero and I can't go on without sleep. And that's being awake for like, 18 hours. At most! I'm frankly kind of jealous.

But hey, if you are that type, just remember sleep is just as important as food and water. If you've been up more than a day, it's probably time for bed. Your brain will thank you. :) </psa>

Just got Caffiene/energy drink vapes and they work like a charm within like five minutes. Productivity 💯 sleep 0

Don't you just love it when you come in late and the commit you made last night and were certain was going to work, doesn't work and everybody is pissed because of it? And all because your shell won't run since the line ending of your sh file was somehow Windows instead of UNIX.

Fucking love it ^_^

I'll give you a few reasons to walk away from a dev's chair:

1. if you want your life to be simple and not challenging, if you just want to go with the flow - choose something else. Dev's life will definitely bring some challenges to your day (and sometimes night, and sometimes - your weekends). Especially if you feel you are a perfectionist, dev life could turn your life into a living hell if not handled with care.

2. If you like to see people smiling, if you love that feeling when you help someone and that someone has a better day thanks to you - choose something else. 1st line SD would probably do, but the further from technology you go - the more smiles (and human faces overall) you'll see.

3. If you prefer person-to-person interaction over to talking to machines - definitely don't be a dev. Go to management, administration or smth else, but development. >90% of the human interaction in this field is arguments and conflicts; ~8% are requests for assistance, and the remaining 2% are shared by saying "hi" to the office administrator and your (semi|)annual reviews with your manager. Not kidding.

4. If you have a personality where you find it difficult to stand your ground and not budge to the pressure/blame game/your managers asking you to stay in late. Like it or not, it happens quite often. Many devs have spoiled the management by budging to their requests/demands to stay for OT/unpaid OT to "fix the mess they have made". That's a blame game right there. And these people stay in and do what the slaves do - work for free because they are yelled at. And then management sees this technique work and (ab|)uses it on other devs. If you can say NO and stick to it, prolly wave with some printed paragraphs of labour law in front that manager's nose - it won't be a problem. But if your consciousness is too troubling - stay away from this field of engineering.

5. If you want to easily "disconnect" from work and go do something else - dev's career might be a problem. Yes, your computer might be shut down/hibernated/suspended after 5pm until 9m the next morning, but your brain will most likely keep trying to solve the problems you were facing. You'll prolly use your own computer to do some research, check some forums, docs, etc. - this is all your free time, this is all your family time donated to your manager (and to your personal knowledge base). Not to mention, all these things you learn will soon enough become obsolete, as new technologies will replace them. So if you'd like to easily "disconnect" after 5pm, doing that as a dev might be too challenging.

This is my git commit history while trying to fix a bug late at night...

So, depression, yeah?

Two good days of work in a row, and on the third, I sleep late and think during sleep and throughout the night, wake up tired and feel shitty and feel a crash-burn in my feelings. (or whatever you want to call it. Burnt out? Tired? Exhausted? Lonely?) So now I have the rest the optimizing sql bullshit project and a paper to finish, plus I need to work more on the thesis. And ofc, work itself.

Everything feels so gloomy.
I know it gets better, but feeling shit doesn't help either.
Anyways, I'm fishing for attention this time so gimme your good vibes! 🙂

late at night..

should I keep coding

or.. you know, me alone with dark room, internet and laptop..

tl;dr
I am either the most responsible or the biggest idiot in the team

----------

TODAY.. oh boy.. fuck today. Like literally tuck this day and this shit. We ware doing releases for an integration we ware working on for ~1.5 months ... Aaand things went wrong - I guess we didn't make a sacrifice to the release gods - finally at around 8:30pm, being pretty much the last in the whole fucking office after a few last minute fixes I get my skinny ass on my way to grab a Corona and enjoy the public holiday tomorrow ...

Aaaaand I wish that was it, it turns out some things ware forgotten by.. well everyone aaaaand shit doesn't work (ofc ffs, why should it).. I see a slack notif and the feeling of dread gets me a couple of messages back I promise I'll be there in a couple of hours tops..and here I am ranting doing shit covering my desk with "food", hating my fucking self...

Me and the Head of Dev are literally the only ones working ATM...

Anyone else have this, seems like you can do double the work in late night pm/am than in day am/pm..

And I'm starting my internship next week.. gotta be a morning person now :/

Late night work... At least a whiskey is keeping my mind at rest!

Just because I am a night owl and arrive late to your fucking meeting at 1100am, it does not mean I am shit head and trying to save out of office. Then why did you fucker shift my meeting an hour before and screw up my whole day. Fuck you asshole.

!dev

What a fucking son of a bitch day...

I’m hungover as fuck so i don’t wanna drive, so I want to pay parking for a few hours.
I didn’t find my fucking key, when I pulled up the couch to look under it, my XPS fell of it and smashes the screen. At that moment my landlord knocks on the door to take a look at the kitchen ceiling and t he kitchen is a fucking MESS! You know when you’re drunk and get a late night cooking attack? Yea, that sort of mess.

Completely fucked in my head I got the reserve key for the car, unlocked it and the bloody alarm went of because the keys battery is empty. So managed to turn it off, went back into my apartment and found the key BEHIND the motherfucking couch.. BEHIND THE COUCH, HOW WOULD IT EVEN GET THERE? Ffs...

I’ll just continue drinking now and hope tomorrow is gonna be a better day.. and order a new screen for my laptop, it’s not at all like I’m short on money this month anyway..

Multiple all-nighters (all day every day):

1) Working, studying and developing an Android game as pet project. Last few weeks before release (yup, I've set a deadline for a pet project) my day consisted of uni, work, more work and 4-5h sleep.

2) Having worked on my thesis (Development of a CPU/SoC + Firmware + Linux kernel) and actual paid work. In parallel. Because, you know, I need to eat and pay rent and shit while I'm writing the thesis. And debts at that moment were not an option (still made some). All-day all-night all-week. After submitting the thesis I went to the doc and enjoyed 2 weeks of doing nothing.

3) Sometimes on my main open-source project after regular work hours. If I have the motivation and ideas that I want to check out or prove it gets late/early too fast.

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.

Ranting after many light years (oops that's a unit of distance)

Damn Damn Damn.

There is complex workflow engine, and the only thing I know is once you fix and get success response from method A(), call method B().

After 2 days and nights effort, method A() is fixed and I am getting success response.

Now, when I pass this response to B()

One data is missing and hence failing.

Where the hell is that data getting kicked out...

I am in a dead end. I don't even know where to look.
Pinged engineers for help but all in vain till now.

Working on one of world's largest system, and I am miserable in debugging with this system.

And the worst part is there is nothing that I can turn off and on so that it works.

(Don't blame me. I am not that dumb. I just started using it since 3 days)

I had once an sql error that took me two days to resolve it.
The error message was a syntax error but I was using an ORM to write my queries (doctrine with php) .I didn't have too much to debug as the code was pretty simple and clear so I got to the point that I convinced myself that this a bug and I'm gonna try to mess around it to avoid it.

Second day late night, something popped up in my mind '' hey what about those reserved words? Could it be the reason? '' aaaaand BINGO the key '' option '' is a fucking reserved word for mysql.

Tip : always check that list before writing your data models (specially if you're a noob like me)

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

I hate leaving work when in the middle of something, I tend to obsess over it all night lamenting that I didn't finish.

Today I was in a similar position but I needed input from our Finance directorate before I could finish. So I sent them an email which would mean that I'd done everything possible and could go home knowing there was nothing more I could do tonight as surely no one would be working this late.

However five minutes later they replied giving me the exact details I needed.

So yet again, I'm going home frustrated.

Why can't they be that useful the rest of the day?!

Few weeks back, late night, busy watching online series and suddenly, junior pings me and asks for doubts related to implementation design and then implementation in nodejs (which I touched long long ago). And, me being attracted towards debugging, and kind heart to help the junior(hihi kind heart), helped to completely resolve the issue by texting and screenshot of logs sent over message.. just to mention. Time was around 2-3 am.. my most effective time period..

I got a feedback saying that I am good at solving problems which are obvious and have obvious steps. But I have to improve a lot where problems are complex or solution is not known.
People, I have 3.5 years of experience in industry and still I am a junior. I am continuously thinking about it. I was a smart person till my school, I never had to work hard I think it is impacting me till now. I sleep so late and work only in the night, get up so late and feel bad about it :( Everyone is doing so good as compared to me.

So it's 4am and I can't sleep! Code snippets bouncing around my head!! 😫

Time for late night coding, debugging, thinking..been busy since I woke up, work, college, exams, work..work while waiting for an exam..

Coffee - check
Cigarettes - check
Music to keep me motivated - check
Laptop still not lagging - check
Will probably want to sleep in couple of hours - check

Late night after everyone has slept, switching on all the 3 monitors, reclining on a comfortable chair, fetching some snacks and coffee by the table gives me the perfect mood to code!
There is silence all around 😌

Machine learning is hard! Spent a whole day with Weka and it's Neural Networks. God my brain. There is too much to know before being really equipped to use this tool... especially from code.

2 am. Time really goes fast when coding a whole Saturday

Staying up till late in the night just to get this message. Finally it's done. :D

Was coding all night & fell asleep at 3:30 AM. I was late for school so my mom was pissed at me. ☹️

Me when I get an email at 4am from one of the other offices asking for help

No table and monitor, and having to work ALL THE TIME. Our team structure changed recently, and a coworker with 2 years of experience is my lead. He wakes up at 11-12 in the morning, starts working by around 2, takes enough breaks and sleeps at like 5 AM. He assigns tasks late in the evening and night. Expects people to finish it staying up late, because if he can, why can't we. Most of the time, it's like, hey, just push a little and finish it tonight, we have other things to do tomorrow.
And team mates who can NOT work without help from other people and text and call you every hour.

Late at night. Phone set on silent and a lot of Club Mate

Late night work

Why do bosses have to be such absolute bellends?

I have depression and ptsd after my time in the Army, which I was open with my boss about when I started.

It is more or less under control, but over the last month or so I’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, and had a telling off at work about being late and using my phone too much. I’ve been doing everything that has been asked of me, but I hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t be using my phone (I have trouble concentrating at the moment so have a tendency to switch between things a lot like Work, emails, phone, emails, work etc. While at home I’ll have the tv on my computer and my phone switching. Between the 3)

So after my telling off and I’d calmed down a bit I sent my boss an email apology, saying I was going through a rough patch but that it isn’t an excuse and I will try harder to stop it from affecting my work etc.

She comes back with an email about she’s done this for me and that for me but she needs to see some output and wants to own some issues and see them to completion.

Now, I admit my output has been down a bit but I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some custom software that’s full of spaghetti code so it also requires time for me to get my head around it to understand what’s going on, and the guy who wrote it and is the one who knows exactly what it is that needs to be done only works 3 days a week and is only in the office for two of those, so makes it a bit difficult.

Anyway, I assume that she for got I am the person running the project (I use running in its loosest possible terms) to migrate us from SourceSafe to GitLab and if she’d bothered to look she would have seen every single piece of work that I’d committed over the last 2/3 weeks.

Luckily for me I know have to re-write all of the work I did in the last 2/3 weeks in one night.

Also because I, quite correctly, got told off I know feel like an absolute cunt, I’m getting marri d in 3 weeks and now I seriously feel like saying fuck it all and leaving everything and moving away

When I was younger my mom would tell me to clean the soda cans off my desk. Now my wife tells me to clean the beer cans off my desk. It nice to have a beer when late night programming :)

Night time depression+anxiety combo is super fun!

Specially that part that tells you "check your emails" and then you find like 69 more reasons to worry.

I should just call it quits and become a middle manager. Or is it too late? 😬

Ok this is a weird story.

So myself and two friends were working on a chrome extension several years ago, probably late high school/early college years.

So before any of us had seen the ballmer peak xkcd, I had discovered it on my own. I was telling my friend that we should start drinking because a)it's Saturday night, and b) I code better buzzed. So he decided to push the limits. He poured my drink super heavy, then another, then didn't finish his and insisted I did. He ended up getting me super drunk. I started going off on how they were doing it wrong, then took over the keyboard. What I wrote cannot even be considered code. I went on an incoherent rant, puked in a trash can, and then woke up in the bathroom with a towel as a pillow.

And that's the story of why my friends are convinced the ballmer peak is definitely not a thing.

The real problem it is that i can write lines of code and build algorithm in a fastest way in the late night.

Meanwhile in the afternoon I just wanna eat pizza and sleep on the sofa.

Software Engineer
Nerdious Geekius

The elusive Software Engineer is a nocturnal creature, rarely found at their desks before 10 or 11 in the morning, but often staying late into the night. They dislike being interrupted while at work, and it theorized that their penchant for twilight hours is an evolutionary adaptation to reduce breaks in their trance like state of coding.

Not surprisingly, Software Engineers are solitary creatures, except for occasional gatherings called "code reviews". In these gatherings, engineers gently pace around a clearing, sizing up each others work. Although occasional battles will erupt, they mostly end without injury and the engineer will retreat to their desk and continue to hibernate.

Fun Fact: Software Engineers have been know to kill each other in brutal fights over identation styles

!dev, depressing topic warning

-----PADDING START-------
Thanks for the update and for me to get a new one and it was the same as the one I have is a trial run to the store and get some rest and feel better soon and that is why I am asking for a friend to talk to you about your day and I don't know yet if I can get it to me by the end of the day I was in the shower and then I will be able to make it
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Do you ever feel there's like no real point to life, like you could die tomorrow, you wouldn't really care?

I feel life is ok, I've got it a lot better then others in my situation at least financially. But in terms of relationships probably not and I don't have much interest in developing any.

And looking at the future, I just don't see it going anywhere or getting any better? I could be easily replaced, forgotten, not doing anything meaningful.... And the only other people that would notice and remember are my parents.

I enjoy doing things but in the long run they make no difference. I can have short term goals like maybe for the next few weeks, months but if someone asks where do I what to be a year from now, what do I want to accomplish, there answer is "I don't know and I don't care"...

And I guess that's the point, each day sorta just feels like whatever...

Is it bad practice that I stay late(night) reading rants without coding?

Late night + Stellardrone + Haskell = bliss