I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

I'm a lawyer, like a year ago I was home alone (wife and kid went on the trip) and from boringness, I decided that I should learn to program (was thinking about that earlier because of some ideas for apps I had - I was fucking naive then :P).

So I start googling best way to do it and I decided to start CS50 course on edx. And that was a real blast for. Best learning experience ever happened in my life.

Anyway, I was going through CS50 curriculum (at the start I thought I will quit it after few weeks) and every day was like so exciting. This whole programming thing seems like the best thing happens to me in many years. There were so many interesting things to learn, I felt like I discovered whole new word.

So after few months while I was finishing CS50, one day I decided, fuck it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (I'm 35+ btw ;)). I chose frontend path as it seems easier for a person without technical education. If everything goes as planned I will start looking for a job at beginning of next year. So where I the rant you could ask?

Well, you should guest what my family thinks about it. My wife was like at first: I'm proud you learning something new, now she hates it, making fights about me always sitting in front of computer (which is not true as I learn most in work in my spare time - I can do it as I work on my own), she even told my parents that I cheat her because she started family with a lawyer, not a programmer (supposed to be joke, but really not fun for me) . WTF - where is the fucking support ? ehhh. My parents on the other side still don't believe I will do it (after more than a year of my learning) and they still think I will quit the idea in the end....

So thats it my rant about what my familly thinks about me become programmer.

(sry for my English)

!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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

I'm gonna be honest with you guys.

I need a friend. A real friend. And I'm looking for one (or many) among you.

Is any of you interested in being my friend?

I know, it sounds weird. My inner self bully is bringing to mind many adjectives for saying that: faggot, weak, snowflake, gay, pussy, clingy, demanding.

I know. But I'm at the edge of 30 and I think it's better if I cut the shit and just be very clear about the type of friend I'm looking for.

I need people that will be there when the shit gets tough.

I can joke with you,
I can laugh my ass off with you,
I can passionately argue about what's the better programming language.

But most importantly, I can be there when you're depressed, when you want to punch your boss in the face, when you're griefing a loved one that is gone.

And that exactly what I'm looking in a friend.

I used to have friends in life, but a variety of circumstances caused some distance: commitments, personality changes, physical distance, or just a feeling that they don't give two shits about me.

Am I the perfect friend? Not at all. I have a temper and am quite opinionated about my tools, but most of the times I try to be a not-asshole.

I might get angry and be very honest when I don't like something, but it would be very weird for me to turn my back on a friend.

It is impossible for someone to be friends with and to like everyone. But the least I can do is just give anyone a chance.

I think friendships are just things that take time and grow if there is enough care put into them.

Here's my discord chirptune#1829, so if you add me, please let me know your username here.

I think it'd be cool to have like a brotherhood on discord or slack of people looking out for each other (jesus christ, that sounds corny as fuck)

Not to rob people from devrant, I just think that the board style can't fulfill deeper social needs imo, that's all.

Me everyday:
1- Get excited to start coding
2- Start coding
3- Run code
4- Bug found
5- Start debugging
6- Start feeling frustrating
7- Start questioning myself about career
8- Start hating life
9- Start banging head against the wall
10- Start looking for a different job
11- Oh shit! It was a typo
12- Go back to number 1

I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST NEURAL NETWORK!!!

But first of all, as I know you guys, it's spaghetti code and even I as a newb see places where I used too few-dimensional array or passed useless parameters or simply wrote too many redundant lines of code. I know it. I will make it MUCH better next time. Period.

But OMFG this made me scream from happiness today!! Just these few seemingly random numbers... I'm really done.. That's why I jumped into coding year or two ago..

And for some background, I didn't study any IT school, I'm just highschooler (general grammar school) who traded gaming for learning. Also my maths teacher teached NNs on university and is very keen to teach me, so that's that.

Now I wanna make the best out of it and I'm looking forward to write some well documented and flexible library, parallelized and everything (I'm gonna learn a lot in the process of doing this) better then FANN.

Maybe I'm gonna fail(99% probability but hey, I'm programmer beginner, I still think I can code everything I want). But if there is just one moment like when I saw this screen today, I'mma trade my life for it.

Sorry for taking your time guys, I was just genuinely stunned... A lot

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

Jjust got a notification from google drive that I'm out of space. Which is weird because I only have some documentation on there.

So I go looking around and find a folder of "Earth Porn". Apparently I had forgotten to stop a script I made about a year ago that saves all the /r/earthporn top posts.

Atleast I got screensavers for a life time though.

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

A few interview tips from the other side of the table:

1. Bring a laptop

I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.

2. Ask for clarification

Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.

3. Know what kind of company you and talking to

In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.

Just some random tips for an interviewer.

From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...

Congratulations, you played yourself.

The riskiest dev choice...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

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..

!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

My first actual rant on devRant:

Fuck corporate companies. Fuck agile development.

In the last 8 months I’ve been with this company, I’ve 1) made the app layout (which was super fucked) compatible with iPad. 2) reduced the apps size by 1/3 of the original size. 3) improved memory usage by double the efficiency, nearly eliminated all memory leaks. 4) gotten employee of the quarter for some of the above mentioned.

After all of this I got a talking to from product manager that “he knows I am a good developer but needs more consistency” after I spent a sprint on one story trying to consolidate front end validation logic and make a “validatableTextField” actually do some validation. So much for the MVVM you promised me.

Also, was promised I’d get some experience with Android, and with a team of 8 devs 6 of which have droid backgrounds and other two are juniors, guess whose only even built the droid project once in 8 months? You guessed it. This company has drained me of all of my knowledge, went against most of its promises to me, and values pushing features to the point of adding tech debt faster than I can solve it.

Unfortunately my personal life relies on this job or I’d quit right away. But you bet your ass I’m passively looking for something and I can’t wait till I get a job offer and quit on these ungrateful hypocrites.

Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..

It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.

*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)

Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.

But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.

Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..

This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.

With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.

Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.

But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.

I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.

It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.

I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)

Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <3

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

Hey guys and ladys. I've got another little rant about my teacher.
As some of you may know, i finished my final exams last week, so basically every relevant grade is done. Every teacher except of my special snowflake programming teacher spends the lessons casually talking with us (some even say we dont need to show up anymore).
Little backstory: Grades need to be done on 18th, June and i get my certificate on 22nd.

Back to my rant. Special Snowflake is different. He wants ANOTHER project. This is totally his idea and is nowhere mentioned in our curriculum. It has to be done until next friday, it has to be C# and we need a detailed documentation. This wouldn't be a problem normally - if I wouldn't be moving at the moment. Special Snowflake knows this but doesn't care.
Except from the criteria above he wants it to be:
- fancy
- loved by everyone. Literally we need to make something EVERYBODY wants in their daily life
- good looking
- everyone should want to pay money for this

How am I supposed to come up with an idea and program the shit out of it in less than 2 weeks, which i need to paint my new office and pack some more stuff.

Why even bother with article sites now? Try to search for a quick answer to a question and the only resource is some article and the user is met with:

- "Hi, here's where all your data goes. Please unsubscribe from our 937 partners and continue."

- "DO YOU KNOW WE USE COOKIES?" (Covers 60% of the page).

- "It looks like you're using adblocker. Mind whitelisting us for the 2 minutes we're in your life for? "

- "Before we show you the single sentence answer you're looking for let us promote our shitty content that you'll never click on because we hired the guy who makes shady porn links on every z-list site possible."

- "This article is in multiple parts to spread ad revenue. Click next to continue."

There's probably an extension that stops most of this but christ, it shouldn't be this bad.

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.

I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".

I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.

As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.

I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.

Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life

> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

So we started looking into docker. As always I needed to do the research and I was fine with it.

We have 4 projects that are sold into one suite so logically I follow the microservices build structure.

3 months later after everything has been set up, we get called into a meeting. The whole suite should be a monolith as microservices doesn't make sense to the people planning everything.

Ok pulled my current plans out abd made everything a monolith. Just note I also get pulled away to other Business Units to do work for them.

Get pulled into another meeting 2 months later. Why isn't the docker containers in microservices!? It is stupid running as a monolith and we should've done our jobs better etc...

After the meeting my manager and I just sighed and walked to the office. So basically 5 months doing the the exact same thing we did in 3 weeks.

Now they want to develop other services and want to strip every method into a microservice and bundle it together.

Life of a DevOps engineer right!

Lots of stress and strain the last months private and at work.
Headache all the days and no time to get back to my self. Programming starts to get tedious.

Now changing my life completely.
Broke up with my girlfriend and started looking for a new work - finally got a new contract today.
Dismissal coming on Monday.
3 months to go to get a enjoyable life.

PS: lurking some months and finally created an account. Thanks for all the rants which let me smile!

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

🤘 😈😈😹 🤘
Wordpress documentation...
"
Hi all, 😎 welcome to wordpress.
Use it as your last resort. Fuck all programming langs. Php is love, php is life."

Oh by the way documentation also says:
"
Wordpress gives you all the freedom you can imagine. Say for instance... You can use any language for server EXCEPT python, ruby, java, c# and many more.[note: Keep looking for the updated list of EXCEPT as new languages come we add it here.]
"
😂😂😂

It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.

I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.

They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.

The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.

So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.

And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.

That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

"yes, we are looking for frontend interns from your place of education!"

One week later:

"Sorry, but we would like someone with more real-life experience"

How do you expect me to get experience!?

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

Drinking good whiskey, listening to Chopin and birds singing, looking at moon.
I can do it for the rest of my life.

Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”

◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)

◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.

So I just had this job interview with a "startup" (side note: who the fuck still calls limping companies "startups" in 2024? That is sooooo 2010s).

There was this tattooed and very pale girl (you just know the vibe), the mandatory Norse bearded tall guy and the balding, "I'm-in-my-fifties-but-I-am-not-a-square, maaan" sleasy-looking white guy in a button up shirt but no suit jacket. The whole stereotypes gang came looking for their missing nerdy Indian.

The sleasy bloke goes on and on on a looong tirade on how they're "a tech innovation academy", how they "move fast and break things" and they "run smoking hot", so that "long nights are to be expected".
So, they usual red-flagging shit.

Then they all went on a "but we're not like all those companies that look exactly like us" word salad about "sustainability and a healthy work life balance", with their "highest value" being "the utmost respect at all times". I'm nodding my head at the meaningless splurge until they fart out the sentence "for example, cussing while talking with colleagues is a fireable offence".

If some hustling enterprise rather prefers a posh working environment, one can adapt to such circumstances. Provided, of course, that said enterprise adheres to the administrative coherence expected from a culturally refined institution. Mostly by compliance, from the leadership, to a rigidly predictable working schedule.

Now, if the bloody curs want coder dogs that work assfucking hours with a shit eating grin, they better swallow our fucking sailor mouths. Fuck, I've done twenty hour shifts getting my ass kicked in dark startup fisting/rush rooms. If unable to yell at any blabbering cocksucker to go stick his fucking opinions up the bitch who crapped him, then I ain't gonna bloody be there.

TL;DR they can either have a "utmost respect" working environment XOR a "fast and hot" daily hustle.

After they crapped out that oxymoron I could barely hold myself to avoid saying "sorry, I do not partake in any of the psychedelics you must be on".
On to the next interviews!

So I have been looking for a job for so long now. I keep losing faith every single time I get the dreaded "thank you for taking the time to apply but we did not find a match for you at this time" I am having such a hard time staying optimistic!

I've seriously lived thru some fckd up last few years, my father died, my grandpa died and I didn't get to see either of them.

I filed for a divorce from the worst most scamming fraudulent person ever and have survived and have come out the other side, thankfully I am rid of him and all crappy people in my life. I did it all without a plan on how to make it all better, I just went with it by knowing I didn't know where I would end up but I sure as hell wasn't going to stay in that situation, nope, not a chance.

While going thru a contentious divorce and court dates, I was also learning to code--it kept me looking forward to something. Once I graduated and received my certificate . . . PANDEMIC.

Now I am competing for jobs with people with years of experience! how am I ever going to get a job in this type of situation?
I know this has to end sometime and I will eventually be able to get a job but seriously how do you stay optimistic with so many rejections non stop day after day?

this is horrible and I don't know what else to do. I'm glad I found this space for my rant.

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

My job quickly went down the shitter. A mass exodus happened, with half of top talent leaving, and the other half let go. The gig started out great, and offered me the growth I needed at the time, but sadly, life changes and moves on.

Determined to leave amicably on my own terms, I started looking elsewhere about a month ago.

I got an offer today! It's a perm position to offer stability to my fam, but with a consulting firm, so I'm excited for the relatively consistent change of pace with projects, technologies and clients. After spending years on end working on good projects that fizzled out and never saw the light of day, I'm longing to have my code released to the wild! (Not counting various patches and bug fixes)

Wish me luck!

I had a zoom meeting with a new company who came looking for ME. I did NOT look for them. I already have a job (but they pay 3-4x more than my current job).

It went well. How the fuck was this a technical interview. Guy only asked me what ive worked on so far by now. Nothing technical n shit

At the end

Hr asked me how much bands i want 💰💰💰(here we fucking go again)

I had to stall it and avoid question. The guy started rolling his eyes and turned off his webcam. The fuck is your fucking problem Bitch?

Then she said we cant move to the next 76th interview unless i say range or minimum. I don't give a fuck anymore. I said my minimum

She started writing it down and, i have never in my life seen someone disconnect a zoom call after that.

Literally hr was saying Thank u for taking the time to join the interview, the guy also said thanks, i started saying thank you for your time an- they fucking disconnected the fucking call. In the middle of my fucking sentence. I did not manage to finish my fucking sentence from how fast they disconnected.

NOW I'LL ASK FOR DOUBLE OR NOTHING AT THE END INTERVIEW DUE TO THIS BEHAVIOR. GET FUCKED

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

So almost burst a vein today because of a teacher who kept telling us that the .NET orm , Entity framework , loaded the whole database in memory at a context's instantiation , i thought that's kind of stupid thing for an ORM today,considering the hit on performance and memory consumption with large DBs, and asked her to argument why they would adopt such an approach , at the end she said it worked like that and that me saying it's inconvenient is just my stupid opinion . when i looked it up on the internet i couldn't for the life of me find any mention of that behavior and that she was completely WRONG !! i fucking hate this dumbshit university am going to , anyone looking for an intern trying to escape dumb fucks ?

My mother is a manipulative bitch.

From my childhood, I remember nothing but fear and guilt. When I was 13, she shamed me for my body looking ugly and too feminine. She shamed me for having better vision than her, and that I don’t need to wear glasses.

I had a broken toe once, and she shamed me into admitting it wasn’t in fact broken. After two weeks of pain, she finally got me to the doctor, and x-ray had shown it was in fact broken.

She always made me carry her heavy luggage with her crap to the airport, and once I got hernia. The surgery was needed. After the surgery, they didn’t care, didn’t give me the time to recover, and made me carry her crap again. The second surgery was needed. It was more complex than the first one. Now my body is ruined by those disgusting scars. I hate my body now. It is ruined.

She tried to knock down the door into my room when I was crying and didn’t want to talk.

She screamed at me when I wanted to donate some of my old clothes to charity, the ones I bought with my own money. She is so obsessed with her crap. She hoards it, and she was hoarding it into _my_ room, not hers.

My father is still unknown. She abandoned me as a kid for my grandparents to grow me. I barely saw her till the age of six. Then I grew up with her and my stepdad, and their relationship was all manipulation and guilt. She made him apologize and beg almost every day over the course of thirteen years. They were fighting about their miserable sexual life, lack of her orgasms while I was still a kid. She just didn’t care. Once they decided to talk about their pissing kink right next to me when I was (not in fact) asleep.

When I was raped, she did nothing. She just kept on calling me beautiful and insisting she wanted me to wear mascara, while hating gay people. It was all before I realized my gender identity.

She also didn’t notice I was autistic. She liked it, as it gave her advantage. It’s easy to manipulate an autistic teenager.

After my coming-out, she told me she had cancer, and she wanted to stop treatment in order to “die sooner and not see me”.

But once my bipolar disorder awakened, things changed. Bipolar is my shield. I can be manipulated, yes, but bipolar will obliterate my whole world view once a year, together with your manipulative crap you planted into my life. And because it dismantled a 19-year-long, almost fractal manipulative masterpiece, I fear nothing now.

I disowned her some two years ago.

how to learn web development in 2018:

- watch youtube video of that new shiny promising framework

- spend hours trying to set up development environment

- spend another hours waiting for the dependencies to install

- spend the next few hours wondering and googling why it wont work even at fresh install

- spend another few hours redoing everything just to make sure you haven't missed a step

- realize that the youtube video you watched is uploaded last week, and now the framework developers mysteriously decided to change literally everything

- spend hours looking for another youtube video until you realize that now you are watching completely unrelated youtube video

- spend next hours wondering how your life become this pathetic while overthinking all of your past mistakes, and now you are just this lonely pathetic person with no clear future and that you will spend the rest of your life working at a fastfood chain below the minimum wage with no social life living on your parent's basement.

Algorithms real life implementation

On the way to your college canteen? -> A* search

Waiting in line in the canteen? -> Queue

Notice that girl standing in front? -> Linear search

Searching for her dad in the phone book? -> Binary search

Stupid! Google it! -> Trie

Search for her on Facebook! -> Depth-first search

Found her! Friend request? Accepted! Send a Hi! -> Graph

Writing her a secret love letter? -> Caesar cipher

Uploading your first date pic on fb? -> Image compression algorithms

Looking through her Whatsapp messages? -> KMP algorithm

She found out and had your first fight? -> Start over with some gifts! Backtracking

Got her list of items to buy? -> Array

Too many items! Low on cash, maybe? -> Priority queue

Making her play treasure hunt for her gifts? -> Linked list

Wait! Go back! Is that a ring? -> Stack

Girl’s family not agreeing to your proposal? -> Divide and conquer

Got married? Congrats! Going for your honeymoon? -> Travelling salesman problem

Your mom packing luggage for you? -> 0/1 Knapsack problem

She packed your favorite pickles? -> Hash table

Driving to the airport? -> Breadth-first search

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

so I had coworker that I hardly knew that started hitting me up on our Lync chat system in a sort of creepy way. at first he would just ask my advice on things a lot but he seemed like he was always looking for an excuse to come by cube. then I completely changed divisions within my company. there was no reason why this guy should still be hitting me up with tech stuff but he would still every couple weeks out of know where wanna engage. he'd try to find some technical reason but nothing we did now even remotely related. so one day I kind of said to him why are u coming to me with these issues still. he said "u haven't figured it out yet. u don't know this but we know each from a long time ago". so now I'm like going through all my early schooling, college, other jobs with him. he says no to all of that. he finally says it's in the spirit level. like from another life and he's surprised I have noticed it. 😮😮😮

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

Hey guys, you won't believe what happaned to me, I left my laptop open in a hacker coffee shop and went to take a piss, and when I returned I fou d out that someone stole all my crypto CockRingCoin 😭😭 I lost a million and a half Shekels but then remembered my brother has a cousin who knows a lawyer who's wife is a friend with a wolf who knows a real matrix hacker who can hack CIA using only his toes, I contacted him and you wouldn't believe it but he got all of my cock coins back to me, I don't know what I would've done without him. If anybody needs help recovering crypto I can more than reccomend my dear holy saviour LeHackerCockSucker
WhatsApp: +972-50-EATMYASS-0
Email: ciahacker@cock.gov

But then as I was happily looking at my crypto returned I notice a few payments I don't rwmember making, turns out, my wife was cheating on me! And using my crypto to buy her lover stuff!
So I contacted the afformentioned lawyer who's a friend of the cousin that my brother has, and he helped me file for divorce and punish my cheating wife, for anybody needing a marriage lawyer:
WhatsApp: +972-54-DeliciousPussy-6
Email: eatmypussy@lawyers.porn

I am now happily married with the wolf who's the friend of the lawyer's wife and he fucks me in the ass every night. If you want a good life like mine you know who to call.

I was looking for a job after graduating. Came across a company who had a open internship role in a position that I’d never heard of. Email the recruiter and have a good talk but she can’t tell me what the direct responsibilities are. Can’t even answer “what software will I work with on a daily basis?” Even though I was a student, I knew something was wrong.

Ended up moving to the next round and got an interview with my potential managers. They still cannot tell me the responsibilities and nervously laugh when I asked. They do tell me that I will be actively programming which is all I really wanted.

Start the internship and find out that the first 3 months I am only supposed to observe video conferences. I can’t ask questions, I can’t even have my video on. Through these conferences, I found out that there’s no programming involved at all. All low-code drag and drop shit. After that I started applying to other jobs during those meetings

Fuck those managers for lying to me and wasting 3 months of my life

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

You do know that "why do I need you if I can copy-paste code from SO?" joke floating around, right? Today I had a real-life situation perfectly illustrating it.

So I bought a set of parking sensors. Cheap ones, from AliExpress. Prolly the cheapest ones I could find. Installed them w/ engine turned off. All seemed fine. Cleaned it all up, got ready to go, started the engine and beeeep beeep beeepeeeeep beepp ..... beeeeeeeeep.

fuck.

Tried unplugging/replugging them one-by-one to find the faulty one. Nada. Apparently they all were false-alarming. They must all be bad, bcz they seem to work well w/ engine turned off (ignition on) and only false-alarm when engine is on.

Allright, I'll get a new set next weekend, a more expensive one and replace them again.

There goes my €20 and another week basically w/o parking sensors (car length is >5 meters, so sensors do help a lot).

Today I spend a few hours removing my rear bumper again, replacint all the sensors, wiring, etc. Tests show promising results - all sensors seem OK even w/ engine on! Close it all up, start a car again and.... beeep bep bep beeep beeee..eeeeppp.

MOTHER FUCK!

Another 30min-hour goes by while looking for a possible culprit. And I found it. The fix could did not take longer than 5 seconds. Apparently a wire feedint the sensors' controller was too close to sensors' wires. All I had to do is to push that wire a lil further from the controller with my index finger.

I could have saved €30, a week of time, half a day of work if I only knew what wire to [literally] poke.

shit...

I just found out I had used, for over 4 months, the wrong function to encode/decode url strings, which caused a lot of issues with my app...
I refused to believe that the problem is there, so I was looking elsewhere.

The longest search of a bug in my life finally over. Fixed! :D

I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.

I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.

I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.

I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.

I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.

This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.

Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.

Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?

I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.

Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.

I've never written a line of PHP in my life. Been contacted by 2 recruiters this week who were looking for experienced PHP developers

!happy stuff

Couple of months back I applied for a scholarship with Udacity to get into android programming with Google and today I got the mail of acceptance.. I got the scholarship!! For me personally who not often sees the good side my progress in life I'd thought that to be amazing and strongly looking forward to it!!

My family (dad, mom and I) runs a software business. Things were going decent when I was in college, and just as I was about to finish college, it went slightly bad due to lack of some technical insight. So I figured, I had the knowledge to do so, and joined in the family business as my first job. When I joined, I found out that things were worse that what I expected, (lack of processes in the company to handle day to day business). But we took a year to fix it and solve issues. But during this year, while the company finally runs as a proper company, we went into some serious debt to keep it running, as we were expecting it to get resolved soon. But now, although the company is structurally fine, the sales have seriously dropped. This has us cornered and we aren't able to do anything. We are seriously considering shutting the company down.

Which is not the worst part. The worst part is the debt. Since I, was a part of the company too, I am equally responsible for paying it off. And now, due to both my parents hitting the retirement age, I will be the only one repaying it. I really don't want to invest an estimated 8-10 years of my life living very modestly and spending a large (70-80%) of my income in repaying this.

I don't even know what to do, and things just seem very hopeless for me. Looking for any advice anyone has.

I guess if I had a bit more experience in the real world, I would be better at dealing with this, but I'm literally just 1 year out of my college.

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

I'm looking for ways to focus on coding. So, yesterday i deactivated my facebook and it seems life is more productive now.

I don't know why I am a programmer. I went into engineering because I wanted to make video games. I did controls engineering to make physical systems go vroom. Now I mainly write software to make specialized physical systems go vroom. When I was a kid this was not what I would have wanted to do with my life. My 10 year old version of me is standing over me looking down saying "Pathetic". I feel like I need to do something about this before I die.

I want to make a game system for RPGs that is similar to an authoring tool to allow me to make games with some very specific features. Think creation kit for arbitrary RPG games. I am thinking I could make the authoring tool a product as well. If people want to make their own games. But I also want to make moddable RPG games using the authoring tool. I want to give people the ability to mod the game. So I am struggling with how to allow modding and sell an authoring tool. License to distribute unique games? I dunno, maybe I will just keep it as a modding tool for the games I make. I feel like good quality games are moddable. I hardly want to play anything that isn't.

You know that you made it as dev when you realize that your creation has ability to effect your life also the life of others

It came to me much earlier in life ( college final semester)
F: Hey there is this girl that i am trying to talk but she never replies me on Facebook i waste to much time looking for her online status , i wish if i can say hi as soon as she comes online
HF: (first reaction) leave her alone man , ( dev reaction) hmm fb probably be using jabber protocol like xmpp I could make xmpp client and sync online status. If status changes drop a notification also the asmack lib provides a way to send msg to user in your chat room sooo we good !!

At the time i was handling 3 android app , implemented this and called it FacebookStalker , you can select who you wanna stalk and what msg you wanna send them as soon as they come online

Google obviously didn’t liked it
for a long time i judged myself that How can i can make this creepy app
Later I realized that it was not the app i was suspended because i used a DRM marked image as icon

Google never tells you the actual reason why your app is suspended so you cannot fix it.

I learned to be mindfull of what i code cause it started having real impact. Loosing dev account was like loosing everything at that point. i had nothing else

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Cousin sis who was brought up abroad is back in the country, looking for further education opportunities.

Says she wants to study graphic design but from the short interaction i had, it seems she has no fucking idea about the basics of what goes into graphic design. Neither does her parents.

Haven't seen or heard any work or hobby from her that would make one think she has interest in graphic design.

Asked whether she tried doing some design and it seems she is not even aware of tools like Photoshop or illustrator.

It doesn't help that she barely talks at all and wants to get back to her phone. Compared to her, i feel like an extrovert lol.

People who barely interacts or expresses are cringey to talk to.

Trying to talk to her, I feel like looking at myself from 10 years ago.

The point is - learn to talk more. It can help you a lot in life.

HR people on LinkedIn. What the fuck? Do you seriously believe you can attract qualified developers by telling them you’re looking for ninjas, jedis or life savers? I for one am still fairly new to the job so I don’t consider myself to be by any means a coding wizard, and I don’t think any strong senior developer is gonna be seduced by your catchy terminology (I may be wrong about that). Come on, talk to us like any recruiter would in any other line of business. No need to replace the words "qualified" or "experienced" with your stupid magic words, unless you want to sound like you’re desperate

I'm starting to have suicidal thoughts though the Javascript and the whole frontend.

Is anyone looking for a Ruby Developer with 2 years of experience with Ruby, 2 years with pure SQL databases and half year with React?

I don't want to see only Javascript for 8 hours per day for the rest of my life.

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

For those who had already followed my story here, a while ago I was in bad hands having several employers not professionally consistent (unfortunately).

Soon like any professional, I went in search of other jobs and looking for something better for me. I did several interviews with several recruiters around the world (massively trying to go to Europe).

Some never gave me feedback, they never wanted to at least respond to messages, emails or direct messages on LinkedIn.

Until one day a company whose owners are of the same nationality as mine opened the doors for me I came to Europe to work for a client of theirs and that client absorbed me in his company and today I am their CTO.

And magically all those recruiters from different nationalities appeared with the old man "hey, remember me ?! So about that interview, it really didn't work, right? But now I have another *** opportunity ***, how are you? Available for a conversation?"

I have already made several selection processes in my professional life, and I never failed to answer a candidate (that's right, everyone, even negative feedbacks) and I am proud of that. I am a dev and I still did the only job that HR should have done, it gives feedback.

With a lot of joy in my heart I say that the game has turned.

Me: Ok time to save money, have a trip to melbourne coming up, save for a house, car and wedding... Brilliant...

Internet: Oh hey you know how you wanted a smartwatch that was not sporty looking and has NFC, heres the Ticwatch C2!

Me: I hate my life...

Internet: also heres some of the programming theory books you wanted on sale!

Me: starts tying noose

Why must saving money be so bloody hard when everything you've wanted just pops up .-.

I was working on a project, it was a race to the finish.

We are all on very little sleep, like none. Everyone is in a haze.

Last minute a bug comes up that we cannot explain. One of a lead guys say he will handle it but we can see him degrading.

We left him alone, until he comes out of the quite room looking like a scolded child.

“I can’t do it guys... I really can’t. I’m stuck and I can’t do it. I gotta go for a walk...”

As he walks away I say...

“Did you push your branch? I’ll have a look”

Now to be honest, I’m fucking running on fumes at this point as well. So I start to think... what’s the low hanging fruit here?

Spelling mistakes. Brackets. Shit like that.

It was a spelling mistake.

When he walked out of the building we were a fucking mess. When he walked in we were all high-fiving.

He looked at me and said...

“What was it?”

I said, “it was a really strange little error but I got it fixed.”

The guy, who is NOT the touchy feely type, hugs me like I saved his life. And in his ear I whispered...

“It was a spelling mistake” then I winked at him.

We high fived, released the fucking code and never spoke of it again. (Except laughing over a few beer)

I felt like a fucking super hero

To quote Charles Bukowski:
"and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"
I always have tendency to fall into feeling lonely and abandoned, but these days my life is tossing some of the wildest curve balls more than ever before.
The latest one yet just happened this Monday. My manager quit and there was no knowledge transfer, and it was not on the good terms with the company.
Now I'm the only member of my team, and I have to take care of some of the projects that I've never worked on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not setup for failure, and there are no expectations for me to know how everything works, quiet the opposite. But working with our clients and debugging the projects that I literally setting up on the fly had been a rollercoaster.
Second time in this company I will be looking for a manager in my department, and teaching them how everything works. Fun times.. fun times never change..

!shortRant

You all complaining about shit code from coworkers and about fucking WordPress. Looks different, but know what? Answer is the same.
Money.
Let me explain.
For example, you were born in USA. You can choose any profession, and if you became pro - you will be payed great. Looks nice, isn't it?
But if you were born in Russia, India, somewhere in Africa, whatever, you can be businessman, coder or you can suck a dick to the end of you life.
Not that great, yeah?
You are looking around and see great people with their own dreams and talents. But then you ask them "to which faculty are you going?" Answer is obvious. And that's how shitcoders are born.
And yeah, about WordPress. I'm mobile developer, I just can't understand how awful it is (or not, idunno). The only thing I know - if I were PHP developer, I could earn twice more than now. But why I didn't choose that way? Because I REALLY LOVE MY WORK. Everyday is good, I'm working at weekends often, because I want.
So please, shut up. You could never work with WordPress, but you motherfucker CHOOSE IT. You could switch to node, go, Java. Why the flying fuck you didn't? Oh yeah, MONEY. So please, shut up.

Devrant isn't for crying girls complaining about shit they did themselves. (No sexism, just metaphor, sorry girls)

Yesterday, i had to use neovim for a task on my friend's laptop. There was no WiFi and I couldn't install Emacs. This guy uses Vim a lot. He recently moved to neovim from vim. He had some Ruby codes going. I had to debug some codes(performance issues). I was reluctant to work on it but i had to. After looking at some keybindings and the plugins that guy had written, using vim was pleasure. It was fast. I could shoot up multiple terminals work on that and was instant. I wrote some plugins to indent my code which worked as it's supposed to. I used spacemacs(as it's configured properly) Emacs but there is some load time on spacemacs and there are some issues shooting up multiple spacemacs on terminals. I had just configured and started using prelude which is beautiful Emacs configuration and is fast.
After using neovim that day something hit me that i had blindly had faith in Emacs without using Vim and i use Emacs only for text editing task and terminal. I don't use it for listening music, browser and other task i can always use modern browsers and Spotify for that. Modern browsers and music players are amazing and using those in Emacs there is always a lack of functionality and UI.(modern people don't use those i think and some Emacs users i know use stripped down version of Emacs i.e. microemacs or XEmacs.

I know vi is present by default on every Linux distribution. That keybindings are same as vim and it can be configured so, it is useful for embedded devices and system architecture. I love terminals and love working on tty. That's why i guess i felt instantly tempted to keep on using vim and i loved it's performance. I checked on evil layer before but there are some issues with evil layer in Emacs like it isn't too efficient like vim. I love lisp though and clojure can be edited nicely in Vim.

Is this sin against the church of Emacs? Should i join vi vi vi? I have already dedicated my life on Emacs (check my bio). Am i tempted by the devil?

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

I'm a student at a cyber education program. They taught us Python sockets two weeks ago. The next day, I went home and learned multithreading.
Then, I realized the potential.
I know a guy1 who knows a guy2 who runs a business and could really use an app I could totally make. And it's a great idea and it's gonna be awesome and I'm finally gonna do something useful with my life.
All I gotta do is learn UI. Easy peasy.
I spent the next week or so experimenting with my code, coming up with ideas for the app in my head and of course, telling all my friends about it. Bad habit, I know.

Guy1 was about to meet Guy2, so I asked Guy1 to tell Guy2 about my idea. He agreed. I reminded him again later that day, and then again in a text message.
The next day, I asked him if he remembered.
Guess what.
I asked him to text Guy2 instead. He came back to me with Guy2's reply: "Why won't he send me a message himself?".
So I contacted Guy2. After a while, he replied. We had a short, awkward conversation. Then he asked why he should prefer a new app over the existing replacement.
He activated my trap card. With a long chqin of messages, I unloaded everything I was gathering in my mind for the last week. I explained how he could use the app, what features it could have and how it would solve his problem and improve his product. I finished it off with the good old "Yeah, I was bored😅" to make the whole thing look a bit more casual.
Now, all that's left to do is wait.
...
Out of all the possible outcomes to this situation, this was both the worst the least expected one.
I'm not familliar with the English word for "Two blue checkmarks, no reply". But I'm certain there is no word in any language to describe what I'm feeling about this right now.
By that point, Guy1 has already made it clear that he's not interested in being my messanger anymore. He also told me to let the thing die, just in case I didn't get the hint. I don't blame him though.

It's been almost a week since then. Still no reply from Guy2. I haven't quite been able to get over it. Telling all my friends about it didn't really help.
Looking back, I think Guy2 has never realised he has that problem with his product.
But still, the least he could do is tell me why he dosen't like it...
"Why won't he send me a message himself?" Yeah, why really? HMMM :thinking:

You know what? If I ever somehow get the guts to leave my home country, I'm sending a big "fuck you" to this guy.

I am currently learning angular.js and in index.html I call two different controller files. I have spent the last 5 hours of my life looking for the error when the issue was that when I opened the script tag I didn't notice that type="controller.js" instead of src="controller.js" because of auto finish please kill me now for this terrible mistake that has almost annoyed the fuck out of me and forced me to walk away from my computer on multiple occasions to try and figure out the issue

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

There was this place somewhere in the ocean called “United Paper Island”, a bit like paper towns, but a real one. You could only get there via a private jet or a ship that came only like every three months or something. the island was small and… eerie. There was a large bus stop-looking hub in the middle of the island, and it also had streets/housing, but things looked off. Some streets resembled well-known places like Fifth Avenue or Champs-Élysées, but not quite. Everything was half abandoned, and felt like Half-Life 2 maps. A small town that was just a bit too silent. The plot was that we moved there temporarily, and I went for a walk trying to convince ppl that it was okay, it was fine, just a regular place. But I had a gut feeling it was not okay at all.

Then my stupid brain decided to imagine what it would feel like to be buried alive on this island, specifically waking up inside the coffin underground. Then I felt like I was suffocating, and I finally woke up.

First thing I did was immediately grabbing my laptop, opening google maps and trying to find this island. “Paper Island” and “United Paper Island” yielded nothing, obviously. But I _knew_ the location.

As I was scrolling around the map, it felt like that knowledge was being erased. I felt that. Just like someone connected to my brain, selected certain files and hit “delete”. After 20 seconds, it was over.

Now I don’t know where this island is.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

--- Visits stackoverflow for an answer
. You find the accepted answer amazing... Yep this is what I'm looking for. (You copied the code into your source)
.
.
. scrolled down a little bit
.
.
. You saw another answer with a higher upvote. Ooh lala, this is fucking cool. (You copied and replace your source again)
.
. scrolled down once again
.
. You noticed yet another answer which is the most recent and a lot shorter implementation of what you just copied. (No shit! You copied and replace your source yet another time)
.
. scrolled down for the last time maybe and it looks like the previous was the last.
. But then...
.
. you saw a comment with lots of upvotes even more than the accepted answer and this comment points to a link.
.
. You clicked the link with your mouth salivating waiting to see what holds at the other side of the world which amount this so much upvotes.
.
. And Tadaaaa 404 not found!
.
. You feel hunted by that mysterious link for the rest your life...

Hey devRant! It's been a long time, but I'm baaack! I know you missed me, but my life has been so eventful, and difficult, and so I am here for sympathy and recognition of my status among my fellow devRant community, because like, I'm basically a legend now, I'm sure you've all heard of me!

Did I mention I'm back!? I know right, it's mad, it's like the place hasn't been the same without me. What has changed? Man, I remember when devRant was a toddler colouring in my walls with crayon, man those were the days...

Oh, have any of you seen @OtherLongtimeUser about, are they still alive? Come on guy, we were like best buddies, and your existence validates my sense of self-worth in relation to my status on this here community. You about?

Anyway, life's been hard, I'm sure you're all desperate to hear about it... Looking forward to you asking me about it in the comments so that I can skirt around the answer for you whilst still trying to extract the maximum amount of sympathy. But yea, just tell me you've missed me, that'd be fantastic.

Also, I bet the banter on here isn't like it used to be. All you n00bs missed so much. But hey, did I mention, I'm baaaaack!? ✌

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

I'm fucking done.

I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.

After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.

Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.

For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.

What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

!rant ?

So I had 2 Stack Overflow questions open about Rails / Webpack data communication, plus one issue open on Webpacker's github for 3 days, desperatly looking for an answer or an idea. No answers.

Today I talked a bit with my flatmate about my problem, dude gives me a perfect, easy to implant solution, and life seems to be bright again. Thank you Alex 😥.

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

I've spent many years in a bubble of 1 backend lang.. but when i started checking out other langs, I got very annoyed that each one has same basic stuff but with different syntax... Can we just agree on something? Ffs!
We really couldnt come up with unified syntax for -
false, False FALSE
OR or ||
def func function
And dont get me started on all the variations of for loops... Its like we are trying make our life hard

Looking at new versions of some langs, looks like they are copying new stuff from one another.. with different syntax.. thanks!
Nodejs trying to look more like she doesnt have callbacks.. while other langs adding callback functionality... Why why why?!

Do you know one major thing (among others of course) that has made devrant feel like home for me after swearing off social media for a long time?

Common ground with users dealing with absolute, insane incompetency at work (I have it real bad at my job).

This doesn't so much make me angry or frustrate me as it makes me sad.

Everyone has varying levels of intelligence in infinite disciplines. Someone could make you cry because they play violin so beautifully but they can't tell you 4 + 4 because they are completely dense, but boy are they genius with that instrument.

Everyone is GREAT at something, that's capitalism's strength! Everyone can excel! I'm lucky enough to truly in my heart believe that programming, data and game development is my true calling...and I personally think I'm amazing at it.

It breaks my heart when people fall into or pursue something that clearly they just don't have enough passion for or regardless just don't have the skill for.

They become toxic to themselves, their employees/coworkers, their industry.

Sadly, power is given to people who simply aren't capable and power is bad on so many levels (aka fucking psychopaths gaining too much power) but it's also bad when people who don't know what they're doing or care get power.

People, I implore you...the secret to happiness and fulfillment in life is finding what makes you happy and what you're passionate about and good at and gripping it until you die.

Most people don't find it....but DON'T stop looking! It took me until my 30's to figure it out. My best friend in her 20's took her life because she couldn't find purpose...don't just be an asshat, incompetent manager in an industry you don't know a fuck about. Love what you do and help others excel.

This is how I get when I'm drunk, sorry. You guys will learn, lol.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

I honestly don't understand people who genuinely believe formal schooling will cover all the basics they need to know to do a real-life job, and still get barely passing grades on all relevant subjects.

I genuinely don't understand people who copy GitHub projects to pass classes, and graduate from a university with goddamn StackOverflow instead of a brain.

Whom I understand even less are people who don't do anything major-related on their spare time.

I mean, change your fucking major, do what you actually like, do things that actually light your nuts with passion.

Please don't waste my time pretending you are in it not just because it's potentially well-paid and "cool".

Please don't waste my time being my coworker.

Yes, I'm looking at you, trendy wanker with a CS degree and no personal projects.

P.S. Junior here. Yes, I'm full of hatred for all the "real programmers" in the industry out there. I hoped for a better experience.

P.S.S. I mean absolutely no offense to people using either GitHub or StackOverflow outside of the aforementioned context.

Just want to put it out here... reading this will waste ur time. :(

Having a serious crush on co-worker. I tried not to have a crush on him initially because he’s a colleague and he seems to be much older(max 10 yrs I guess). Age isn’t an issue but ppl say it’s not good to like someone from work.

But then he kept on glancing at me and caught him turning back to look into my cubicle at several occasions. Saw him looking at my direction across the room, hall, turning back to look when he was waiting at lobby, and all the way from smoking corner as well. Could be possible that he just happened to be looking in my direction several times.
Now, haven’t seen him since early feb because of the quarantine. Luckily, I chanced upon his number when everyone in the dept was put into the same chat channel for the Covid19 news. I had this urge to ask what was it all about because we’ve been told to wfh till further notice. Who knows what could happen to us during these period.

So tried to be brave and asked abt why he was looking into my cubicles several times, without coming out weird (I hope). His reply was “dont know”. I don’t know what to make of it. Could have been anything else but how could someone just reply don’t know.

Then came yesterday, my friend was telling me about her experience on tinder. Apparently she’s been using it for fun and she got funny texts from the guys there. So I decided to give it a try. Man, it was so fun swiping left all the way (cuz they couldnt be compared with work crush) till I swiped right for this older guy. We matched!
He was the first one to match, probably abt 5-10mins after I’ve finished setting up profile and all that. It was totally a new experience for me. I forgot abt my work crush in that moment. He had this minimalistic vibe. Didn’t smile much in his photos, gave me calm feeling and looked so cool. He put “Everything is good in moderation” in the bio. He’s the only one comparable for that work crush. Not sure who’s supposed to start saying hi. My friends said wait for the guy, so I waited.
Got a few other matches after him but didn’t like them as much as him. I finally decided to say hi. No respond till today. Given that he put Doctor for his occupation, I assumed he’d be busy. So I waited. Then sent another in late afternoon asking if he plays LoL often (he’s wearing LoL land yard in one of the photos). No reply.

I started to feel weird because this is supposed to be light and fun because who takes things seriously on tinder, right. They’re there to flirt and kill the boredom especially because of the lockdown. And I started to have serious feelings for this one guy whom didn’t even bother to reply. So decided to delete tinder for good. Sent him one final msg that I really wanted to get to know him and I thought he’s a really cool handsome dude. But now that I’ve deleted my acc, he wouldn’t even see my msg anymore.

His profile name is Randolf. I want to get to know him in real life. But is it illegal? :(

Thank u for read this far. I just didn’t know where to put all those feelings. And sorry for wasting your time with nonsense.

Worst day of my life.

Got a job at an awesome company in another country but joining is in November.

Bunch of us got screwed over by the current company because of "downsizing" (out of the blue, they wanna start over with 4-5 devs like 2 years back) and they don't want to keep front-end developer as anybody can do it... (yeah I remember how the site was before I came... using ! important everywhere is not the solution).

Started looking for jobs (because I need to pay rent) so that I can spend 3 months there and then quit. Facing moral dilemma, as I don't want to do that to the company who hires me now.

!dev

I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.

The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.

As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.

This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.

My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.

That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again.

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

!dev !rant

I'm looking for recipe to try and make as I'm a bit too bored and my school life is being a bitch. Can anyone recommend me their favorite recipe?

And yes, I'm bold to assume you guys can cook

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

I don't understand Laravel...

I'm just a software undergrad in my final year. Coming from JS side of things (Express, NextJS), I find Laravel so complex, and maybe unnessecarily complex?

Like, when I wanna learn Laravel, I understand the MVC structure. However, going deeper into it, there are libraries/names like
1. Vagrant
2. Facade
3. Artisan
4. Guard
5. Gate
6. Policies
ALL OF THESE
WHICH I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT TIES TO THE FUCKING MVC STRUCTURE

I'm seriously giving up... My courses forces us to learn this framework, and I feel more and more inadequate because I have so many things to learn, including things for my FYP, which involves the use of NextJS. And can I mention HOW EASY AND MINIMALISTIC JS FRAMEWORKS ARE?

LIKE, I JUST WANNA MAKE A STUPID FUCKING APP MAN, WHY MUST I KNOW SHIT LIKE ARTISAN MAKE, WHAT THE FUCK VAGRANT IS, HOW GATES ARE RELATED TO POLICIES, HOW POLICIES RELATE TO VIEWS, WHY THE FUCK DOES FACADE EXIST, and other fucking stupid questions I need to ask in order to utilize Laravel correctly?

Don't even get me started on JETSTREAM, FORTIFY, LARAVEL/UI, BREEZE. Like, WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST HAVE ONE SINGLE PATTERN, AND THEN HAVE GOOD TUTORIALS RELATED TO THAT ONE SINGLE THING?

I don't know, am I just stupid? Looking at Laravel, I feel like my braincells die more and more looking at the words used, the unusual terms, and the pain that comes with trying to learn it, because I don't have time. I'm going to fucking fail this subject because I have too much other stuff in my life to learn about.

I'm fucking tired man...

!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
--------
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...

I have a really old Toshiba NB200-10P notebook with Intel Atom CPU and 2 gigs of RAM and 32 bit architecture... It was made for Windows XP, and now it barely runs Windows 7... So I'd like to give new life to this old piece of hardware with Linux (for basic tasks like Office, and maybe coding with Notepad++)...
I really like Manjaro, but after they ditched 32 bit support, the Manjaro-32 community project seems a bit unstable...

So, could you devs please recommend some reliable - and somewhat good-and-simple-looking - Linux distros?

Since my contract is going to be terminated on 1st July and brilliant devrant community injected me idea to make same project and start selling it as incorporated I made some steps.

I made simple POC that is command line application in different language and unrelated to what I’m doing and showed to my friend and ask if he want to buy it for his company and he was like wtf this shit even exist on the market or it’s new thing ?
I admit company I work for is not present in my country and this product is like not existing on the market. ( at least I can’t find it )

From this point I have a feeling I need to do it. I have life savings that will provide me to at least 2021 or even for a whole year if I’ll be smart and I think it’s going to be good thing to take a summer brake and make own project based on professional experience I have.

Despite the situation around I will be mostly coding 24/7, drinking and playing playstation.

I probably will convince my friend to work on it and my other friend to sell it once it’s done. He already wanted to sell my command line tool but I told him to keep his mouth shut cause they might steal the idea.

I already decided to use different tech stack and api so all software will be different, some business parts are unavoidable but I have many fresh ideas. At the end I will just connect some online payment, make youtube commercial and start selling it by integrating with some api and buying internet ads, also I will start looking for a new job from October if nothing will work out and just keep investing less time in it.

What you think ?
Should I take the risk or not finding job and do something that my heart is telling me to do( I write software for 12 years for money so I don’t think it’s even possible ) or should I live safe boring life and just go to another job ?

Thanks
Have a nice day.

So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

God I fucking hate macs.
I got a mac at work. I tried to install ubuntu, with rather questionable results (unfortunately, I expected that) - so I tried to get mac work for me the way I like a system to work. I needed to download slack, simple enough, right? Ha, you wish. It's gotta be done through Apple store, so I went to create an Apple ID inside the Apple Store form. And, well, it just errored out on the submission. Great start. I went then to the settings and created an account there, great success, went back to Apple Store. Unfortunately being logged in at the system level doesn't mean you are logged in to the store. So, I went to log in to the store, simple enough, right? No, nothing's simple with Apple. After logging in I got a message that the Apple ID has not yet been used with Apple Store and that I need to review the account's setting. So, I click the "review" button and... I'm presented with a log in form. Yep, a perfect log in loop. I can't log in because I can't review the account but I can't review the account because I can't log in. Fun :)

You can't just go to the web admin panel for your account to review it for Apple Store, that would too be too easy. After a bit of searching I've found an answer on StackOverflow. You need to log in to iTunes. Through a fucking MUSIC APP. To install a free application from the store you need to log in to a music app. Yes, we're all mad here.

Then, after finding out that to be able to use side buttons on my mouse I need an app that I need to manually restart every time I restart the machine and that I need to have an app to fucking transfer files from an android I need another fucking app, because reading a storage of a linux-based system would be too standards compliant - something in me broke. I found out that installing windows on a mac is officially supported.

Supported doesn't mean that it's easy. I tried to install it trying different solutions from SO, but each time I would get an error that Windows couldn't modify the boot partition. Turns out that even wiping the drive and reinstalling OSX doesn't remove residual files on a boot partition and Windows installer is not allowed to modify them. It took me hunting into some shady looking site to actually find this answer. I have no fucking idea how long it all took me, but, finally, great success, Windows, WSL, side buttons working, I can even install slack from an installer. I just wish I could have those hours of my life back.

Me: trying to do any simple fucking project
Me: cant figure out how to do something simple or cant figure out how to start or how something should work.
Me *Looks up problem* (everytime...)
results: SOMETHING I WOULD NEVER HAVE FUCKING THOUGHT OF.

Am I just a shitty programmer, a shitty learner, or just not cut out for this? because I fucking Love this field. this is the only thing I ever want to do. BUT I CANT FIGURE ANYTHING OUT FOR THE LIFE OF ME EVEN WITH LANGUAGES IM GOOD AT!! WHICH IS JUST PYTHON AND IM STILL SHIT AT THAT.

I TRY TO DO PROJECTS WITH JS, OR C, OR PYTHON PICK WHICHEVER ONE. AND I NEVER KNOW HOW I SHOULD START IT, AND IF I LOOK UP HOW TO DO IT ITS SO MUCH LONGER AND COOLER AND BETTER THAN MY DUMBASS WOULD HAVE DONE (and longer in a good way because its well thought out and works)

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET A REAL JOB IN THE FIELD IF I CANT MAKE THE RANDOM IDEAS THAT I SEE ON THE INTERNET AND WHY CANT I MAKE THEM AS GREAT OR LONG AND SHIT ON MY OWN. SO MANY PEOPLE CAN WRITE SO MANY LINES OF CODE AND FUNCTIONS AND ALL THIS SHIT THAT WORKS AND YEAH THEY LOOK UP SOME PROBLEMS BUT NOT HOW TO FUCKING DO THE ENTIRE THING LIKE SOME FUCKING RETARD
AWDJKBAKWJBDAOLK;JWDBOALBJKWODANLWIO;NIAWDN;PIAWLDJBAWIDHB
I CANT GO A PROJECT WITHOUT LOOKING UP HOW TO DO ANYTHING BECAUSE MY LITTLE BRAIN CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Last week I got 2 offers to work remotely which is amazing for me and both of them sponsorship me to their respective countries.

I finally resign and finally I'll going after some life quality which I was looking for at this point of my life.

Just realised I've been looking for an x86 based laptop to install Linux on just for around the house...

Been looking at buying a brand new one and only now just remembered I have an old 2009 MBP...

Let's break out the elementary OS USB and breathe some life in this baby!

Addition to my posts about getting accepted to faculty of information technology at the Czech Technical University in Prague:
I am now officially in the student life mode :D
Tasting the life at a dormitory and living on my own... (still okay considering that I don't have to work for money, I just ask my mom to send more money when I don't have anything to eat so I can buy the cheapest food I can find to live yet another day 😇)

Soo does anyone reading this post happen to be living at koleje Strahov? I'm in block 7 and you can find me by looking for an MSI gaming notebook with devRant stickers all over it. Hit me up and we can go out and have some beers :)