Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

-------------

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Hai devs!
Team devRant here.

Some sad news, my teammate can't participate for reasons I don't need to disclose.
I'm not stopping though, I'm going in alone! (Or well, physically).

I'll post the link to the updates (and more) site later on but the important part:

It starts at 12pm EU/Amsterdam time and stops tomorrow at that same time!

Working on a livestream =)

Cheers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

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

“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”

Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...

*Sad music is playing*

“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”

Yeah so what?

*Sad music continues*

??

*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*

????

Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.

Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).

Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.

I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?

Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).

But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)

We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.

Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.

We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.

That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.

So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.

And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.

I love drinking on a Sunday!

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

Earlier this day i reached 1000++. Nice, isn't it?
Suddenly an idea comes to my mind.
Why not make a rant and thank everybody? And now comes the important part:

Why not make up a funny story telling how i met @dfox and welcomed @linuxxx and @alice on devRant?

Because somehow the story isn't funny at all because nobody got that it was a joke...

Went great...

People think i'm really old (19 btw.)
People think I know @dfox personally
@linuxxx can't even remember how I never welcomed him

So... sry... I guess? But thanks for the really nice comments!

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.

After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.

The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.

They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.

I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!

If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.

---

I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"

Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)

been a couple of years since I was last active here.

Source Engine still has its claws on me today - but Nii broke free and properly got into other engines and made some cool projects! We both study different stuff now.

I tried to get into Unity a couple of times now, even made a small VR grappling hook prototype once (def not nauseating). But it's hell. It's kinda sad that modern engines don't understand the needs of level designers as well as Source's Hammer. Even though Source is outdated af.

Thing is, I am more and more starting to doubt that this is what I wanna do in life. Game industry sucks. Ad industry sucks even more. I might just become a tree and produce oxygen.

I started using duckduckgo about ten years ago and have evangelized it ever since, including on devrant, but I think I've just about had it with it. Let me explain.

I was more than happy to accept the less-than-google results for standard searches, because I could force the site to only show me results that matched an exact string if I put quotes around it, or force the results to include or exclude results with words with minus or plus characters before them.

But that's all gone now. Now, plus just means, "show me more results with this word," and minus means, "show me fewer results with this word." Wrapping a string in quotes doesn't mean you require anything exact anymore. The name of the game with DDG now is the same as Google: engagement. Narrowed results or fewer results means less chance of clickthroughs, and you can't sell ads that way.

For normal searches, I'm off duckduckgo. It makes me sad.

Let me clarify though that DDG's bang searches are still fully functional, and are still an absolutely indispensable part of my workflow. I use them well over a hundred times a day, every day. I updated my rofi script for web searches to use qwant, but still go to DDG if the search string begins with a bang.

Very random, I’d normally post this on twitter but my girlfriend is there and it’s about her. A bit long and very personal...

to;dr My girlfriend and soon to be fiancé officially who is certain we are going to marry, doesn’t want to invite people to our wedding anymore because she doesn’t have close friends like I do and I’m quite disappointed.

My girlfriend and I have been planning to get married for a while now at least 18 months. I haven’t asked her to marry me yet officially but I know she’ll say yes because we’ve discussed it. We’ve spoken about a small wedding with a few friends not much family but the more we spoke about it the more she’s reduced how many people we should invite. Today she basically said she doesn’t want to invite anyone because she doesn’t have any friends she’s that close to or trusts like that.
By comparison I have about 5 best friends I can count on any day of the week and at least 5 other friends I’d want to be there. We’re both introverts but I’m close to some of these guys because we have similar mental illnesses and trauma from our youth and we gravitated to each other like magic. She kinda gets jealous of that sometimes or sad that she isn’t close to anyone like that besides me. But not like a toxic jealousy or anything. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point it really may just be us at our wedding.
I’m a romantic and the day will be great regardless, after all it’s her I’m marrying not them. On the flip side I’ve always seen my wedding day as something I’d get to share with my close friends I wanted to get married in the past in fact this would be the second time I’d propose to someone. She’s the one that made me feel like I’d marry again after the first engagement went terribly.
I’m disappointed and if I bring it up too much it’s just gonna make her feel awkward and cave for me but I don’t want that. Gonna marry her regardless though.

My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert

Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?

Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?

Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?

Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

Problems. We get them frequently, to me it feels like life is not about being happy and all, it's about how you handle your problems. Any kind of problem, be it work related, you personal life anything.
Developing the skill to deal with different kinds of problem is what makes your life better and better.
What world taught me till now, to run away from the discomfort, a lot people talk about how environment is bad, and you should not take shit from anyone. But few things tell us what's actually lack inside us. Maybe, on social media we don't boast a self awareness based thinking because is makes people uncomfortable to think about their own behaviour. Self awareness is becoming more and more important for me now. I am trying to keep my self love intact, it's hard though. But knowing your own shortcomings and taking actions to understand and do something about them makes me feel in more control. Makes me happy. :)

I'm writing this, because I just got a work problem and I snapped and closed my laptop very impatiently. Then in few seconds I realised, it's a kind of a problem that I should try to 'deal' with and not go into a loop of self hatred. Even though my heart ja racing fast, and all the hormones which are making me wanna feel sad, I feel aware and more in control that hey, you are feeling this because this problem has these consequences but let's try to solve it. :)

!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.

This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.

So it was time for a change. And I made a change.

It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.

I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.

Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.

So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.

So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.

Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.

This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.

Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.

How many of you guys use vim?
How many hate it? Why?
How many haven't tried it yet?

I've been using it for a month and it feels great. Everything is fast and customisation is great and fairly easy (just vim ~/.vimrc). With a little bit of searching abilities, you can do pretty much anything you want by configuring the vimrc. And besides the initial learning courve of having no UI, it feels much more intuitive to just use the keyboard.

I used it by a necessity to edit stuff from the wls, but fuck, now I'm fucking addicted to it. Every new command I learn is a fucking drug for my hands.

I totally recommend it and personally feel a tad sad when vim gets hate. I understand jokes though. I also struggled at first to use "i" to start typing, "hjkl" to move around, and got stuck with the good ol' ":q". But it's worth it.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

TL;DR: I'm losing touch with reality and relatability and I am seeing it happen to me.

Context: As a dev, as we all do, I started with a low salary and was poor for the first 4 years of my career. I used to take pride in my poverty and because of it I faced difficulties in life.

Somehow because of that (and drugs), it gave me a fun personality and I was able to crack jokes about it and laugh it off. I was fun at parties.

But now, with moderate struggle, things are much better for me. I'm a YouTuber, I have clients and a full time job and I end up making the salary from just one client what I used to make in 2018 from a full-time office job.

Now, when anyone jokes about being poor and struggling, although I can still laugh with them, I pity them. I feel they are not working hard enough (even though I'm aware that I don't know their story, so it's a bad judgement and unfair).

I can no longer relate to my past self.

For me, I get sad about myself that I still don't have enough, while knowing I have more than what I could ask for.

I know this is not a good thing to happen to me, but it feels like I'm helpless. Sigh, I'm becoming a boomer aren't I?

Exams are done, i passed some subjects that made me almost drop out.
Felt good. Now if i manage to do well again in exams i may finish the uni on time.
And now here it comes. One of my professors saw that i was coding my self in contrast of the 90% of other students, and with 2 more guys from my year, suggested us to his friend that owns a company, so we could work there.
I went there, talked about the team and the product we have to do and it seems that for now the only developers are me and 1 more girl and 1 more guy, all new commers, not even juniors.
Shiet. The team told us not to be worried since they will be our instructors and help us out and if we need more help they will hire a senior dev.
Not sure how i should react to that.
I do that mostly for experience so i can leave the country when im done with uni to go to estonia holland or finland.
One more thing, we still don't know what languages we will use and even though i told them that im pretty good with python they seem not to consider it at all. I'm the only one of the juniors that has actually made projects and coded on his own, not with university projects.
Also so that all other employees use windows machines.
Sad.
Hope all that goes well.

!dev

Personal rant, but as one shouldn't bottle up emotions, probably not so bad idea....

Started with diet and exercise in the vacation, as finally a certain thing starting with C calmed down...

Its maddening how fucked up the world is. Now as a lil private info (that might not be so unknown, shared multiple times here) - my body is a train wreck.

Lungs are fucked, muscle distrophy, some other things are fucked.

I'm the kind of thing every gym trainer dreads - the client that needs not only a lot of ass whooping, but also has a lot of problems that need to be taken care of.

Which is why I rather do exercise at home, cause... My experiences with humans in gyms are bad. Most trainers behave like fucking chimpanzees screaming commands while not listening what one tells them...

First challenge: Find a low impact cardio training.

What one mostly finds is a female chick (which is sad cause I like men more for obvious reasons), that should gain some weight, screaming at ya how great sport is while jumping around like a bunny on ecstasy.
Low impact isn't really low impact when you jump around, lil bunny... And it isn't low impact when you just let yourself fall to the floor and start doing push ups.

If an obese person like me did that, it would end in pain, frustration and an empty fridge TM.

So one has to painfully look and skip through 20 min vids of "Non low impact low impact YouTube / ... vids" to find one that is doable without wrecking the body even further... Yaaaay. That makes one totally not feel depressed :-)

The other thing that I always hate is dieting. Note that I don't have to change much - I'm basically on a diet since years, holding weight the whole time.

The jolly fun is that I can't take off with just an diet. If you never heard that such thing is possible, a lil advice: It is possible. Nothing hurts more than being told that eating less solves all problems magically - cause it doesn't.

What I usually need is added protein, as I suffer from muscle dystrophy in my left side. (hence the low impact vids).

If you go to a grocery store, you most likely find *tons* of protein stuff.

The fun thing is that roughly 80 % of that are - like all things in a supermarket - completely bullshit.

I know one could avoid using protein powder / ... - but that makes dieting a very very very hard task, as one has to not only do a lot of planning, but cooking and eating becomes a depression palooza... It just doesn't make fun when you have to scale components for every meal or force yourself to eat e.g. 250 g of low fat curd cheese to gain the necessary proteins.

Why is supermarket stuff so shitty....

Added sugar / saccharides . When one has been dieting for long for health reasons, one finds out pretty quick that most products (especially those labeled as healthy / fat reduced / "weight loss") are perfectly made to lead to a sugar crisis and binge eating.

I've found protein drinks containing up to 25 g of sugar per drink (330 ml).

A coke has 27 g of sugar per 250 ml...

:) Now isn't that jolly...

I've found my stuff of joy not so long ago (not advertising here, but depending on flavor it has only up to 3 g (!)) of sugar per drink)...

It just annoys me and pisses me off how much money is made - in my opinion deliberately - on the suffering of other people...

Most laws by the way end up being blocked by lobbyists - most nutrient scores etc are just "wrong" or better to unspecific... Making exploitation pretty easy.

It's funny how everyone has an opinion on obese people, everybody is pointing fingers and explaining how stupidly easy it is to take off... And at the same time no one gives a damn about shit like that.

That's all folks. Feeling better now.

By the way, I'm doing fine. I lost 7 kg already, though the train wreck of body was pretty pissed the last two weeks as everything hurts.

Another reason why motivational speeches are dumb in videos: Pain isn't fun. :)

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

------

2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

----

3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

RIP GitHub

Take a service I like and pay for, a service that is about open source and collaboration, and sell it to a company that is complete garbage and has for years been hated for selling garbage overpriced software that is just terrible.

I’m not looking to argue about Windows (it’s garbage no matter how much you want it not to be) but Microsoft as a company is just not a fit for GitHub.

I’m not stupid though, I see the goal. The goal is that old school, shitty emperor use software teams will be more likely to use GitHub if it is owned my MS. On the same way that many of them force their employees to use garbage Windows machines because “it’s what we have always done”.

GitHub will become another shitty service that some people argue is good based on their ignorance
Of other options. This is sad.

TLDR: I fucking dislike this acquisition entirely and will immediately remove all private repos from GitHub and cancel my subscription on Monday if it is announced.

#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect

This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release

An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.

The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!

I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes

I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!

As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).

Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity

Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections