Up for a rollercoaster?

I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.

Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)

Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.

Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.

Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.

I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!

🥶👰‍♀️💍👰🏻‍♀️

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

I don't really "keep" myself motivated. I wake up with certain amount of motivation every day and then I slowly die inside through out the day, every day.

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

So the company didn't make an offer in the end because I was "not motivated enough" and "too interested in 4-day-week / PTO". Yeah right, fuck me for wanting to have a life outside work. *sigh*

It's rant time again. I was working on a project which exports data to a zipped csv and uploads it to s3. I asked colleagues to review it, I guess that was a mistake.

Well, two of my lesser known colleague reviewed it and one of the complaints they had is that it wasn't typescript. Well yes good thing you have EYES, i'm not comfortable with typescript yet so I made it in nodejs (which is absolutely fine)

The other guy said that I could stream to the zip file and which I didn't know was possible so I said that's impossible right? (I didn't know some zip algorithms work on streams). And he kept brushing over it and taking about why I should use streams and why. I obviously have used streams before and if had read my code he could see that my code streamed everything to the filesystem and afterwards to s3. He continued to behave like I was a literall child who just used nodejs for 2 seconds. (I'm probably half his age so fair enough). He also assumed that my code would store everything in memory which also isn't true if he had read my code...

Never got an answer out of him and had to google myself and research how zlib works while he was sending me obvious examples how streams work. Which annoyed me because I asked him a very simple question.

Now the worst part, we had a dev meeting and both colleagues started talking about how they want that solutions are checked and talked about beforehand while talking about my project as if it was a failure. But it literally wasn't lol, i use streams for everything except the zipping part myself because I didn't know that was possible.

I was super motivated for this project but fuck this shit, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I wanted good feedback not people assuming because I'm young I can't fucking read documentation and also hate that they brought it up specifically pointing to my project, could be a general thing. Fuck me.

NEW TALES FROM THE FUCKING CRYPT. It's disgusting...

... how managers keep to invest money into totally useless gadgets at the company to keep themselves motivated with stupid toys, tech and gear. WHY in fucks name would you not spend the money on hiring more devs and a dev consultant?

It's funny how they presented the stats first: "yea well we have ten big projects in dev right now" (we are FIVE FUCKING PEOPLE, tells you everything, right) "... BUT WE HAVE BOUGHT NEW SCOOTERS FOR THE COMPANY!".

Ok... why though? Who would actually use those things except the ones that bought them. Just another way of spending more money to reduce the promised employee return on the company's profit...

Weekly Q: How do you keep yourself motivated?
A: No matter what - I allocate a little bit of time every week to something I really care about right now.

When I was green it was mostly learning. Now it's mostly codebase cleanup, dev experience improvement or dabbling with some feature that's not prio.

Might not sound like a lot but doing it weekly does add up.

Worked with a bunch of talented people today. Sat for the most of the day analyzing an incident together. Dividing the different possible issues among us, crunched the data, trying to understand the code and business. Some tricky calculations. Fixed the issue and deployed to all environments.

Getting motivated and talanted people together is key to everything. Nobody was silent and many people said

”I don’t understand”

Which led to even further deep dives. It was great.

JIRA was nowhere to be found.

(Yes, we found two more issues when doing all this work!)

You know, it's way past 2 AM and I'm insomniac (as usual) and ... I'm overthinking. Someone distract me plz until I fall asleep.

...on another note, if you can, show me a motivational video that has actually motivated you.

I am finally again at a company where I enjoy working and my coworkers are great that makes it easy staying motivated. Besides that need to provide for my family.

It was making me anxious that I was the only one doing a PhD among my close friends. I actually was feeling like I'm not good enough for it, because those around me didn't feel like they're good enough for it. (ridiculous, I know. But it is what it is)

And then, one of my bestfriends went for her PhD. Her situation is complicated, so she actually didn't have much of a choice. But now I am motivated and feel like I might actually be able to do it. 🙂 Mainly because now I can at least ask someone close when I have stupid questions. 😁

It is starting to feel like less of an strange idea, and more like proper work. 😁

If you’re struggling with productivity:
[1] Wake up early & Exercise
Waking up early means getting most of the work done as soon as you start your day. This sets a routine for you.
Doing a high-intensity workout early in the morning can kill laziness and make you feel productive.
[2] Divide the day into three parts
Do the most work in the morning hours i.e 6 am to 11 am.
Keep the 12 pm - 3 pm for work that requires less energy. Evenings can be utilised to finish minor tasks.
[3] Make a timetable
A proper timetable or To-Do is a good way to keep a track of your daily routine.
Tick off the work you've completed and you'll feel you've been productive.
[4] Follow people who motivate you to work
If you waste time scrolling on social media, make sure to follow people who instantly motivate you to work and take action.
[5] Update or shift workspace
Your workspace is where you spend most of your time, so make sure it makes you feel motivated to work.
In case you are bored of your workspace, shift it to a new room, preferably that has windows for fresh air.

How do you keep up with this? How to stay motivated?

Management is getting worse. All they want you to do is reduce customer issues, reduce P0 and P1. Numbers aren’t looking good.

But with that also do that GIGANTIC piece of shit epic we assigned you this quarter.

Don’t forget to help that DUMBASS contractor to do this task he was supposed to learn the last 10 times he did it. By help we handholding.

Also all the manager can really contribute is by saying reduce the numbers because that’s what his manager says.
Also why aren’t the code reviews done?

Also attend a 9AM sync up call as well as a 10PM sync up call in the same day.

Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh

I hate these Mondays. You start really motivated after a nice weekend of seeing lots of old friends, but instead of your own work, you have to pick up the mess a coworker left for you while fleeing into holiday and because that's not frustrating enough, you try to review code from that new senior developer and get confronted with the probably most awful commit history someone ever managed to create.

Of course he also needed handholding and multiple trys to stop breaking like every coding convention we have for branch management...

I am still a junior and I feel pretty disappointed when being confronted with people being so..confused with stuff like git even though they have like 10 years of experience.

While I was still studying, I somehow imagined this industry to be much more...sophisticated?

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

Orchid runs!

It's very far from done, but now I'm motivated to get shit done! My optimizations can now have measurable impact! The hypothetical examples no longer have to be hypothetical!!!

Okay so, I’ve recently started going through our products’ security postures and their teams’ related practices and processes. I knew things were in a bad state, but I have to admit I’m a bit anxious at how bad things are… and it’s not like nobody cared or anything, quite the opposite; the teams are quite motivated about cyber sec. It’s just that they don’t know what the fuck to do and where to start even if they did.

Okay, that’s my job to figure out the roadmap to improving their security posture and processes and help them implement it. If it wasn’t bad enough that there’s half a dozen products whose cyber sec roadmaps I need to prioritise and manage somehow, I heard this week that due to some organisational rearrangements, the number of products under my stern guidance will nigh on double at some point very soon…

I need a team. Give me a team.

I had a job opportunity with okayish maybe good job and more money. Last november. But i had a bad feeling somehow. I told my boss and he said he will try to get a raise for me of i stayed, so I stayed. He wrote some stuff so mgmt to hopefully get my raise.

Meanwhile super important project took place. I have to meet deadline, this friday. Was somewhat motivated, did a lot of overtime.

Today mgmt responded, raise denied. Because i can not prove i have an open opportunity with that salary. No shit after it took them two months!

And the day after tomorrow is the deadline. Bad timing, suckers, bad, bad timing. I will deliver what i have regardless how buggy tomorrow and take friday off.

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.

Being over-motivated will make you irritating to others and Boring to yourself!

First Covid and now the war which will probably become World war 3. Despite trying my best to stay positive and work on my skills as a software engineer and a professional, it has really affected my will to keep grinding and hustling in life. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay motivated and on track.

Please tell me I’m not the only one feeling like this.

So I wanted to know how reading Computer Systems a Programmer's perspective would help me grow as a programmer to motivate me, I asked on StackOverflow thinking that an environment geared towards learning would help others stay motivated in their pursuit. LMFAO

and now I'm unable to post for 5 days, fuck stackoverflow and fuck those uppidy geeks,

i had built up a great addiction to working out daily last year until i went on a trip to village on new gear and came back coughing hard. my cough thenlasted for a month followed by another trip followed by again coming back home and getting sick.

now its 3 months down this year, i am again healthy but haven't started hitting the gym nor do i feel motivated to :(

i mean, what is even the point of keeping your body in pain when it is as fragile and prone to diseases as it was when you were young :/ fucing shitty fragile body

I keep myself motivated by reading about new technologies, language features and constantly trying to improve my code.
I see great reward in having fast and readable code.

Another consultant. He/she sends out meeting request about system X to me and a few other guys/girls. X is actually a, you know, global thing. It is well known but not incredibly famous but well known.

But she/he mispells it. It is not even close. So, he/she just guesses how it should be written. It is not a big thing. But I am truly interested, and a little worried, about how that kind of mind work. Is she/he convinced that that is how X should be written? I think not because X is not an actual word but just a product name. In this case the product name is synonymous with the company name. If you pronounce X as he/she has written it will just be distinctly different than the correct way of saying it.

So I got this meeting request in my calendar which just sits there in its erroneous way and it irritates me. Mostly, I am annoyed by the fact that he/she did not bother to look up the correct spelling. And it has now been a week or so and it has not been corrected so I must then conclude that he/she still is ignorant of X. Which leads me to the conclusion that he/she is not really that motivated.

I am perhaps a grumpy old developer but I do think I can spot incompetence a mile away nowadays. I’ve been at it for over 15 years now.

which software/research/project you created in your free time as a hobby recently?

I personally created a small widget app that would allow users to create widgets of PDF files on their mobiles.

i have noticed a personal trend : i tend to spend my free time on language/tools/framework that are somewhat different than my daily job. I am a software engineer building sdks in my job that provide a very commercial set of features for android apps, but ended up creating an hobby app that would utilise android's other cool APIs ( storage, file, permission etc) .

before this project too i was exploring backend and web development, creating small react websites in my past time.

do you also spend time exploring outside yhe frameworks/tools used in your work life? or if not, how do you keep yourself motivated? the lateral part os important for me as i am soon going to a job where i might be exploring android APIs in daily work life and therby making android apps will become boring for me .

i remember before joining an SDK making company, i was trying to come up with an SDK myself lol, which at that time was opposite yo rhe work i was doing in the day

I have a question, how have y’all stayed motivated working on your personal software projects?

I have so many things on my to learn list and it's just keeps getting longer every week DX
I need to figure out how to be motivated after work

Coding can be challenging and it's natural to feel motivated sometimes and demotivated other times. Here are a few things that might help you stay motivated while coding:

Focus on the benefits: Think about why you are learning to code and what you hope to achieve. Whether it's building your own projects, getting a new job, or solving problems, reminding yourself of the benefits can help keep you motivated.

Set achievable goals: Setting small, achievable goals can help you stay motivated because you can see progress and feel a sense of accomplishment as you complete each goal.

Take breaks: It's important to take breaks and give yourself time to rest and recharge. This can help you stay fresh and focused when you return to coding.

Get support: Surround yourself with supportive people who can encourage and motivate you. This could be friends, family, or online communities of other coders.

Keep learning: The field of computer science is constantly evolving, and there is always more to learn. This can be both exciting and motivating as you discover new technologies and approaches.

Remember, it's okay to have ups and downs when it comes to motivation. The important thing is to keep moving forward and stay committed to your goals.

~ Chat GPT

Question:
How do you stay motivated to face another Monday?

any advice/suggestions to intensively brush up on modern C++ and multithreading for an interview that will likely be technical and cover bases like algorithms, data structures, etc?

I haven’t done c++ for awhile since a few courses in college - I did parallel programming and GPGPU on the side, but nothing on a professional level.

I’ve been mostly doing front web dev since I got out of school and C#, so I’ve been more on design/higher level of abstraction in dev and if I am asked things about pointers, memory allocations, etc I would probably draw a blank but I am motivated to no life it hard for the next week to catch up again.

I'd have been motivated to work this whole time if they'd just left their filthy hands off what is important to me. As it was originally worked during the whole time period. Kind of says something really. And their idea of a smart way to proceed was to make everything dirtier and grosser everywhere and more miserable looking, how nice. Course even if I hadn't had a happy fall recently on my knee, I'd still be more tired than I used to be for certain.

Speaking of which.
A few times that didnt happen because someone interceded.

I mean :P

honestly truly that didn't happen in the first place.
it was however your job to transport prisoners at one point. so they just tried to reverse things it seems to the benefit of some kiddy raping monkey.

Another working on Monday as a dev. I love this job but why do I feel I am not motivated? 😔

I love how they blamed sex and violence on TV for the twisted little shits in my generation and after

Funny.

I'm only motivated to violence by evil fucking people and that takes either state approval or considerable prompting and pushing to happen

I don't think someone set another kid on fire over a video game or did half the shit they did in this country for watching an episode of farscape or Stargate