Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

My CEO: "So! You are the new guy we hired to design and manage the implementation of our new state of the art super-duper fancy ERP solution with badass Business Intelligence systems to grow our company which already spans over several localities across the county, that has to live for at least the next 12-15 years?

Please remember that the Windows Server in the rack in the basement needs replacement soon, and that our new fancy solution must not in any way utilize cloud-technology or SaSS! I don't like that! I think it's a scam! We store everything on premises, own our infrastructure and we buy our software...Because I think that is best!"

Me: "So... let me get this straight: You want me to build you a one-off, concept sports car that can outperform a Lamborghini using only plywood, duct-tape and a donkey cart?"

He walked off... I may need a new job next week!

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.

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Me: Hi Guys, theres no docs on our custom push notification / deeplinking implementation. I've tried to work backwards from a QA testing doc to add new links. Can someone tell me if this is all ok? It seems to behave a little weird.

Dev: Looks ok, but we've moved to the braze platform for sending notifications. You'll need to trigger braze notifications now. Test that it works ok with that <confluence-link>

*hour later*

Me: I've tried the debugging tool, both with my payload and one of the samples from the link. It displays on the phone, but tapping it doesn't trigger the deeplinking.

Dev: No it works, try one of these <screenshot of samples I used>

*hour later*

Me: Tried it again on the real device to make sure, as well as on develop and master. Not working with those samples or mine.

Dev: No it does. It comes in here in this library <github link to line of code>

Me: ... Nope, debugged it, it doesn't get passed the next 'if' check on the next line as its missing a key/value. The whole function does nothing.

Dev: Oh do you want to send a braze notification?

Me: ..... you told me I had too .... yes I guess.

Dev: ok for a braze notification it works different, send this <entirely different sample no where on the link>

Me: ...... but ..... this is only for braze notifications ..... why .... all the samples have deeplink url's .... but they don't ....... are you ..... FFS!!!!! !@#?!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┻━┻ ︵ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

┌П┐(ಠ_ಠ)

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

Coolest thing i've built solo? I think it's my 3D snake multiplayer game.

It all started with a simple 2D snake game to teach programming basics at community college. Then i added a multiplayer mode based on a simple UDP implementation. Then i wondered how it would look ike in 3D and i had the idea to figure out how to implement a 3D engine by myself and i dove into the maths and wrote a simple 3D engine based on a windows forms picture box.
I showed the game to my colleagues and the loved it and we played it a lot.
So i added special mode boosters, and sound and map events and obervermode and observer polls.... you know it.

Here's a little collage of the journey...

Somebody asked me my API doc.
I don't have any API at all.

I will lie, and I'll write a swagger specification in few hours and I'll send them.

They will try to read it and understand, and after maybe a week, when they will ask for testing and endpoint I'll pretend to be on holiday for 2 weeks.

3-4 weeks gone already, I checked they should be on holiday by then. Only then, I'll answer with a fake endpoint with fake data.

I'll get another 2 weeks if I'm lucky.
When they discover about fake data, I'll say there is a bug.

In total if I play well, I have 2/2.5 months to implement some kind of API server with some more or less true implementation.

Thanks to Swagger. Swag

I joined a company 6 months ago.
No CTO.
No development process.
Spagetti code.
Takes loads of new requirements on top.

Later
I advised the software head and managing director on how to improve our software development process.
New tools
Less requirement good quality software
New products and micro services.

Both of them agreed but they said they are waiting for new CTO to confim as an authority and responsibility.

Well I cant do much just to do my work.

1 month ago new CTO joined
Revised whatever I advised and implementing it right. I like it.

Got my confirmation after 6 months instead of 3 months.

CTO called me in for review and gave me 2/5. And said you need to improve more.

I asked him, in what do I need to improve.
He replies in technologies and development process.
And he takes credit for all changes and implementation.

I argued about it. I already suggested what you did but was ignore because we didnt have CTO.
Hes like ignored me.
Fucking you CTO.

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

Any other front-end developers check out Visual Studio Code? It’s got a lot of really nice features, including the absolute best implementation of Emmet I’ve ever seen. My new favorite editor on both Windows and Mac!

Me: ya hi, we integrated with your API and I'm receiving error x
Provider: ok we'll disable validation, plz check
Me: ya it works, what's the problem? I used a GUID for id and I'm sure it's unique, here is URL and request body
Provider: you have something wrong in your implementation. Fix it and it will work
Me: aaand what's the wrong part of my implementation?
Provider: id is not unique, fix it. *Hangs up*

I sometimes sit and wonder, how and why does this kind of people get hired, FOR FUCK SAKE YOU ARE THE PROVIDER AND YOU DONT KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG!
fucking useless ...

CVs be like:

"Voluntarily worked as a tech consultant in impoverished communities to promote social mobility and empowerment through the implementation of a specialized computer science learning program and interactive software handling sessions."

Translation: helped my parents attaching word docs to their emails.

Spec sheet vs implementation.

(lateral pull down machine at my school’s gym)

Business: we need feature x in two
Days, highly urgent!
Me: fine, here’s a shitty implementation we can live with until you decide how to Actually make this work in the future.

2 days pass...
Me: where’s the content for feature x?
Business: awaiting approval

5 more days pass...
Me: I’m guessing this super urgent request wasn’t needed after all?
Business: it’s still awaiting approval
Me: so... I’ll just go and remove this feature, and revisit when its actually needed.
Business: no, it’s needed now, we are just waiting on approval
Me: 🤷‍♂️

Duck my life sometimes.
I could have built a full fledged system of this shitty hack job instead in the time taken to approve a useless piece of content.

Just tested my GPU code vs my non-GPU code.

Its a simple game of life implementation. My test is on a 80 x 40 grid running for 100,000 cycles.

The normal code took 117 seconds.
The CUDA code took 2 seconds.

Holy fuck this is terrifying.

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

so heres to all the fucking programming teachers who use incorrectly terminology when explaining shit. now i gotta go tell my friend that he should ignore what the teacher said and ill tell her how to myself. also fuck javascript and code.org's terrible implementation of an environment for it.

Fuck you, you motherfucking fuck. How DARE you have the capacity to sell fake fucking chips on Amazon and make me fucking waste hours of my god damn fucking nights trying to program your shitty, lazy-ass implementation of an EEPROM.

I followed the datasheet specs down to the fucking microsecond just to find that nothing would write to the chip, and then spent hours of my goddamn life trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, making myself feel like a fucking failure for not being able to write 1s and 0s to a few pins. Fuck you, fuck you with a giant horse cock with needles on the tip

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

I hate that trend of making things more lax in terms of implementation quality while writing it off with a simple but stupid "oh computers are faster now, users have the RAM, yadda yadda". Yeah but back in a day things were actually running pretty damn fast in comparison while doing it on hardware that is totally potato in comparison to what's used now. This trend eats away ANY gains we get in terms of performance with upgrades. It deprecated the whole notion of netbooks (and I kinda liked them for casual stuff), since now every goddamn one-page blog costs you from several megabytes and up to tens of megabytes of JS alone and lots of unnecessary computations. Like dude, you've brought in a whole Angular to render some text and three buttons, and now your crappy blog is chewing on 500 MB of my RAM for whatever reason.

Also, Electron apps. Hate them. Whoever invented the concept, deserves their own warm spot in Hell. You're doing the same you would've done more efficiently in Qt or whatever there is. Qt actually takes care of a lot of stuff for you, so it doesn't look like you'll be slowed down by choosing it over Electron. Like yeah, web version will share some code with your desktop solution but you're the whole reason I'm considering your competitor's lack of Electron a huge advantage over you even if they lack in features.

Same can be said pretty much about everything that tries to be more than it should, really. IDEs, for example, are cancerous. You can do 90%+ of what you intended to do in IDE using plain Vim with *zero* plugins, and it will also result in less strain on your hands.

People have just unlearned the concept of conscious consumption, it seems.

Just had another developer tell the team that the requirements “contradicted” his implementation. I think, if you’ll let me check my fuckstick-to-English dictionary… yeah, that just means “I did it wrong and I don’t feel like fixing it.”

So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.

So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.

Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.

Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.

Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.

I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.

Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".

Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.

You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

My boss: "We need this feature by Friday"
Me: "I can make it work, but I need more time to do it properly"
Boss: "Just fix it by Friday, and you can make a proper implementation later, when there is time"

Like there will ever be time once it works...

I finally finished my implementation of a suffix array construction algorithm! 😄
It takes about 30 mins to process 1GB of text and uses all available RAM, but it works! 🎉
Now I can optimize it, the original algorithm is 3x faster.

During the last couple of days, I got to hear quite a horrible story...

So we start at the beginning, where I have a dev-related chat with some other strangers on the internet. One of them was working on a custom protocol implementation with an API to go with it, written in Python. There were plans to migrate the codebase to another language like Rust in the long term. So the project seemed to be going well.

Another guy and the main subject of this chimed in on various of our messages, and long story short - he uses Express.js for everything he does, and he doesn't know jack shit on what he's talking about. Yet he still does.

Later we got the delight to hear that he had beaten up his mother, and that she's now in the hospital because of it, with broken arms, hands, fingers and severe bleeding. Yet he has the audacity to complain about his sore throat, caused by all his shouting. He refuses to seek any help, or to take medicines he's been given. This has been going on for several days now.

As much as I hate to even think about it, these too are "developers". I too have skeletons in my closet, but goddamn.. that these people even exist. The very idea that you may be talking to them every day. It disgusts me.

My new favourite response to a bug ticket:

"But do you not remember we tested the implementation and it worked?"

... yes ... then it broke under other circumstances.

... must be terrorists or something

I fucking hate ppl who transferred from business program into the CS program. They are all talk and no action. Literally this girl who claim to be “good at algorithm” doesn’t even know how to write a quick sort. In the past 2 months I have received more request from business program students to “help debug program” than all of the other departments (science, engineering) combined. Worse, some just straight ask for my code so they can copy off my implementation.

Seriously, it’s okay if you don’t know how to do stuff. But it’s not okay if you don’t want to learn AND feel so fucking entitled. I have a lot of homework as well, it’s not my responsibility to **help** you.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Me: Hi! I'd like to apply for the front-end developer position!
Them: Mmhmm. What's your education? It involves a lot of javascript.
Me: I recently earned a certificate in javascript development for front-end, on top of my professional experience.
Them: What's you're experience?
Me: 8 years of professional front-end development.
Them: Hmm. That won't work. What about this job, Implementation Specialist?
Me: So I have to help the customer write requirements, train the customer with new software, write documentation for the customer... you want me to apply to be in customer support?

Would I have spent the last 8 years of my life learning and earning programming if I liked dealing with people?

So, my boss was angry at me today because...
1. "Why are we taking so long to finish the software?". We started coding in March, and during that time I kept asking for requirements, design and his answer was, "You build it and we'll see." . During that time, after creating the system with only three type of user modes, he was like "Oh, I want customized user permissions." Took me 1 month to come up with a design, implementation for everything. Also during these months, nearly 2 months was wasted because he kept giving me other things to do, and I was not focusing in my current project.

Today he was mad because he expect me not only to build the infrastructure, setup servers, write backend code, do QA etc, He wants me to be a product designer. A fucking product designer. My answer to him was "If you refuse to help with designing the UX, either hire someone or I will just copy/paste things for internet. If the UI works, there's where my job is done."

Fucking hell. Not only I am being under payed, but he expects do to the job of 5 other people. Fuck this shit.

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

Told juniors about coding guidelines that don't put another if-else just to fix a bug. Think through about it and see if you can come up with better solutions.

Today one bug was filed, they asked what happened, one junior said that he [my name] asked me for no if-else in code. He kinda deleted all if-else in codebase and started using same implementation for everything.

I'm standing with a WTF face.

😐

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

!rant
My first design work (in Adobe XD)

Design has never been my strong point (implementation or design) but am very interested in designing interfaces.

Don't hold your horses. Criticize this. I want to know what you think about this.

This will definitely trigger some people.

New smartphone releases aren't 'tech news'.
An implementation of a technology ripped off from other devices (GPS, VR etc..) isn't 'tech news', it's just implementation of an existing technology.

So please, everyone who reads the self-called 'tech news' to look for a new phone release to waste money on - stop calling yourself a 'tech geek' - "Oh my god, I'm such a tech geek, it's embarrassing - this new iPhone was released and I just couldn't wait to get spend my money on it".

Just shut the fuck up - you are willingly dragging a tracking device everywhere you go and you are PAYING for it to look cool and be full of features you won't even fucking use.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Serveral users complain that the error messages our software produces are completely useless, so I get assigned to improve the error reporting.

Starting the task by checking what's there and how it works together.

Looking through the code I discover 4 completely different error reporting implementations, each having the same intent and promised functionality. All of them are used somewhere, sometimes next to each other. Needless to say: None of the implementations actually implements all it promises.

My favourite part is the setErrorMessage(string) method that is defined in one header and used in many places, which has the implementation

void setErrorMessage(string){}

Fuck my life.

Need my vaccine receipt to go to a wedding. And I’m in line to get the pdf document. On the one hand this is some cool implementation for a load balancer, on the other hand this so strange… be online in a line to get a document -.0

My shitty neural network doesn't want to learn.

Wondering if the problem is in my implementation of the backpropagation, or in the fucking hyperparameters.

Stupid network go fuck yourself and suck my neuron.

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

First rant here, and it's going to be a query to the more professional and experienced members of society (most of you).

I am currently a Sys Admin for a major company, and I develop at night. My primary employment at the moment is the sys admin job (and I code for extra money at nights).

I wanted to start a development department at the company that I am working at, but it was turned turned down. It was stated that we are not branching in development, and that we should stick to our server implementation and support. This was a prompt to me wanting to start studying officially (I wanted to get qualified in JAVA, so that I had some paper behind my name when I looked for another job). HR and my directors outright denied me the ability to study through them (they pay for studies for employees) and I was more than fine with this.

I took a loan and paid for the studies myself. Can't crush a dream, you know?

The director caught wind of me studying, and now has demanded that I develop him a mobile application for the company. I told him that I am not a mobile developer, and that it didn't fall into my key performance areas.

Note, I do my coding on own time, on my own device, and never at work. It's fully my intellectual property. It also in no way interferes with my work during the day, and has NO conflict with my contract this side.

He sent an email yesterday, this is after two months. He is now stating that I WILL do the application, and he has CCd HR and two directors.

I don't want to do the app for this company, I spoke to HR previously about this, and she said that I should try and quote it under my own company name (which I did, but it was denied as it was "too expensive").

Now I am being forced to do something that is COMPLETELY out of my roles and responsibilities, something that this company has ABSOLUTELY no desire to go into further on, and he is basically letting me know that if I don't do it, he is going to start messing with my pay.

I really don't want to do this, and I cannot afford to make my secondary job my primary at the moment. The problem is, too, that I don't have the time during the day to develop AND do my sys admin tasks (I manage more than 300 servers, and 5000 devices).

What can I do in this instance? Or what would you guys recommend, in your experience?

Sorry for the noob question, but I don't know what to do.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

I just made my own implementation of a scraper for NASA's Pic of the Day. It should have automagically changed my wallpaper at 4 AM to the new pic of the day.

Today's "pic of the day" is a video. It broke my shit.... So much for the excitement of seeing my automation work.

At this point, I just feel bad for my coworker.

No, I am not frustrated or angry, just feeling terribly bad for her as how difficult life must be for someone so dumb.

We are introducing a new method to track some data in our product, like total number of sign-ups, DAU, etc.

Now the implementation is already WIP and this is known to all.

The dev has documented the approach where he has mapped the screen name, a screenshot, and a snippet of the schema that tracks that particular screen.

I kid you not guys, this coworker somehow landed on that document and started some scientific study to try and extract data.

Yes, she looked at the schema screenshot and spent like few hours trying to decode it to figure out the sign-ups and DAU.

Data via a screenshot in a document. I can't even express it.

And then texts me in panic mode that she isn't able to access the data because the file is . jpeg within a document.

I asked where is she executing the schema, because I thought she is joking initially. She said she doesn't know and asked me where she should execute it.

My mind is numb. Life must be real hard when you are so fucking dumb.

Im getting tired of this fucking scrum team.

First of all let me introduce our backend team which takes 3 weeks to add one fucking column to database and in the end turns out they fucked up RabbitMQ RPC implementation so the column is not syncing with our app at all so now we have to wait 2 extra weeks until that will be working. Best part is that backend fucker who fucked up doesnt even feel like hes blocking a feature and would rather sit for extra few days and do nothing until he gets reassigned his pile of shit back to him than clean up his own shit.

Then we have business analytic who doesnt know how to define tasks properly so I have to record each grooming meeting so I would know what to fucking implement because he doesnt even bother to take proper notes. Which results in not fully defined tasks, which results in unexpected behaviours and MR's stuck in limbo for weeks.

Also lets not forget QA guy who doesnt even bother writing scenarios, I as an app dev have to write them myself just to be sure that fucker will test everything thoroughly.

Then we have fucking devs from consultancy agency who apparently have 6 years of experience (I have barely 2) and these fuckers are spamming me daily with the most basic questions. After each grooming they rush to assign themselves tasks which are not even defined properly yet and not even in this sprint, but fuckers are lazy so thy want to reserve easier tasks for themselves. Pathetic.

At least I have a decent senior on my team, but sometimes he patronizes me so much that I start asking me what I am doing in this team.

Fuck this shit, I asked for a 43% raise and if Im not getting it in 2-3 weeks im outta here. Fuckers.

Best:
My first 3D engine with a really hacky physics implementation made textured spheres bounce off of each other. Biggest satisfaction ive ever had.

This incident is from my college days.....

I saw one of my friend was arguing with his project partner. He was pretending to know everything in programming better than his partner.

Just for fun, I asked him to implement single linked list by using arrays/pointers (I gave him 20 mins and told him to do in any programming language he is familiar with). He was not able to do, so I suggested him to use Google and see if he can find something which can help him with implementation....

Within 10 min he came with a solution which was working fine. So I asked how does he implemented, and what does the methods do.... As expected, he was blank and I got to know he copied entire solution from Stackoverflow.....

A thought came in my mind:
Just by knowing copy/paste won't make you a programmer....... <\>

Sprint planning:
PO: I have a great idea for a new game changing feature
Team: cool, let’s talk requirements, etc
PO: nah, I trust you can come up with the best implementation possible
Sprint demo:
Team: presents the feature
PO: Why are you guys always doing it your way, instead of following my vision?!

Every single sprint...

So, 9months ago my scrum master came to me and asked me to spearhead a "little" API... 2months work, no worries... I started the analysis and quickly discovered that that estimation was grossly understimated...

I convinced them that it was not 3 months but 4. I alerted to the design mistakes that were made, I pushed changes and made sure the entire project worked, was stable and the best it could be... 4 months passed, target proposition donne... Several change requests since then and we have been implementing braindead CR after CR for 5 months... Most CRs came from design issued I raised but we're ignored at the time just to come back and bite them on the ass...

Horrible design, bad documentation, amateur requirements analysis... However, delivered successfully with great acceptance...

What was my reward? They rearranged my team, removing virtually every good performer.

Never did I receive a "good work" or a "thank you"... I don't want one, I am just doing my job... However can you please not fuck me in the ass!? I now have 2 projects to spearhead at the same time and virtually no team... I can only handle so much!!!

Some good news? Ok, just announced I'm the project owner of a new project, that we will take advantage and make a 2 in one.... Great! Some more work for my lap! Thank you for the workload raise!... Ok, timewise? One month! And I still don't if that includes implementation....

TL DR; did my job, got fucked with more work...

Sorry for the vent, just wandering if I should try and not do my job...

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

!multirant

1. MonoDevelop

Installed Unity for a game I'm working on. Realized I didn't reinstall VS when my SSD got corrupted. Didn't install VS plugin w/ Unity.

So now I have MonoDevelop. It's not a bad editor, but PLEASE. IF YOU ARE GOING TO HIGHLIGHT A FUNCTION WITH RED BECAUSE IT DOESNT EXIST IN THE CLASS, THEN TELL ME, WHAT THE FUCK EXISTS IN THE CLASS!

2. UnityJS

Unity's JS implementation is terrible.

First, let's throw basic syntax shit out on the window. string.toUpperCase? Nah, let's make it string.ToUpperCase to annoy the shit out of devs.

AND SOME OF THE STANDARD FUNCTIONS ARENT EVEN FUCKING WORKING!

Need to use parseInt(string, 2)? WELL GO FUCK YOURSELF, BECAUSE WE DIDNT IMPLEMENT THAT SHIT.

...or use C# I guess...

FUCK UNITY.
🖕🖕🖕

Fuck you google android IME team and fuck their open source policy..

So recently i had a chance to work with AOSP LatinIME code, basically our Android keyboard was forked from very old code base of LatinIME and my job was to change its base version to latest Version available on AOSP repository. Downloaded latest Android 8 codebase. Did 2 weeks of deep investigation of what improvements we will get from upgraded code base.

And I came to know that those Google fucking cunt sucking dick heads deprecated that project and broke the whole thing to a pice of shit. Half of the code is broken with fucked up todo stuff and motherfucking missing method implementation with not implemented warnings. What those motherfucker did is that they abandoned the open-source project after they released Google GBoard, and fucked the stable code by adding quard gram support and dictionary download with multi account features which was never completed by those motherfuckers..

Those misguiding donkey shit fuckers kept a depreciated project in AOSP build tree which has not received a single fucking commit from shitty ass Google IME team, is said to be reference model of Android IME implementation..

What kind of fucking shit is going with open-source code in name of making competition high with thirt party Android keyboard developers ..

Fucking shit fucking ime team .. fuck you .. wasted my fucking time reading your shitty code base .. Fucking shit

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

When I implemented a new algorithm in C and beat the previous implementation of a tool by 5 seconds in speed (17s best case before) and my mentor implemented the same algorithm's pseudo code beating the previous implementation by 14s.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

Think twice code Once, if I had a cent for every time I've jump right into the code without a proper analysis or design just to notice that my whole implementation is not functional or scalable I'd be a millionare

Yesterday before going to bed, I got rid of and made sure my program has no more errors so that I can implement other features in the morning.

Today when I compiled the same program again(without any additional implementation) I got more errors then I solved in night. I guess the part when I got rid of errors was just a part of my dream!!

How I solve complex problem during development.

1. I left my machine with all the thinking and start to think of another activity.

2. Start another activity I like specially a physical one like playing a game, jogging or just walking.

3. Then after I am fully involved with this activity I start to think of different scenarios of the problem I was trying to solve.

4. Eventually, different solutions came to my mind and I evaluate them one by one with respect to my problem.

5. I finalize a couple of solutions based on the evaluations.

6. Rush to my machine and start implementation to see if it work.

PS: During all these thinking I will be terrible at the activity I am doing.
Loop again if It didn't workout.

I wish my boss would stop revoking my permissions. He's always saying how these slew of things need to be accomplished, yet, everytime I go to do them I'm at a wall because, despite having permissions for a very long time he decided to revoke them entirely.

It's not like I can't be trusted with them, it's been over 2 years with them, so why the sudden revoke?

I finally sent some snot mail to him informing him I'm unable to complete my tasks without the permissions granted to me (I'm a sysadmin, sec guy, boss is vp of tech), and instead of him granting them yet again he's going to run around and try to hack around the permission requirement so he can avoid giving me them.

Seriously? This is stupid. I was the one who wrote the security design and implementation document, and put all that work in. Now I'm being locked out of the system I designed, built and implemented?

Well, time to look for a new job. If you're a manager, please don't revoke your employees permissions without notice, at random, and try to hack around well-documented security policies. It won't end well!

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

Have been using redis for my new system and wanted to try some gui, so I stumbled on "redis desktop manager", it supports ssh tunnels, privatekeys and more, great isn't it?

BUT IT SAVES YOUR FUCKING PLAINTEXT PASSWORD AND PATH TO YOUR PRIVATE KEY IN %USER%\.rdm\connections.json

WHAT THE FUCK, fucking ask that password during connection, don't fucking save it in plaintext and give an attacker literally the path to my key, wanted to PR it, but fuck c++, probably thats why he doesnt have it, because hes just using some library, so he doesn't have to fuck with the actual implementation of it.

Just had my first insomnia night, I simply could not fall asleep! While laying in my bed I had great ideas for work and for my home projects, like new features, infrastructure and even implementation details. Now that I'm up I can't remember most of it, of course!

Worst part about it is that when I got to bed I had about 5hrs to get some quality sleep, now I got non it feels like. Fuck.

Can anyone relate? :/

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

I was junior developer. My friend recommended me for JavaScript Senior developer in the company he was working. He had settle the interview without asking me. I knew a little of javascript, but I was not ready for this interview at all and I knew that.

So I went to the interview. The questions were very difficult and complex for me, I answered two question of ~15. I was very upset, I was sweаty and blushed ... one of the most uncomfortable moments in my career.

After the questions, the interviewer decided to give me a MacBook to do an exercise with JavaScript to see me in action. The exercise was easy, but MacBook ... Damn it, I saw a MacBook for the second time in my life. I knew the solution of the task, but I was very slow in implementation because of Mac..

After 15 minutes of slow coding and sweating, the interviewer said "OK, just finish it at home and send the code to my email...".

When I got home, I made the perfect solution for 30 minutes and I sent it to him. The only answer was "ok, tnx" and that guy didn't call me anymore.

This is kind of rejection I think ;)

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

So not too long ago I made a rant about this time I told my superiors of a problem and it got shot down because "We don't want to save developer time".

I warned them that the CPU was going to reach it's limit because the issue involves exponential growth on CPU usage the more we develop.

As it turned out, despite my thoughts that we wouldn't reach that limit for over a year, a new development led to it blowing up in their face today.

I am now treated as the expert on the topic and they're rushing to plan my suggested implementation in the next release.

I'm mildly amused.

!rant

Our implementation director got bored since yesterday. So, I decided to let him barge in with my colleague and let him manipulate the audio speakers. Things got funny and asked me to code properly so he can take a shot and send it to his friends. What I did, I copied and paste the code and saved as .bat to make the console looked like the matrix while coding. 😂😂

It was disappointing when I heard that the concept I was working on was already developed by Google long time back. I had spent a complete month in implementation and thought process.

But, to motivate myself, I should feel proud that my idea was worthy that a technology giant worked on that.

However it was confusing to understand the behavior of someone who called my idea crap in starting but then appraised when he got to know that unknowingly it was duplicate of some Google's project.

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

I only wish that my agile team comes up with the task breakup and documents the implementation approach to our project, as good as this kid did, while panning for a party!

img source: reddit

I'm reinventing the wheel by making yet another neural network library. It's not any good yet but I learn as I go along.

The only documentation that exists now is the admittedly quite comprehensive code comments. I'm it because Keras (using TensorFlow) requires a 3.5 compute ability rating for CUDA acceleration (which I don't have) and it doesn't support OpenCL. Eventually, I will make my implementation support both with varying levels of acceleration for different compute capabilities with the oldest supported being my hardware. If I ever get around to it.

I'd say wish me luck but determination would be infinitely more useful.

So I had a problem. MongoDB replica set connection was not accessible to server in another container. I’ve used ChatGPT. Gave it my code. It showed me the things I didn’t know and helped me work out a problem I’ve struggled with for 2 days.

It’s awesome!

ChatGPT is basically StackOverflow 2.0. It’s a tool and a great one. I can’t wait for an actual production level implementation target to software engineers.

P.S. I think co-pilot sucks.

Late night ramble warning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm tired of "agile" development. Sure the concept of a hacky POC that gets thrown out for a real implemention sounds great. But it never gets thrown out. That shitty POC become the foundation for a horrible mangled mess of hacky improvement after improvement. I'm tired of my boss telling me "do it the easy quick way and fix it later", like fuck off no. I can save man weeks worth of bug hunting a year down the road by actually taking an extra day to do it right. Like fuck does no one care about quality engineering anymore?

Sometimes that extra day to write a general vs a specific implementation is worth it.

In "Sprint Planning", the team is supposed to come up with stories, break those down into tasks, estimate those tasks as a team, then let devs choose what tasks they want to work on based on the stories pulled into that particular sprint.

Instead, our manager creates the stories. He assigns the stories to each developer and then has that developer announce his theoretical tasks (without any research on feature's or project's requirements!) in front of the entire team. So, when I say, "I think it will take me 6 hours to implement this feature", he says, "6 hours? I think it will take 3." and then types the estimate as 3. I have so much rage when that happens. Then we continue to sit in the room for 2.5 hours where we go through this long data entry mess of him typing out tasks and second guessing estimates. There is no team deliberation or collaboration, its whatever the manager says.

While there are many issues I take with this approach, my pet peeve would be the second guessing of the estimates. It would make sense for teams members to second guess estimates as long as they are the same teammates who have the ability and possibility to take on the tasks themselves.

But I disagree with a manager seconding guessing an implementation feature that "I" definitely have to do alone, and they do not possess the immediate knowledge to implement it themselves.

The presumption of incompetence:

Has this ever happened to you?

Starting a task and chatting with a fellow dev-- my first time implementing analytics in this particular app. I mentioned to them that I've been doing analytics implementation on various apps at our company for years, but our current apps' analytics setup is the most intense and this will be a good learning experience for me to dig into.

They responded by sending me code snippets of existing analytics implementations to help me. Not hidden or lesser-known classes, very obvious ones I already had open and was working off of. With advice like "just search the codebase for 'analytics' and 'trackPage''" lol.

I like this person a lot, but this definitely caught me off guard. It felt like something her obtuse manager would do, but not her. This would probably not be a big deal to most but I'm so used to being given unsolicited/unhelpful/irrelevant advice from male devs, and having to be pleasant and thank them, this one was tough to witness.

How do you respond to unsolicited "help"? Does it bruise your ego the way it bruises mine? lol

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

!rant

Been working on a custom html partial injector (js/jquery only) as both a personal challenge and utility to use for my website scaffold. Being a challenge, i decided not to look at any implementation from another JS framework. I won't lie, i had it 'working' at least 5 times now, but this time, after about 3-4 days, i think i got it for real. And the cool thing? It's a bit less code than my original implementation even with my generous whitespace and verbosity. And it even unwraps nicely so it looks like a regular html page in the dev tools.

I love when things finally work as they should--God knows i question my motives before then.

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.

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

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

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

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

I ain't that picky, but the image I am including here makes me feel uncomfortable.

Is it horrible? Nah, shit like this happens all the time. I just feel weird about it due to my manager's constant pixel perfect implementation requirements.

I have been having a crazy week. And I am thankful that at one point during my period of Javadiction(the great Javadiction of 2015 as I called it because I did nothing but Java) I landed on the Velocity template lang.

I quite like templating engines. Always made me think that if I wanted to start with lang design I might start there. Anyways, Velocity is pretty cool and I quite like using it at work.
It makes everyone think that I am the Alpha coder since around these parts it ain't known at all.

So why the fuck did you go into code that I've written, change the name from "mode" to "type" throughout the >1500 lines of code that's relevant to the feature, and then move on to change my implementation to something that is arguably not common practice for the language and framework we're using, and in turn create duplicate state? And why the fuck weren't these changes in separate clear commits, but instead scattered over multiple commits? You're supposed to be senior!

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

So I spent the last 2 hours trying to figure out why my co-workers source when hitting the API I built was not working. They kept saying that the problem was the API and I kept saying that it's their implementation.

Turns out it was their implementation and as well as the API. Their implementation problem was not setting the "Accept" in the header. The API problem is how Laravel will return a JSON error response ONLY IF the "Accept" is set in the header.

I actually documented this into the API documentation but it's obvious that none of my co-workers read that you need to set the headers correctly. I think the more scary thing is that they didn't know the difference between Accept and Content-Type!!

Devs! Heard about this thing called going to sleep without dreaming about ways to fix a bug?

Whenever I force myself to sleep whenever I get stuck on a bug or confused about the implementation of a feature and started dreaming about the approaches I can take. Most of the time I wake up around 2 or 3 am to try out an idea I had and most of the time it works.
Now I fear this is becoming a habit. Is it something I worry about or ignore since my problem is getting solved?

My worst nightmare just came true. Been working with a difficult client for the last 3 months (1.5 months longer than the project was supposed to last). The client has essentially questioned and made me justify every decision I've made about implementation.

Today, as I'm nearing completion on the project the client pointed out a piece that isn't being accounted for correctly.... and they were right. Going to take me several hours to make the correction. 😣

University is a dumb place.

Example:

I have been restricted to a predefined list of projects for my dissertation. The trouble is, the project must be a solution to an existing problem. So we're given a product to develop which then requires us to actively search for an implementation which addresses a problem.

Not only have we not proposed a solution ourselves but have also been given a list of software requirements. Wouldn't be an issue if we hadn't been pushed to write about our "requirements gathering" process.

So we have to gather requirements that are the requirements we have been given but do it in an independent way. Yeah, sure.

I am genuinely just going the motions with this fucking place now.

Since graduation, I have worked in IT for 2 years, mostly in testing and implementation side. Finally I got a developer position in the field I wanted (Data Engineering). I had never thought that it would be such a soul crushing experience. My current company is very notorious for its bad management practices, but there is indeed a bigger picture to this. The IT industry in general has devolved into a gigantic ponzi scam built on exploitation and BS. Quality of solution and quality of work was replaced with a ‘Does it work now?’ approach with zero contingency. And the fact that geeks and nerds are naive only helps the white collar crooks to exploit them as code monkeys. Fuck all of this!

!rant

I had a talk with my manager about my future role in the company. I had talked with him before about my interest to dive deeper in the technical side - rather than the business side, for which we have a higher dev demand.

The outcome is that I will work more closely with the senior devs on technical improvements and also tech strategy (e.g. implementation of code reviews). I will also advise the upcoming manager of the development team (who is coming from a PM position) on technical decisions. Lastly the roadmap for the company is to work more with cloud technology (azure), which is also going to be in my new duties.

I'm looking forward to these new challenges where I can improve myself on the technical side (yay!) rather than on the business side (which bored me).

Go to bed tired. Wake up tired. Get up tired.
A month ago I was excited doing my work, I even was planning a huge change on one of our projects, detailed everything and passed it over to other folks to get funding. Now I seriously doubt I could pull it off. When I start reading a line of code I forget how it started before I reach the \n.
There was this thing I was asked to implement... A nifty one, I already could see the implementation. As I came to it I got stuck. Like when your body gets "stuck" when you get scared to death - you know what you have to do (i.e. RUN), you know how, but for some reason you just can't... Couldn't come up with anything. The other dev had to take it over and implemented it all in like 4 hours. Just like that. And it took me another 4 hours to understand how and why it worked when I know it should not take me that long as I used to write similar algorithms myself for fucks sake! I know I could have written it myself... but I couldn't..

I'm seriously worried.. Is this the end of my carreer as a dev? Am I broken somehow? I have some vacation days saved but I doubt it would be enough... Don't know if changing workplaces would work as well. I've always wanted to leave 9/5 and start working on my own project full time but now I am not sure I could pull it off either.. wtf is happening.. wtf... wtf..

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

OpenCL...

Okay so I'm completely new to OpenCL and I just put some stuff together to get a simple GPU Kernel running. Well that worked pretty good.

The reason I got into OpenCL was because I wanted to do some simple SHA1 cracking on my GPU. What I did was, I got a fast implementation of SHA1 from the internet, which works perfect in normal C++, but for OpenCL I have to rewrite some things. So I replaced all the memset and memcpy and so on with simple for loops and it still worked. Now, this should work on OpenCL, too, I thaught. God I was wrong!

Somehow the clBuildKernel got executed normally, but when I try to access the returned value (the error code) I get an Access Violation? It just doesn't make any sense to me?

Well I will try some stuff tomorrow again and I will find a solution for sure, but still, until now I just don't understand it.

Continuation of the issue I had yesterday, and a realization of just HOW FRICKING STUPID C++ could be. Basically, yesterday my code for class was skipping a line of user input code, I checked the code for hours to see if I missed anything, if anything was out of scope, both input's I was using were back to back and absolutely identical all the way from the implementation both equaling "\0" and I couldn't figure why only one of the input lines were being ignored. Out of desperation posted the code on here (see my last post). Welp, I finally fixed it, and BOY AM I SO SIMPLE. cin.ignore().

TL;DR
Dumb issue, dumb solution (in my opinion)

What I hate the most about my job?
Wrongly estimate the time required to do things…

Sometimes is good, I think it will take 3 days and I'm done in 1, but other times it's not!
e.g. today I estimated an easy implementation would took 5 minutes and it took 5 hours instead… fml

Teach kids to love computer science first, the rest comes later.
When I was in uni, most of my pals don't know why they're in the class. How the fuck can you teach linked list implementation when most of the students don't seem to bother to understand what a variable is?

they say do TDD

but its often that my test is wrong while my implementation is correct lol.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

You can connect to Docker containers directly via IP in Linux, but not on Mac/Windows (no implementation for the docker0 bridged network adapter).

You can map ports locally, but if you have the same service running, it needs different ports. Furthermore if you run your tests in a container on Jenkins, and you let it launch other containers, it has to connect via IP address because it can't get access to exposed host ports. Also you can't run concurrent tests if you expose host ports.

My boss wanted me to change the tests so it maps the host port and changes from connecting to the IP to localhost if a certain environment variable was present. That's a horrible idea. Tests should be tests and not run differently on different environments. There's no point in having tests otherwise!

Finally found a solution where someone made a container that routed traffic to docker containers via a set of tun adapters and openvpn. It's kinda sad Docker hasn't implemented this natively for Mac/Windows yet.

Today I decided to turn an RFC5545 RRULE implementation I had made a few months back for a project in Rust into a cargo package, it would have made a fine addition to my portfolio since I was positive some people would find it useful. Turns out someone else had the same idea as me around the same time I did, but already published a package with it and, worst of all, the dude seems to have made it better than I ever could.

Welp, guess I'll just throw my code away, use his package in my project and maybe contribute a bit to it if I find any issues.

.-.

Wanna know about hacks? I'll tell you. There is a peace of software called SugarCRM. It has OAuth2 provider implementation. I was assigned to write OAuth2 consumer for it.
It turned out they just failed to make it right.
The list of hacks:
* Hack on standard Authentication header. They use custom.
* Hack on "scope". They send null which is standard violation. So it is replaced to empty string before response processing starts.
* This is my favorite. Refresh token simply doesn't work. So we need to store user's credentials in memory to be able to reauthenticate user transparently.

I've found a very interesting paper in AI/ML (😱😱 type of papers), but I was not able to find the accompanying code or any implementation. After nearly a month I checked the paper again and found a link to a GitHub repo containing the implementation code (turned out they updated the paper). I was thinking of using this paper in one of my side projects, but the code is licensed under "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License". The question is to what extent this license is applicable? Anyone here has experience in this? thanks

Fuck you apache server...
Why did your dumb ass developers decide it was a good idea to not support "expect 100 continue headers". I seriously suspect that the devs were high smoking dragon dildo ashes like they were getting ready to get a whole chair shoved up their asses.
I wasted alot of time thinking i was getting a 417 http code because i fucked up my API implementation... No, it was the dumb apache server that decided to give me the finger.

Also, whoever built the HttpClient for .net framework 4... Fuck you too for automatically adding that dumb header to PUT requests and not properly documenting this or allowing for it to be disabled in a non hacky way.

I appreciate and enjoy solving coding problems... I, however, can't stand dumb decisions like the two above.

I slowly relise that "modrn" developpers don't know a minimal things about programming (yes, i'm using "programming" instead of "evelopping")

They copy paste shit, it works. They resolve some problems it works.

But... They have have ZERO understading of what they are doing.

Just couple of days, got a discution with a person who is "Blazor expert". who will be paied 200$ / hour to find problem in current implementation. I KNOW there are problems because couple of them I introduced my self.

We at server side. I provided test logins, plus 10 page document explaining infrastracture.

One of his first question in interview : "Oh. I cannot see ajax calls in network in chrome".

WTF DUDE ? Do you even understand how server side blazor works ?!

Welp, he is hired. FOrt 120 hours.

I' want to see what he will present, as it's clear as day he doesn't know a thing about server side blazor architecture.

Restarting regular expression parser from scratch has been good. I am somehow both much farther to completion and farther away from completion than I was in the earlier implementation.

Further in the sense that this implementation is going to be way more flexible to changes in the language

Farther in that I haven’t even got all of the regex parts added to the first stage yet.

But I’m feeing good about it.

Even if I did refactor it so my constants are in all caps and now feel like my core is yelling at me.

* Developing a new "My pages" NBV offer/order solution for customer
_Thursday
Customer: Are we ready for testing?
Me: Almost, we need to receive the SSL cert and then do a full test run to see if your sales services get the orders correctly. At this point, all orders made via this flow are tagged so they will not be sent to the Sales services. We also still need to implement the tracking to see who has been exposed to what in My Pages.
Customer: Ok, great!

_Friday
Customer: My web team needs these customers to have fake offers on them, to validate the layout and content
Me: Ok, my colleague can fix this by Tuesday - he has all the other things with higher prio from you to complete first
Customer: Ok! Good!

_Sunday
Me: Good news, got the SSL cert installed and have verified the flow from my side. Now you need to verify the full flow from your side.
Customer: Ok! Great! Will do.

_Monday
*quiet*

_Tuesday
Customer: Can you see how things are going? Any good news?
Me: ???
*looks into the system*
WTF!?!
- Have you set this into production on your side? We are not finished with the implementation on our side!
Customer: Oh, sorry - well, it looked fine when we tested with the test links you sent (3 weeks ago)
Me: But did you make a complete test run, and make sure that Sales services got the order?
Customer: Oh, no they didn't receive anything - but we thought that was just because of it being a test link
Me: Seriously - you didn't read what i wrote last Thursday?
Customer: ...
Me: Ok, so what happens if something goes wrong - who get's blamed?
Customer: ...
Me: FML!!!

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

Well, this one was very satisfying.

When I resigned from my previous job, there was this one last task I had to finish. The task was to implement an identity and access management system that would work across three different platforms they had. I used to work on one of them which had nothing of the sort but the other two had something of their own. Here lies the kicker, it had to work with existing authorization system in other two platforms. After explaining multiple times why that is a bad idea, I gave up. I created an interface, no implementation, documented how the interface was meant to be used and got the hell out of there.

Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.

For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>

The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

I'm really tired of all the hype that Python lately gets, mostly by begginers or at most mediors.

I get that a lot of people like it's syntax, but it has just a few use cases where it really shines (like CI scripting or ML). In other cases it always has a much better and much more mature alternative.

As a web developer I would always pick PHP over Python. It has really mature frameworks like Symfony or Laravel which are using PSR standards, well documented and implemented common patterns, option for strict typing and probably most importantly tons of libraries for pretty much everything. For example I could find implementation of payment gate for even the smallest banks in our country, thus saving several days of implementing it myself. And PHP will always humiliate Python in performance. Yet, pretty much every comparison article of those two will state Python as better option for webdev, mostly because it is evident that the person who wrote the article never even tried to do a proper atleast midsized project in PHP, but has ton of experience in Django.

And what exactly is my point? There are two in fact:

1) You should always use the right tools for the job.
2) Even if you could do something doesn't mean you should do it.

In the end of the day I shouldn't really be bothered by people hyping Python, but those fanatics really made me hate the language, even if I would normally consider looking into it.

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.

I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...

I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.

Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.

I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.

Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.

Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."

It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...

The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...

Seriously frustrating some times...

I've been writing unit tests for an existing project for a couple of months now. I'm not experienced at automated tests, so I'm not sure what's good unit tests supposed to be, but the unit tests that I wrote basically just confirm the flow that already implemented, which to my limited understanding of unit tests is supposed to be the other way around. The good thing is that I could catch some minor problems with the implementation such as not imported class used, the wrong variable used since the project is a rewrite of legacy code so a lot of copy-pasta, I also have to wrap some part of the code that interacts with the filesystem in a DI class so I could test that part.

When you are creating a tool for a direct client that has no idea about development. She asks you to develop a tool to open a log file and format in a specific way inside Excel.

Ok, this is simple. In about 4 hours I can do that. After delivery and the client has tested, they answer: "Oh, it's working fine. You just forgot to include Y".

Of course Y were not in the initial scope. They supposed it was as it would makes sense to them, but at first they just asked a tool open a log. Ok, not a problem, I will implement it.

Weeks after implementation they answered it was not working with another specific file format (from a not industry default tool), but they have this client and my code should work with it too.

Ok, let's implement that. I had to change some functions and with some extra hours I could make it work. Once more, after delivery, they said the tool has to use a specific formatting for this file extension, that was not only different to the others, but I had to rewrite the entire code to make it work.

At least they paid me some extra hours...

Client wants something that makes no sense in UX land. We tell them that it makes no sense. Client doesn't listen, tells us to do it anyway.

We do it anyway. Client has doubts about a small detail of the implementation. And asks us what our advice would be.

My advice would be that you start listening to the professionals. How am I supposed to give "advice" on a detail of something I disagree with in general?

Her: "I'm going to cut off one of my hands."

Me: "I recommend you do not do that."

Her? "Would you cut off the left or the right hand? I can't decide."

Me, saying: "I have no preference in this."

Me, thinking: "You should cut off your fucking ears, you're obviously not using them."

Cracked my first weak RSA implementation challenge today. Feels pretty awesome.

Involved primes that were very close, which means you can factorize the modulus quickly to get the private key. Normally, you would never use close primes as prime factorization's difficulty relies a certain amount on some distance between the two values.

The reason you can brute force close primes has to do with them being close in value to the square root of the function, meaning that you can search far quicker than if you were to try every combination of primes.

"Our app needs a barcode scanner"
Fair enough, let's do this!
Android implementation using Zxing: 3 days. Ios: 9 days...
1. Dev iPhone has a subtle hw defect that doesn't let it connect to the computer anymore...
2. Our app-framework doesn't have a proper plugin for ios barcode scanners yet.
3. The first barcodescanner implementation is completely broken
4. Swift is not possible because of conflicting framework plugins
5. Build a plugin from scratch, using zxing objective c port.
6. Build problems with main app.
7. Fuck my life

I made some changes and I wasn't seeing my implementation.
I forgot to save...

My implementation of facebook's haystack storage solution. It's certainly not a faithful recreation, but I think this served my needs better.

The idea is you store all of your files in one large file, and just write down where each of your files starts and ends. This particular implementation I called an indexed haystack because it gives you back an index, sort of like an array.

I was attracted to the idea because it makes the file structure of the server so much more simple, and backups so much easier when you only have a few files rather than a few thousand. Facebook came up with it because it was more efficient to store a million photos all in the same file rather than in a million separate ones.

There is a 100GB limit to each haystack but that isn't technical, it's just a sensible thing to do.

Hey guys and girls, quick question.
Im currently writing my own collection-framework in Go.
It has a Collection-Interface, that looks like this:
Clear()
Size() int
ToSlice() []interface{}
Add(...interface{}) error
Remove(...interface{}) error
Contains(...interface{}) (bool, error)

The library should also contains stuff like stacks and queues, so datastructures, that dont fit that interface perfectly.

So should i write a weird implementation of the interface for them, like Remove for stacks (high pitched internal screaming), or should i just say fuck it, and dont implement the Collection-Interface for these specific types ?

Wtf does it even make sense to ask devs to do estimates for the spike, planning and the implementation of a big feature containing other features which nobody has any idea how long it will take to do and what are the dependencies and to try to fit it in the next quarter release?

Agile my ass.

Technical meeting

We were at technical meeting a while ago, they discussed our infrastructure implementation, all was good.

Then some motherfucker of our technicians, suggested that we should move to bitbucket, I fought fiercely to don't even think about leaving bitbucket.

Suddenly the cock swallowers bosses agreed to bitbucket, they submit their changes.

10 min after the meeting i broke into the biggest boss room, gave him my resignation letter, I just told him, signing your acceptance to move to bitbucket, you should sign this too.

Boom, assholes.
I'm free now.

MEETINGS
Daily stand up
Weekly status
Fortnightly update
Monthly planning

Life would be so much simpler without meetings. Just chat, why fuss over "meeting"?

As it is most of the things don't go as per what's planned in the monthly planning meeting.

Neither is there much of an update in the fortnightly update meeting. Only update is what we planned, isn't the right direction.

This will obviously screw up the weekly status. Screwed up planning is dishevelled implementation.

Daily stand up is just very sleep deprived developers, who don't wanna talk.

Make it my time's worth; say no more meetings.

1. Put idea on roadmap
2. Work out simple implementation
3. Productowner-san, please notice me.
4. Other devs pile on cool but complex ideas
5. A 4 hour meeting later, original simple idea is rejected because it's "out of scope" and there is "no consensus about implementation"
6. I already built it during the meeting
7. I sip my coffee while I enjoy the annoyed gasps as coworkers receive PR notifications.
8. FUCKING DARE TO REJECT IT COCK SUCKING SCRUMBAGS.

*me discovering esp32*
Wow it's amazing!
i'll get one for my project.

*me working with esp32*
I ported my project to esp32, and.....
Wtf!?! after some time (unpredictable 1sec to N mins) i2c devices stops working. (i2c reset doesn't solve)

I lost several weeks trying to fix that
I felt so angry.

then I realized that it's not my fault
it is a bad implementation of i2c api by espressif.

at this point there is only one thing to do.

throw away the esp32!
(at least for some months waiting for espressif fix)

now i did a git revert and switched back to arduino.
now everything works and it's an awesome sensation!