Aah, my life is complete now ^^

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

My life is complete now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

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

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

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

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

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

The riskiest dev choice...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

Ok. Now my life is complete. XD

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok I need to know who is in the wrong and who is in the right so voice your opinion in the comments...

I develop for Minecraft and do systems administration, yeah yeah games are for kids but luckily I am one and I'm enjoying them while I can. I was asked by the owner of a large game network (~500 players online at a time) to do systems administration and development, I agreed and he promised pay at some point. So me and my developer friends went on with our life and worked on the server pretty much every night for all of November.

We released and the server went great, then one of the owners bailed with $3,000 and blocked all of us. No problem we will just fix the donations to go to our buisness PayPal. We changed it and the owner made ~$2,000. Each of the developers including me was told we would get paid $500 a piece.

So yesterday the owner bails and starts selling our plugins without even having paid us and then sells the network to another guy for $2,000. (That's well enough to pay us) did he pay us? nope. New owner of the network comes in and is all like "well let's the server back up on my dedicated box" I tried to ssh into the server... Nothing the port is closed. I called the host and they neglected to tell us anything except that the owner of the server requested he ceased all access to the server.

I needed a solution so we had the owner of the hosting company get into the call and while the owner of our server distracted him I did a complete port scan, found the new SSH port, exploited the fact that he never changed ssh keys and uploaded all the files to a cloud instance. Then I ran this on the server... "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" now our server is happily up and under proper ownership and we all got paid...

Was breaking into the server the right thing to do though?

Story of my life when I am really interested in a company:

Company: let's have a call to get to know each other.
Me: okay.
Company during the call: takes a technical interview

Company *a few days later*: now let's have a technical call!
Me: okay
Company during call: asks to design GOOGLE in GOOGLE DOC (??!!?!)

Company *a few days later*: now let's have a Development Test!
Me: okay
Company *sends an email* asking to complete a task which should take a week to develop in a few hours
Me: okay...

Company *a few weeks later*: Sends a generic email saying they got another person who is a better fit.
Me: ffs..

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

Depression and anxiety is a major challenge in my work life.
I could remember vividly when I was at my last job, any time I felt depressed I'll call for sick leave. It was hard for me to pinpoint the cause of my depression because even while on most sick leave I still felt depressed.
I blamed it on my job, blamed it on my family, on my social circle, on my friends, on my lifestyle, on almost everything. At some point it all felt like it was me versus the world, a fight I could never win.
Thoughts came in... Maybe it's because John is now married with two kids, or because Stella is now the new manager, or that David just bought a new Ross Royce and I'm still riding an ice-cream truck, or its because Steve is always on vacation and PM always complaining about uncompleted task with no acknowledgement for the 2 months task finished in a week, or because Boss is always calling for stupid meetings. Different thoughts in my head... Jealousy, Envy, Disappointment, Tiredness, Confusion, all combined at once.

But I did found a cure for my anxiety and depressed nature...
During lunch hours I visit a beach close to where I work, it's called "Tarkwa bay". I'll sit at the rock formations and glare at the shadows of the rising sun, listen to the sound of rumbling waters and passive the complete overview of nature. The feeling I get there is really calming, It occupies my head with neutral thoughts and a love for nature. 🤗
I truly experienced an improvement overall and it's been a while I felt depressed since I started such a routine.
Nature is really a gift.

Kotlin is now officially supported for developing for Android. My life is complete.

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

!dev

I need to rant about something that has been on my mind lately.

Someone, actually. Friend/romantic interest of mine, from a few years back.

NGL, I liked him. A lot more than I should have. The man had his own issues, but I refused to tolerate his poisonous behavior. Truth be told, didn't want to hate him, even though he was trying his best to get me there. And so, one day I ended up blocking him after a fight. A few months back, I tried to reconnect. Same behavior. But this time around he did say that he was done with me. So instead of sitting through the torture of his "reasons why you suck" presentation, I blocked him again.

Now, I hope he's doing well. Never wanted anything but happiness for him. And as much as I miss him, I think it's better for him to stay away from me too. I mean, if I trigger him that badly, maybe I shouldn't be around him anyways.

Nowadays, I'm staying away from someone else again. Similar scenario. Reason being that I was actually being mistreated, and again I refuse to be tortured to the point of hating the object of my affection.

I wonder if I get attracted to the torture. I'm okay with dying alone tbh, what I'm not okay with is falling for those who don't want my love and much rather kill it.

... Actually, at this point in life I don't even want to fall for anyone anymore. (That is not the same thing as dating someone I like tho. That, I would do) The darker side of me says those who I fall for are all the same type of disappointment, but the brighter side says that I am enough, complete as is, and not everyone needs someone else. idk maybe I'm being a tad narcissistic, or hyper-independant, or flakey and afraid of attachment. But that first friend occasionally pops up in my thoughts, and reminds me that not everyone appreciates when you don't let someone make you hate them.

Oh well. *sigh*

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

Got demoted, got a pay raise and don't know how to feel about it. A story of how not to drink with your coworkers?

The story begins roughly 8-9 months ago. Me and this coworker (let's name him Tim) go out drinking after a Friday party at the office. We do some rounds and we're both smashed. Tim starts telling me how he's happy with life and that he's earning a nice salary right now. He told me his salary. It was the same as mine. Which was weird - He codes in a more hardcore languages than me and has almost double the time in the company as me. I think after some more drinking I've confessed that I make the same as him. This part is sort of a blur (drinking). I've gotten a pay raise(+30-40%) roughly a few months ago from that point backwards because another company gave be a much higher offer. The company I work for matched to keep me. Anyway, 3 months or so after the drinking,Tim is promoted to team lead, and me and a few other people are added to his team. Conversation slips and he told me his new salary - quite a bit more than me.I think it's safe to assume what happened.

The problem with that is that I was a team lead of 1 person (me) at that time, and I was managing my own time and my own tasks, was working with people individually. I was part of the weekly meetings with the CEO and other team leads. Being stripped of this title wasn't a problem at the beginning, as people still contacted me because of their problems, suggestions, whatever. A few more months pass (to now) and less and less people are contacting me - instead they are talking with Tim, and are asking of his opinion on tasks I should do, where he has no experience and roughly 0 lines in the programming language I code in. This is starting to piss me off.

There are a couple other things to take into consideration as well - The company is hiring a lot of people right now. The whole structure for team leads changed a bit, more team leads then ever right now and new roles added pretty fast.

I've gotten a pay raise a few weeks ago though(10%~).

I'm not sure on how to react to this. Should I comply and just keep on working on these tasks? Or should I still keep contacting people directly on their requests and talk to them directly, take credit for the projects I complete publicly and the stuff I do as I was previously doing? Part of me wants to reroute all of the stupids questions people have to Tim, as he is now responsible for these tasks and get this weight off my shoulders.

I'm starting to shift to learning a new programming language and thinking of jumping ship. Thoughts?

Got a mathematics library I develop and maintain. Someone filed a feature request ticket for matrices of matrices. As in, each value of the primary matrix is another matrix. Not understanding why anyone would need such a convoluted concept, I asked for clarification.

Response: "This piece of shit library isn't feature complete without it, now stop being a lazy fag in your mother's basement and actually do something"

Lololololol. Sure thing. Let me go waste two or more weeks of my life developing something i've never seen used in math, without any justification beyond "feature".

!rant

Goodbye Java I will not miss you at all! I swear ...

I do like it when making web services (especially that I can use Java8) but for Android you have been a torture. Hello sweet Kotlin! I shall embrace you and treat you like my newly born baby!!

Story is:
Working on a new project where I need to talk to a web service (also made by me).
Started writing in Java, all is cool and unit tests pass.
Downloaded Android Studio 3 Beta 1 and converted my Java code to Kotlin, That AsyncTask did not look nice in kotlin, converted it to async & await feature and I must admit lots of code removed, no more need to create a new fucking AsyncTask every time the app sneezes for data!

I feel like I'm working with C# but with difference in syntax.
My life is now complete :)

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Hey there 👋

I am more or less throwing any burden (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google etc.) out of my life. Of course I will continue using the Google account for YouTube and some games that need it.

That's what it looks like right now:

Raspberry Pi 3B+
✅ webserver
- forum - complete (atm just for me)
- blog - no ideas and just installed october cms and nothing done yet
- nextcloud - complete and filled with my porn... eeh... data

✅ mailserver
(missing spamassassin, clam or sth. like this but it's working 😂)

✅ matrix-synapse
(as an additional alternative to messengers)

______________

Raspberry Pi 2
✅ catches dust
(any ideas?)

Of course, many more configurations and the like are necessary before everything is ready... but what then or what else is there?

At the moment I still use WhatsApp. Just wanna take time before sending everyone a message about changing the messenger and that it should be important for thinking about the own privacy, which alternatives there are bla...

Edit: For passwords I'm using Myki - didn't hear anything bad about it yet and it's very easy to use (Firefox add-on, Android app).
I love my passwords with 200 characters 😂
Maybe someone's knowing more about them?

Hope I didn't forget a thing... thanks in advance aaaaaaand... I'm gone. ☺

balancing school work between life and sport and programming is so hard. i mean, school is complete bs. what’s the point?

ffs it’s not *just* that im never gonna use the shit im taught, but that if it dont learn it, im punished. even in some classes (code.org), information that we’re taught is blatantly incorrect. either way, being able to find the foci or an ellipse and the latus rectum (hehe) of a hyperbola isnt going to make it easier when i get my job and just adjust css to my bosses’s specifications. i maintain a 4.0, and i fucking hate it. my friends are working hard, and getting into mit for racial diversity, while im doing just as much work, for what?

i want out. i really do. but this redundant thing called a degree is holding me back. i really want to have some way of proving my skills without a degree. i’m currently building a social media application i believe will take off, but frankly, i dont care.

take off or not, hopefully it will be enough to prove my skills. i’ve been working on this for two weeks now, and, well, that’s my story.

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

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

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

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

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

Just found out that Visual Studio actually has the equivalent of Swift playgrounds - just go to View - Other Windows - C# Interactive (or F#, Python or PowerShell). My life is now complete.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

I cant keep this inside anymore I have to rant!

I have a colleague that is an horrendous loose bug-cannon. Every peer-review is like a fight for the products life.

Now I understand - everyone makes bugs me included and it is a huge relief when someone finds them during peer-review. But these aren't the simple kind of bugs. The ones easily made when writing large pieces of code quickly. Typing = instead of == or a misshandling of a terminating character causing weird behaviour. These kinds of bugs rarely pass by a peer-review or are quickly found when a bug report is recieved from testers.

No the bugs my colleague makes are the bugs that completly destroy the logic flow of a whole module. The things that worst case cause crashes. Or are complete disasters trying to figure out what causes them if they are discovered first when the product reaches production!

Ironically he is amazing a peer reviewing other peoples code.

But do you know what the worst thing of all is! Most of the bugs he causes are because he has to "tidy up" and "refactor" every piece of code he touches. The actual bugfix might be a one liner but in the same commit he can still manage to conjure up 3 new bugs. He's like a bug wizard!
*frustrated Aruughhhh noises*

being physically disabled is such a nightmare. i have experienced a whole different personality of being dependent on others , being incapable of basic tasks and feeling incomplete all the times. it's very humbling, and i have found a whole new respect for human body and social conduct.

just want to get whole again. don't know how long its going to take a humerus arm fracture to join back on is own, now that i got a plate screwed to the broken parts to keep them together.
the doctors will probably ask me to remove the external brace after a few months followed by exercises for next more months the complete bends/stretch will probably take 6-9 months and bone will join enough in 1-2 year after which i could get the plate removed (this is the happy case, not considering the high risk of my bones getting permanently twisted or plate getting envolped by bone mass )

everything simply sucks till then. imagine getting pushed back in your life by 2+ yrs in your prime age of 25.
farewell to my dreams of adventure sports, senior goals and gappy marriage .

folks, don't do stupid stuff that can get your body into trouble, you WILL regret.

So I bought 2 dvd packed with old rpg games.

I didn’t know my first quest will be to get those games working.

To make my life more miserable I decided to convert those dvd to iso.

First I needed to find computer with dvd because those I use apparently don’t have dvd anymore.

Found one with windows 7 inside.
Yeah first mission complete.

Now just find dvd to iso software and burn those bastards.

I need to update date / time to be able to use internet over https.
Checked.

Started looking for the dvd to iso software. Microsoft answers giving links to bloatware with detailed instructions how to install desired things without crap. The link to download doesn’t work but at least I have the name ImgBurn.
They have website so I click on first mirror and run setup.
First fail they’re linking to bloatware that downloads another bloatware that installs some search plugin for firefox.
Uninstalling search plugin.
1 hour passed by.
Clicking last link. Success.
Now time to click it smart to omit any unwanted software and get only what I want. Reading trough install instructions and checking out not wanted checkboxes is like great quest.
Finally I have what I want and I can backup my dvd.
What a great evening.

My life is complete now.

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

i am seeing this weird pattern of people getting too much close to their work colleagues and i am unable to understand the why behind it .

so one of my homies is a kind of introvert but a smart genius IT guy who ended up with a rich paying job.

now, his job is mostly wfh and 1 day wfo, but he has engrossed himself in his company so much that i fail to understand why. like,
- he would go to his office for 3-5 days instead of 1
- he would plan trips/vacations with his colleagues and bosses
- he would go to different cities/countries to attend the meetings that are happening virtually too( basically a zoom call where some people are joining from office and some from home)
and so on. basically instead of spending time with his homies/family, he prefer spending time with work people.

another guy is doing somewhat similar . basically he runs a legal firm, and instead of having a strict boss employee relation with his interns, he would bring them to his home, celebrate birthdays/parties with them in clubs, and even bring them to our homie gang trips.
as of late ,those trips now don't even include us :'(

-----

i fail to understand why. my work culture is so shit, i just wanna complete a fucking year here and grab my bonus and leave. most of the team that i work with is in a different city, we are asked to work from office that is 40 km away from my home, other colleagues are practical snakes and i am not even interested to see their double-faced faces even during work hours, leave alone after-hours.

another guy among us is a tution teacher and this fella is taking coaching classes even on weekends. i don't know whats wtong with people of my age. we haven't crossed even 26 and we are all running some rat races.

i need some people in my life with whom i can spend some hours relaxing without worrying about my job or backstabbing

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

Alright, it's been a while since I expressed my thoughts/feelings but here is what I'm dealing with.

Ever since I was a kid I've played games and even ended up enjoying the testing of new beta games more than actually playing games. The first games I played were atomic bomberman and worms. I was 4 at the time and lived in Denmark. By the age of 6 I moved to The Netherlands and have dealt with 8 years of being bullied for a reason I do not know. So as you can imagine I've dealt with a serious depression for a while and have always felt out of place.

Later after a few failed attempts of following an education I got into development. This was after I wasn't accepted into an education of game design. The course I follow now describes itself as application development but all we're doing there is building websites and not learning a proper way to keep code clean.

In the second year of the three year course we had to follow our first internship. This was the first positive thing I've had with school in my entire life. I ended up working for a company that had a game which tested your skill, the game was used by recruiters for bigger companies to pre select the right people for interviews. I had a look at the code of the game and it was a mess, after a couple of meetings further I managed to get them far enough that I could start working on a complete rewrite of their game.

So far it's been a rough road to becoming a game dev but I most certainly hope to own a studio one day. Now I only need to manage until I've got there

So I’ve been working on a tool to do offline domain joining in an active directory for about a month in my company, and so far everything is functional and done EXCEPT that one thing.

Essentially to do an offline domain junction, you need an AD account that has sufficient privileges on the domain controller. It will then generate a key that you can use on the client machine to make the junction to the domain.

I have tried literally every possible option that I could think of and I cannot for the life of me figure out why the client machine does not accept the generated key. I’m using methods from the Netapi32.dll which are barely documented anywhere, I even searched on GitHub code references and I couldn’t find much… Theres also a tool called djoin.exe that supposedly does that, I’ve tried with that tool too, to no avail.

This is the last thing missing for the project to be complete, and it’s pretty essential as well…

So close yet so far….

If anybody here knows anything about that kind of stuff (admittedly very niche) I’ll take anything.

Note: I think I’ve browsed all the websites and forums referencing to these functions and the tool now…

At first i was told to go to college BY PEOPLE WITH NO COLLEGE because i wouldnt be able to find a job without degree

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i sacrificed my life for school

Then later i found out PEOPLE WHO FINISHED COLLEGE told me i just need knowledge in order to be hired, and turns out degree is unimportant

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i studied and worked on practical projects and gained knowledge

Now when I try to get hired, they admitted that i am able to complete complex projects and i know how to solve the problems even if i see them for the first time. But they rejected me because "im not sure why the car leaks oil".

I have to understand and know what the whole framework is doing under the hood, how everything works, how dependency injection works under the hood, SOLID principles under the hood, decorators how they work under the hood etc.

So now it turns out
- sacrificing life for school is not enough
- sacrificing life for degree is not enough
- sacrificing life for learning and gaining knowledge is not enough
- now the new trend is i have to know not only how to drive a car like a professional formula F1 driver, i also have to be a mechanic and know how to fix the car if it breaks.

MATRIX IS A BIG FAT BULLSHIT AND A LIE.

I feel like they're looking for a senior developer knowledge to pay him junior developer salary

WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?

I sacrificed 10 days of my life for their bullshit to build this project from scratch as a technical interview. They never said congrats on all the parts that were built right, but only complained about the small portion of bugs i didnt have time to fix.

ALL OF THIS FOR A SALARY OF $1500/MONTH THAT I ASKED. THATS LESS THAN 20,000$ A YEAR. THEY EITHER GAVE ME AN OPTION TO WORK FOR WAY LESS (500-600$/month) OR CALL THEM BACK IN A FEW MONTHS.

I JUST FINISHED COLLEGE AND THEY EXPECT ME TO HAVE 20 YEARS OF SENIOR DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE.

WTF IS THIS SLAVERY BULLSHIT?

HAVING A 500$/MONTH AS ENGINEERING SALARY WITH A DEGREE IS BELITTLING OF THIS JOB.

NO I DONT LIVE IN INDIA I LIVE IN SERBIA. MY DOG IS SICK AND IT COSTS 100$ A DAY JUST FOR HIS TREATMENT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE WITH A SLAVE SALARY IN THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

GoDaddy. Is. The. Worst.

I'm working on an SSL cert domain verification for a client. The chat support tech at GoDaddy has no freaking clue what she's doing. She keeps telling me to follow the same help article I already knew about the first second I heard I needed to do this job. It didn't work. But she keeps going back to it, sure that I'm just a complete and utter moron who doesn't read. Never mind that I have screenshots to prove everything she's telling me is 100% wrong according to every error message this process is generating.

Now she's checking with the "SSL team". Which is code for "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and I'm frantically searching the FAQ database to figure out what this SSL thing even is."

That's what the last hour of my life has been. And 20 minutes of that was waiting in the chat queue.

So from now on 5% of my software dev performance will be related to DEI and I'll have to attend "trainings". Aside from the fact that it is complete BS, how does this have anything to do with software engineering and why is it so arbitrary, vague and hypocritical in general?

I'll summarize your goddamn 5%: don't be an asshole. Can I start working for real now?

Sounds pretty great for an american company that hires people offshore on the cheap and that treats them lowkey like second-hand slaves? But that's ok because life in their country would be worse without a job so we are "helping" them. How generous.

How low can corporate culture (if you can even call it that) go?

Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment

Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me

Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end

So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.

Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours

To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri

What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies

Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.

All of this sucks tbvh

Stupid timeline, there is this company I was working for. It was sub-contracted by another company to do a government project. Government only pays after you deliver in my country. It was a complex system I must say. We were to work with my buddy on this project...now the timeline we were given were not feasible since another company had been given the same project and were not able to deliver. We had a meeting and discussed with our CEO about the project timelines. From the workload the feasible timelines were around 8months if we were to work as two devs. My CEO said that was not going to happen.. The only timelines that was allowed was not more than 3 months. So we suggest use an existing system to customize. .The meetings with the clients were to be weekly demos. So we choose to go with google docs api for the document management part. We were working around 20hrs a day to be able to achieve the target deadline..we management to complete the project within the given timeline..on the commissioning date of the project we faced a government panel and this was my worst disappointment. At the point of login we had to use Google email for business to obtain the API. Just as I was logging in the guy noticed and yelled. "Is that google account ?" and I replied yes..and he said "no need of proceeding since it will be of no use and they won't approve the system". That was my lowest moment in programming. I thought I had done the best project in my life as a programmer only for stupid man to declare my project as null. I felt like calling him son of a bitch but I knew that would have made me more angry...i just walked out. I went to the toilet and all I did was cry for the first time as I can recall.. My question was I was doing weekly demos. Why didn't they raise any questions by then so as to change the entire system??? Later after that demo we went and discussed about the issue and there was time extension. I redid the project using 'open office' but just before deploying the system I got a better job. I wasn't feeling like working on that project anymore. I want to release that project as open source. Recently after one year they haven't yet deployed the system. They are calling for my help. And I don't feel like helping after the humiliation...

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

Okay so I'm back at ranting now cause I got a reason in my useless life to rant lmao. I started college recently, I'm majoring in Computer Science so the thing is that, my University provides specialization in cybersecurity and stuff to third year students and our Mr. HOD of applied sciences, who is basically an ass, in charge of conveying all the details to students, puts a complete mailing list of freshmen in the 'To' box rather than using BCC... smh. *Evil laughter*

I'm finishing my secondary school in a few months and I'm currently unsure what exactly to do after school.
I'm pretty sure I want to become a software developer (maybe frontend UX/UI focused) already but I'm unsure what path to pursue.
As I live in Germany I have the options of either vocational training or studying at a University.
I'm pretty fed up with theoretic work and school right now so I'm tending towards vocational training as it incorporates one or two days of school with working in a company for the rest of the week.
The issue is that I will complete my A levels and therefore be eligible for university education in most relevant courses and have the feeling of wasting possible success in my future career (and maybe life experiences) if I just do the
vocational training.
As most developers here have a long experience as devs I'd like to ask you for advice.
Would you suggest studying something like applied computer science etc. to achieve a successful software developer career and higher wages or is experience more important than higher formal education at university for a developer?

Okay. I look at myself as a kind of intellectual person. My parents are not believers so I came out quiet normal. As engineer and fan of technology I believe in science and I have a fairly complete look at life and universe at whole, I do not need any religional explanation for anything. I do not believe in the conspiracy theories and in any highly organized global secret society who controll us. I have acquired my view and opinions by systematically rethinking every aspect of life and everything I knew and I was thought before, btw this is the reason I stopped to eat animal products too.

But after all this corona shitshow, I really don't know If the current situation is just rolled by stupidity of media and politics or its really some plan of some people. I mean you can legally buy cigarettes with proven death rate of 10%, they recommend you to drink milk while its ultra carcinogenic and like 60% of population is intolerant, you have to wear mask but not gloves while the virus transference is 90% trough hand contact, and there are many many many questions that makes me paranoid. And now this vaccination stuff with countries almost forcing it in population, ahh... Man, This complete story is too irrational and strange. I start to loose my stable belief system and slide out. I noticed that I am not sure and I am just silent when people talk about these things. I hope this nonsense will end soon.

!rant

The moment when @dfox upvotes your rant.

Thinking to start smoking 🚬

Never tried it once in 26 years not even a sip even refused temptations from school friends

Now by starting a job, i have no security, ironically. I feel like i stepped at the leap of a bottomless pit and tomorrow i jump into it and fall... and fall....and fall..... No end.

I have no idea how to use ansible and rexify.org and thats what I'll need to use. I have no idea how to do devops with Azure, and thats what ill do. I only build devops with terraform on Aws.

The unknown of 9-5 is frightening me more than starting a business. Paradoxically, i think it would come as a relief to get fired within the first week from failing to complete literally everything

On top of that my blonde gf disappeared yesterday for 3-4 hours. No texts no phone calls. Called for 2 times no answer. Called 3rd time and got a voice message the phone was shut down. 3-4 hours later she said she was with mom at shopping and didnt have internet

I also caught her texting some random guy on instagram. They both have vanish mode enabled (texts delete themselves as soon as you leave the conversation). Confronted her today. She wont tell me the truth. Likes his pics on ig. Keeps lying. On a question "why do you have vanish mode enabled with him?" her answer is "well i guess married men always use vanish mode"

Im tired

Too much shit unraveling. The opening of 2024 already doesnt look good

Why do good people die in accidents or diseases but i dont and i live? Shits unfair. Why doesnt nature/God fucking kill me? I beg to die. I hope to die. I pray for something to kill me. It would come as such a relief.

This life is meaningless and empty to me. typeof(life) yields a void. I dont value it. Its shit. Whether succeed or fail its meaningless. Nihilism was right

I am literally a walking dead. Physically moving but spiritually dead. Mentally lost. I am the captain of a ship in the middle of the ocean who no longer knows where the ship is going

Why cant i just get cancer or something. Can cigarettes help me get it? Cause I'll start consuming that shit right away to speedrun that process

End it