I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

A little bit of Lua in my life
A little bit of Java by my side
A little bit JS is all i need
A little bit of bash is what i see
A little bit of JSON in the sun
A little bit of Python all night long
A little bit of TCL here i am
A little bit of this makes me your dev

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

You remember when I said the people near me might take everything away?

THE DAY HAS COME.

FUUUUUUUUUUU-

Do I have to say how retarded it is to take a PC and a phone away from a person who first off, loves tech, second of all, gets all her university assignments and information THROUGH an email, third, wants to be a game developer?

Seems like even telling them that I am trying to get as much informed about gaming industry as a whole isn't a valid fucking reason for why I use tech as often as I do... I want to be a game dev, you fucking morons.

So... This began by them AGAIN drilling me about the university progress. I cannot even remember my goddamn schedule, for fuck's sake! How do you expect me to remember every damn grade, every damn exam date and every damn subject name? They also expect me to study 100% of the time I'm using the PC. WHO does that?

They start drilling. I try not answering. It drives them mad. They start exploding. I try all I can to calm the goddamn situation. It's not enough for them. NO, they HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING! I try all I can to survive the situation without a conflict. Too late. At a certain point my amazingly clever father says I'm definitely autistic for trying to answer in as little words as I can. Because they totally don't give me a reason to never want to talk at all in their presence...

They got mad enough to take the phone, the PC and my headphones away.

And now here I am, writing this on a university PC in Chrome of all :|

First world problems...

I've been working at this startup as a tech lead for a little over a year, and we've grown from 3 to over 150 employees, and a bit over a million end users.

I've spent tens of thousands on high end displays and chairs for your lazy butts, on external consultants to help and train you, even those fucking dirty recruiters have leeched their shares of the pie. I built an amazing luxury kitchen with a fridge, beer cooler, induction plates and a blender for all your crossfitting bodybuilder meals, but forgot to think of my own needs.

NOW I JUST WANT TO BUY A GOOD COFFEEMAKER AND ALL THESE FUCKING TEASLURPING FAKE DEV-BROS SUDDENLY START SCREAMING ABOUT BUDGETS AND HOW COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARY IF YOU MEDITATE. FUCK YOU, WE'RE LIKE THE ONLY STARTUP IN THE COUNTRY RUNNING A FAT PROFIT. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID MINDFULNESS IOS APP. GIVE ME MY FUCKING ESPRESSO OR I'LL BLEND YOUR BALLS INTO A PROTEIN SHAKE.

Little fun story

About 3 years ago, my woman came gome from picking up our son from kindergarten.

She told me that she met a very nice woman - also a mom - whose man is also a dev (He is a FullStackDev, while I mainly do backend in PHP) .

She said that she invited them over for BBQ the next day.

In my mind, I was like "Fuck, now I need to listen to some wanker explaining me how great it is to be doing full stack with all the latest and greatest tools and bells and whistles why I am the fat kid using PHP"...

The BBQ-day arrived, we have met, we have talked, and we have been best friends and brothers-from-another-mother ever since.

Life is good sometimes.

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"

Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.

Well, OK, that's weird.

My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.

While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.

So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"

Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.

And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"

I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

Do any of you guys or gals sit outside and code?

Since 2009 this has been my primary work place (even in the cold and rain), I go to the office for mostly non-coding work and have a pc inside for serious sessions but I'd say 80% of my heads down dev time is spent sitting here. A little quirk is when people call or Skype me they'll immediately say "I can hear birds in the background, where are you??".

Anyway, I'm moving soon and thought I should share while I still can ☺️

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Just sharing my experience of my spontaneous interview with Facebook. I'm not good at writing these but here you go :)

- I was working as an Android dev and didn't have much knowledge in algorithms nor competitive programming, never ever interviewed with big companies.
- a random day on LinkedIn, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me
- I ignored it for few week because I thought it's so out of my league, then somehow, out of blue, I had a thought of giving it a try, so I did
- passed first round
- start studying algorithms a little for phone interview in 3 weeks
- recklessly took the phone interview
- passed
- start studying intensively (while working fulltime) for the on-site interview in 2 months
- almost got the job, they gave me one more chance by a followed up interview
- messed up the last chance real bad
- failed!!!
- Initially I just wanted to give it a try, but the fact that I failed at very very last chance, frankly, bothers me a bit. Maybe I will interview with FB or big companies if I have chance later, but I know for sure that the studying had made me a much better dev. All the code I write now is much more efficient (I think), I can and not anymore afraid of reading complicated code.
- Overall, it does takes a lot of time (~4 months studying while working fulltime), but also benefits myself a lot though I didn't get the job, so basically, good experience, but better if I got the job 😁

Oops, wanted to write a few lines and it's a long post already.. I should stop here :D

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

My boss pissed me off so much yesterday I totally ditched work today. I had some spiced rum for breakfast (and dinner) and spent the day playing minecraft and browsing Black Friday specials.

I did a little bit of work that (oversimplified) involved paying a Clover contractor for doing basically nothing. Totes cool with that as the guy is really nice and a decent dev. Annoyingly, though, he started hitting on me and asked me out on a date at the end of the call. He's like 65 and has a daughter (grand daughter?) my age, so that's like totally creepy. Ugh.

Getting hit on by random old men is still better than talking to Mr. Asshole the Sales Fetishizer, though.

Just got this little stinker added to my board this morning….

Ticket Title: Weird shit going on in app

Ticket Description: (blank)

Attachment: <Screenshot of app logo>

Manager: Well what do you think is causing it?

Dev: Causing what?? This ticket doesn’t describe anything at all

Manager: Well it’s a bunch of different things! The ticket is just a high level summary. Now how long do you think it’ll take to fix?

Dev: …

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

My little girl is going to be a dev one day!

"What do you mean it won't compile?!"

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

So I've mentioned that I work in a lingerie store. I'm not ashamed of it, as I make good enough money for a 19 year old living at home and it allows me to spend my free time learning dev technologies and practices while I try to decide on a career. Not to mention I have more bras and panties then I'll ever need, so there's that...

But sometimes when I sit here watching my customers, talking to them, measuring them for bras... I just want to set the store on fire. I never would, of course. I generally like helping these women and talking g to people. Yet sometimes I feel like I am wasting away. Like a little part of my soul dies when I sell some things to some girl while I have a Linux distro download at home waiting for me. Ugh.

Anyway, this is just some pointless venting from me. As you were.

*my first day on the job to work on a website used by dozens of companies worldwide and 1000s of users*

me: So where can I find the git repository?
dev: Git?
me: Uh... what kind of source control do you use?
dev: We don't use anything fancy like that.
me: *freaking out a little, I already committed to this job*
me: So then where do you edit your code and how do you back it up?
dev: Oh, I just edit it on FTP and zip all the code every week.

tl;dr I need ideas on how to warn the next dev(s) that the company is a dumpster fire.

------

For the past week (actual time: three days) I've been writing documentation for work, since there isn't any. It's been okay, I guess. Certainly more interesting than anything else I've done at work in months.

I'm up to 10k words / 67kb of markdown, and I think I'm done. I could easily write another 30k words on everything, but I just can't care enough.

However, what I do care about is warning the next dev(s) about how terrible the place is to work, so I want to add little references or hints or other such things to my writing. To complicate that, there's a contractor dev who said he will edit the document to strip out my commentary and make it "friendly" for the next person. (I can kind of see why: I've been quite honest about the situation of everything, and it's pretty dire. If they read it as-is, they might just walk out the door. I certainly would have.) I'm also going to commit it to the repo, and afaik he doesn't have push rights, so he can't force-push and remove it. (and a force-push by someone else, adding my documentation immediately after I leave... that would be pretty fishy, too.)

Anyway, at someone's suggestion, I added a "three envelopes" reference in the access phrase generator section. I also wrote "Promises made outside of ES6 will not resolve" -- in the warning section of a document almost entirely about Rails. (because the boss has broken every single promise he has ever made me.)

What other hints and subtle warnings could I add?

(And hurry: tomorrow is my last day! ;3)

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

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

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

*hour later*

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

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

*hour later*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┻━┻ ︵ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

┌П┐(ಠ_ಠ)

!dev !rant

Just scared the shit out of my little brother with a bluetooth keyboard. Now he'll never ask for my phone again.

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

I had an intern in for VBA programming on day one they realized that they were in need of an android dev, so the boss came to me and asked if I had any experience with android. I replied with yes a little, I had begun multiple projects but never finished only one of them. After 4 weeks of developing I presented my progress a pretty ugly but working app, after the meeting the boss told me that a other team of devs were building the same app but didn't made any progress in 1.5 years.
Ps: sry 4 my English.

!dev

It's raining. I love it.
It's foggy. I love it.

But I live in a desert and nobody here seems to know how to handle the rain, let alone the fog. (It isn't hard, people!) Last night during my ~30 min drive home from work, five separate accidents/collisions happened just a little ways behind me because it was raining. Now it's foggy, too.

I have to go to work.
I'm scared.

A Fellow Ranter said I should introduce myself, so here I go.

Me = {
Gender = "Male",
CodeOfChoise = {"lua", "PHP"},
Age = "28"
Location = "404"
}

No really here we go, I am Rex, I am dyslexic and forget code really badly but it does not stop me from trying to have fun with some ideas, I use mostly PHP these days but when I want to make a quick windows tool I use a app called AMS or AutoPlayMedia Studios what as a nice lua scripting language back end.

I been coding on and off for many years since I was about 15 and I been in love with computers since I was about 6 (don't tell my wife).

So far I like the site, its better then Twitter and Facebook as it's code related and fun to read and some stuff gets the cogs a turning.

I don't have any real foot print in the dev world, I get by but I not here to be loved, or to be big in any field, I am here because I enjoy my tech.

I leave this little introduce me with a question, what was your first or first memorial computer.

Mine was the Acorn A4000 Mixed with parts from the A3000 and A5000's :) she was a little bit of a mix match.

who ever has this as their skill set are legends!!
made me laugh going through thousands of lines of skills :D
"
A little bit of Lua in my life
A little bit of JS is all i need
A little bit of bash is what i see
A little bit of JSON in the sun
A little bit of Python all night long
A little bit of TCL here i am
A little bit of this makes me your dev
"

CEO had a meeting with the Dev team today and it went a little like this..

CEO: You guys shouldn't be doing any Googling. You should know everything about building websites.
Me(in my head of course): GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!

Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.

All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.

Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.

After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.

Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.

Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.

i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends

tldr:
everyone got the same hardware because senior dev liked it

So my project team was allowed to buy some hardware (monitors/keyboards/mouses etc.) so teamleader asked what we want.
senior dev: i need 1 monitor because i like to work with 1 monitor. i prefer this 27' zoll 4k monitor for around 1k dollars. since i work with multiple pc's i like this bluetooth keyboard and mouse because u can pair them with them and switch witch a click between the pc's costs around 300 dollar (1 setup of this costs 1'300 dollars)

me: so i like to use 2 monitors because i tried out multiple setups and this works for me the best (also what i have at home). but they dont need to be fancy. 2x 24' zoll montitors for each 200 dollar are enaugh (together 400 doller)
i also only work with 1 laptop and would like to have just a simple keyboard and mouse with cable because everytime they dont respons or battry runs out im fk triggered. so for me its okey if its this 30 dollar keyboard and 20 dollar mouse. it would be cool if i could get this mechanical keyboard for 80 dollars but not really needed. i only prefer mechanical keyboards a little bit more. and also i would like this mousepad i really like. it makes the mouse super responsive it's also just 10 dollars (this setup cost 510)

so at the end the teamleader was like. ah u know what senior dev has more xp and knows whats better for coding so we only buy this for every dev. but that 10 dollar mouse pad is okey u can get this extra its not that expensive.

WTF why u dont give me the cheaper setup which i more like. and why u even ask.

Living in a somewhat rural area, local dev jobs are hard to come by. So I decided to look for remote jobs.

I got in touch with a ceo of a company within our capitol, and the process was moving forward rather quickly. Until we got to discussing the salary. The seo had mention something about what he thought was the mininum and maximum salary. I said I needed to think about it for a bit, as the salary was a bit below the national average - but still was higher than I make in my current job.

I later responded with a suggestion a little higher than he suggested, thinking that we were in a negotiation situation. Oh, I was so wrong. This message was met with total radio silence. It's the first time I've been ghosted by a company.

Several weeks later, I got a message saying they hired someone else. That kind of treatment makes me glad I never got the job.

I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

My dad's a silicone guy, my little brother is a java-dev, my mom works for the NHS.

I'm a web and mobile dev.

So... My dad and little bro think I do WordPress and my mom thinks she should earn more than me.

In her defence I'm an NHS patient and I also think her and anyone else in the health industry should earn more than me.

!dev

I quit.
+5 years of working with violent autistic teens. I've seen, heard, and been a victim of some pretty fucked up things. Today however, I watched the cutest little hamster (her name was brownie) stabbed to death for no reason. Time to reevaluate my life, I quit & I'm going back to school.

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I was laid off right before Christmas because my manager would not give me any work (bully.. possibly discrimination). I asked for work to do for 2 weeks, even coming up with things to contribute on my own. My contributions were rejected and the lead developer agreed with me that it was fucked up but did nothing. The little work that I was given was always completed above standard and the lead dev had made comments praising my self tasked contributions but each rejection I was told it would be shelved for version 1.2.

Finally fed up, feeling as though I was being completely ignored, I told the lead dev I was going home half day early if there was nothing for me to do. The next day the CTO fired me and even lied to my recruiter telling him that I had not shown up for work for 3 days (easily disproven).

It's now the first of the year, probably not the best time to be looking for a new job, and my current outlook is that I am not going to be able to pay my rent at the end of the month.

My motivation has diminished, my confidence is gone. Job prospects are few. I don't know how to proceed.

Okay so even at my advance 52 years of age, I still pull all nighters to handle emergency remediation projects, and clean up other peoples messes. I don't mind, I'm a geek, I get high on the challenge of fixing shit that is broken all to hell.

But tonight was different. Tonight has me raging.

I am tasked with renovating a website, and building a sister site to that main site as well. no bother, I haven't done any web dev in 15 years but I'll power through pulling 18 to 20 hours a day for a couple of weeks to get in the groove...

Little did I know... CSS is a pain in the ass to be sure, but FLEXBOX is total and complete bullshit.

I don't give to shits about all the fancy shit it can do, it can't do simple shit worth a damn. Fuck Flexbox, and anyone involved in producing that useless layout model.

The sheer number of idiots promoting that hunk of shit a solution that is to be applied to any task other than wiping my ass is astounding.

Fuck all you jerk offs out there posting your shitty mark up turds as if they are gold, when you know better than anyone it works, sometimes, then doesn't, and is so easy to break it may as well be called "Web Design Jenga".

I'm still tired as hell, and tomorrow I will go back to slogging through CSS as the layout method, but at least I feel a little better now.

Oh and before I forget FUCK YOU FLEXBOX you piece of shit.

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...

"How is software made?"

The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.

I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...

I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.

"What the hell is this?"

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.

So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.

To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.

!dev related whatsoever fuck off if this bothers you

Just got into a big argument with my brother in law because the little bitch was exposing my father and mother in law(which I adore) to the virus by virtue of this little shit partying every other fucking day, going out with people etc and then having my in laws pick him up etc.

I am not gonna lie, I love the kid, but this shit pisses me the fuck off, my in laws are over 60 each and I ain't about to fuck with the chances of my child's grandparents dying because some fucktard thinks partying is more important.

Been wishing for the motherfucker that would since a while now, just hope it's not this kid.

!dev

So a colleage of mine died a little more then a month ago. His brother in law who also works at the company, and has known him for 20 something years (as long as he has worked for the company), had a really hard time dealing with that. My colleage was sick/hospitalized and in and out of coma for half a year+ so this was the apex of an emotional rollercoaster. When my colleage died he was not in a state to work. He actually went to a physisian and now he's seeing a shrink.

He took one week of to deal with everything, including his own mental well being, and you know what the human thing was my employers did. Subtract that week from his vacation days without telling him.

WOW, just fucking wow... I mean - yeah it's sort of legal to do that, but seriously

Junior dude in my team: Started working with the expectation to get dirty and go deep into technology (he was in fact a mathematician). The first two months he was happy like a little puppy playing around. Then suddenly he started talking about getting more responsibilities and beeing more a manager than a dev (because development is too stressful). Then on his last day of the probation period he quit out of nowhere because he got a job offer from a place he really wanted to go. He bought one beer per person in my team, but haven't invited my boss to that event. We suddenly realize why: He talked real shit about him!

What a dick!

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

Currently i have a small web dev project and i set up a live preview website so he cant see it developing and This literally Just happened

Client : hey, are you currently working on my website?
Me : Yes on my computer and working on it, can i help you with something?
C: yeah just a little bit, that logo on the top left are just a bit squeezed in size and stay like that since 5 days ago and it's bothering me, can you fix it?
Me : nah, its just a simple thing. give me a sec and try reload--
C: why is your voice echoing? Don't tell me you are coding in the bathroom
Me: ummm.. No... I guess...? (I Am)
C: 🤣
Me: sorry 😅

The sales and business team at my office really look down at the devs. Just because we don't dress in fancy suits doesn't mean we are any less important that those asshats.

In fact we are probably a hell of a lot more useful since they cant land any sales since they barely have any idea what they are selling and the company is rapidly going under.
To give you an idea :
We recently changed office and one of them asked if they had had to be in the same workspace as the developers again?

Why do we need them?
Cant we outsource their jobs ?

Some of them dont even answer when you bid them good morning

And one douche bag even brought his bluetooth radio and refuses to use headphones , he keeps playing shitty music and disturbing us.

The company is kinda fractured and there is poor chain of command, so there is little we can do, telling dev management is fruitless he has no authority over the guy
And the business manager simply said oh you dont like good music then walked off.

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!

Greetings from Denmark! Thought I would join after a lot of lurking, and tell a little story, as to how I fucked up when I started in my company.

I've been there around 10 days and had never used git besides just add, commit, and push. I was told to work in feature branches, and I did, I was playing around trying to learn, and got some merge conflicts, made a lot of unnecessary commits etc. I was told to clean it up before I merged into dev. And as I didn't know git I asked how I could do that. I was told I could force push in my branch, and that it was okay as long as it was only inside my branch. I tried that and saw my command line force pushing to all branches including dev, and master. My heart skipped a couple of beats, and I went directly to my Lead developer and asked what happend. He got a bit mad at me for pushing in dev and master, and override all the commits there had been made. I tried to explain I didn't he did not really believe me, I was so nervous. Luckily everything came back to normal with people's local branches being pushed etc. But that day I learned about git's push matching config, and my lead was luckily only mad in the heat of the moment and even apologized for getting mad. Just one of my little fuck up's in my short time as a developer

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

First junior software dev job, asked what I wanted for hourly pay, replied “I need at least $13/hour to survive.” (This is in US, 2007, I was almost done with Bachelor in CS, single mom with two little kids, was also in the army national guard at the time)

I grew up poor, and was very ignorant about salary negotiations. So of course they offered $13/hour. I accepted, thinking it must be fair, and was glad to be making more than minimum wage. Six months in, I’m doing the same work as their devs with 2-4 years experience, find out they are billing clients $100/hour for my work. Then, to top it off, the COO makes a joke in a meeting about how it’s not a big deal for their “technical assistant” to be doing lackey work because he’s only paid $13. Fuuuuuuuuck. That comment still makes my blood boil.

I had a nice manager at the time that explained how salary negotiations worked, but I still think it’s lame as hell. I ended up getting put on salary, $50k/year, after threatening to leave.

!dev

It’s sooo weird.
I’m generally not feeling happy or good or “okay”, I’m almost always rather shitty but just keep going through my day without complaining too much because that’s what most of us do..

Today, for the first time in at least one (very lonely, cold and boring) year, I went outside for a smoke and felt good. No idea why.
Everything was orangy/yellowish outside because of the clouds after the first sunny day in weeks.
Its raining slightly but not so much that you actually get wet.

I just had this feeling of “yea, that’s good enough” which I haven’t had in probably 4-5 years or so.

Maybe it’s because I got a little bit of sun for once and saw other people walking 2m around me, I don’t know..
But it felt good.

Does that feeling sound familiar to anyone or am I just finally going crazy?

I also apologise for my last 50 rants not being about dev or rant but I’m lucky to not have much to rant about in my current job 😅

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!

I don't want to come off as a linux-elitist but it's simply amazing how much easier my job is on linux. A good example recently was setting up some libraries for a C++ program I was writing to show to my class. Most of them were using Windows and visual studio, took about 15 minutes to download all the headers and libs, and show them how to configure a VS solution to link them. Not too big a deal but on linux, it only took about 30 seconds to pacman and gcc -l the lib. Little things like that keep me interested in linux as a dev tool.

Yeah yeah, good ol' DropBox.
Which fucking piss-wanker has made the decision to NOT SUPPORT encrypted ext4 starting in november???
You think I'm going to reformat my SSD just for you, you little stinky cunt, huh?
CrapBox has hearned itself a place in /dev/null
Go fuck yourself, you hobo-raped STD host!

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

!dev

Day 8 in isolation.
Im lonely..
My brother calls me.
I haven’t talked to my brother in a long time.
He believes that capitalism is the answer to everything.
It sucks to be lonely in my tiny little apartment so I actually Skyped with him today.

After a 3h call I remember why I don’t usually talk to him.

What he’s saying is:
Democracy only works if the vote of rich people is worth more.
The happiness of your people is defined by the amount of money your country has.
Thanks to Corona, the EU, Russia, Afrika and China are gonna be slums. They’ll be poor and without money.
The US is the only country that’s gonna be fine and it’s gonna be the most important country in the world.
Putin didn’t do anything illegal, he stays president because the people vote for him.

FFS, I tried to tell him my opinion on each single one of those statements, he ignored me and kept telling me how it’s the rich people that keep the clock ticking.

I think my days as a dev are over
shit fuck!!!!
All i know is writing code, schematics, systems recommendations
Was given a tender doc for a project
the doc was in 2 parts "Technical" & "Financial"
I HAVE NEVER DONE A TENDER BEFORE and little did i know a shit load of documents are required
MY BOSS GOT FURIUS SINCE I DIDNT COMPILE ALL DOCS and 1 required doc was expired tried to get it renewed and renewal will take 3 week or 1 month and deadline was in 2 hours time
FUCK!!!!

F U C K M E ! ! ! ! !

Lead-Dev: I got a little job for you; put this list of links in the footer of our website.
Me: But... this list of links is a bunch of websites of another company...
why would that go in OUR footer?
LD: Well, Google gives a higher SEO score when two websites have links to one another.
Me: Oh, okay.
LD: Just make the list as subtle as possible. Visitors aren't really supposed to click on them.
Me under my breath: (How are these people allowed to call themselves professionals?)

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

So I've been doing some code jobs now and recently they pushed me to a new level.
This company worked with some silly management app made in cpp which they asked me to edit a little bit giving it another style and some additional functions.
Day 1: this code is a mess.
Day 2: this code is a mess.
Day 3: how does this code even compile.
Day 4: I no longer have faith in humanity.
Day 5: I found my first comment (Yay?).
Day 16: I'm done.
Day 19: I got paid.

If you're making a project in cpp just like that dev you do deserve a punch in the throat.

No documentation, no comments, no patterns, just some thick pasta of poorly written code, names like fCalcAllTaxFilesSizeMB....
This haunts me for real.

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

So, I'm a CS student in a third world country. I love coding and I think i'm pretty good at it.

As I'm kind of poor, I'm pretty much constantly looking for any job I can take, and I've already done a dev gig at a software sweatshop here doing mostly PHP, JS and Android/Java... the dev experience was cool, but money was absolute crap ($1.5USD/hour at the current rate, working 9h/day Mon-Sat, did it while in vacation). Better than min wage in my country but still, looking at the numbers I see from programmers all over the world... it was practically working for free. The real problem is almost every dev job here is similar, so I was looking into going remote but every opportunity I see is for seniors/people with 2-3 years experience or more.

Can you give me some tips on getting a remote job as a student/recent grad with little experience? What would you do in my position? Any input is greatly appreciated!

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

I go to college online and I'll admit I'm a little annoyed that my Web Dev professor makes us code using notepad and doesn't allow IDE's. I get the point but it's obnoxious, this isn't 2003.

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

So, my plans:

Life
* to have my firstborn child and do my best as a father
* to pay off ~half of my 5yr lease (my brand new car arrived at the dealer yesterday, I will be picking it up within 2 weeks, yay!)
* not to die from starvation while paying it off

Work:
* to become more comfortable and fluent in my current position to reduce stress and save time for personal goals (learning another language / technology so that I'm not a prisoner of the field I'm good at)

Hobby:
* to publish my first Android game (or at least be close)
* to make indie game development my hobby, a way to vent off after work and hopefully a source of additional income
* learn to draw just a little (for my game dev)

My friend a backend dev who manages a little UI by using bootstrap themes. One Saturday he calls me up says "Dude, I need your help, we had a demo and the CEO decides to demo the project to prospective people on Internet Explorer. It looked alright on Chrome but the whole UI has gone haywire on IE. Need your help asap. Join me on screen share". I checkout his HTML code and find a file where the link tag is inside the body tag. I ask him to move that into head tag as in wherever the master template is, I tell him to change the doctype, add responsive meta tags, and even after all these, it just doesn't render bootstraps media queries. After beating my head for around 15mins, I see a drop-down caret in IE's inspector with 7 besides it, someone had set the compatibility mode to IE7. Why in the world would someone set an IE11 to IE7.
My friend heaved a sigh of relief and walked to his boss to show that he isn't a bad developer, his boss is just a bad user.

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

So this one made me create an account on here...

At work, there's a feature of our application that allows the user to design something (keeping it vague on purpose) and to request a 3D render of their creation.

Working with dynamically positioned objects, textures and such, errors are bound to happen. That's why we implemented a bug report feature.

We have a small team tasked with monitoring the bug reports and taking action upon it, either by fixing a 3D scene, or raising the issue to the dev team.

The other day, a member of that team told me (since I'm part of the dev team) he had received a complain that the image a user received was empty. Strange, we didn't update the code in a while.

So I check the server, all the docker containers are running fine, the code is fine, no errors anywhere.

Then, as I'm scratching my head, that guy comes back to me and says "I don't know if it can help you, but it's been doing it for a week and a half now".

"And we're only hearing about it now?!", I replied.

"Well, I have bug reports going back to the 15th, but we haven't been checking the reports for a while now since everything was fine", he says as if it was actually a normal thing to say.

"How can you know everything is fine if you're not looking at the thing that says if there's an issue?!", I replied with a face filled with despair.

"Well we didn't receive any new reports in a while, so we just stopped looking. And now the report tool window is actually closed on my machine", he says with a smile and a little laugh in his tone.

In the end, I got to fix the server issue quite easily. But still, the feature wasn't working for 1.5 weeks and more that 330 images weren't sent properly...

So yeah, Doctor, the patient's heart is beating again! Let's unplug the monitor, it should be fine.

Welcome to my little piece of hell :)

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

I have worked with a handful of very green devs in the last 10 years. A common theme has emerged.

They don't heed any of my advice.

An exercise to the reader:

If you have a Windows machine, but need to work in a Linux environment, what would be your first instinct how to proceed?

In this exercise, you are as green as it gets. You have very little professional development experience, let alone server admin experience. And your lead dev has suggested setting up a VM.

1. Set up a Linux VM
2. Use a live CD or set up a dual boot system
3. Pay for a cloud server and set it up from scratch

I have no idea how this person intends to get any work done on a remote, terminal only, Linux server. That is if I can even get their environment into a sane configuration.

!dev && rant
Temperature causing temper!!!

Summer 2009...
Me: Dad, can me and sis go swim in the pool?
Dad: No son, you can only swim if it's 25°C or higher.
Which in practice meant that we could only swim a few days each summer. Average in Belgium used to be about 21°C.

Spring 2019, my younger siblings...
Little sis: Mom, can we go swim in the pool?
Mom: Lol sure, it's only April but it's already way hot enough.. and during summer it'll be too hot to do the work on setting up the pool anyway.

Winter 2029, in Antarctica...
Me, to my children: During my old days my children, we had this thing called snow!! And we lived in the wasteland that used to be the glorious Europe, back when it was still habitable.. you should've seen it, now it's a desert, but back then it was awesome!
My children: Mum!! He's acting senile again, and talking about things that don't exist!!!

Coming to the crux of the problem right now, fuck me.. I'm tired as fuck but can't sleep because already in the fucking spring, my house is too fucking hot to be able to sleep without sweating like a pig!!!
AaaaaAAAAA 😣

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

They probably should have made me sign a NDA, but I never did.

I was a wee little front-end devloper for a really small dev shop. The lead devloper, who was also the only back-end developer decided to quit. The company was in the middle of a huge project with Rolls-Royce aerospace. I managed to learn ColdFusion and release the application in only a few months. It was basically a giant warranty management application for jet engines. This is one app I wish I can go back and redo because if I had the expierence then that I do now... I feel like it would be so much better. That application allowed me to advance in my career, and 5 years later, I'm working for one of the largest development companies.

!dev

Anyone know of a way to ease a tooth ache?

This pain right now is fucking unbearable, I'm having a hot water bottle against my cheek which relieves it a very little bit and I'm already on the maximum dosage of pain killers.

7 hours left before I can call my dentist.

I hope someone knows something magical for this 😥

Things I love of being a dev:

I downloaded a big list of .mp3's. The server gave them weird UUID's, but it kept their proper title on the metadata. I wanted to change the names to their proper title, and I could've done it by hand, but I decided to write a little script to do it. Well, I'm not a scripting geek, so I had to dive into how to get the metadata and format strings etc, the basics of PS. I'm pretty sure I wasted more time there than I would have just doing it by hand... but hey at least I learned something new! On my track to becoming a full-stack developer!

Anything to not do something so numbingly repetitive and uninspiring as that

So my colleagues and I are somewhat great friends. (As in my first rant, I'm a practical evil joke guy). Since our boss thinks we are working on the production server (in reality, he commissioned it to be done in 4 months time. We all got it done in a month.), we get our own little room in the building, each time one of us walks in, we greet each other with a nice "go fuck yourself". Not to be mean, but just as a joke.

I decide to leave the room to go get a drink and I said I would be back. Guess who wants to see the dev team to see where they are on production? Not our boss, the fucking CEO. This isn't a big company, but this definitely was not expected.

So, he walks in and greets the team. He gets greeted with "Go fuck yourself".

I come back to see my team outside, and the CEO asking me why they said that. So after 15 minutes of ass ripping, the CEO leaves, our jobs barely intact, and I get to talk with the team about why we have to be nice to our superiors.

mangodb's rant reminded me of smth.. Folks from my country might remember this story.

So we have a national e-health system. Millions have been invested, half of the money have never reached the project [disappeared smwhr in between] and its quality is not shiny. It works, sometimes even fast enough. But boy does it have bugs... Let's not get into that. It's politics.

So some time ago one IT guy spotted a bug that allowed him to get sensitive info of other patients. He informed e-health folks and waited for a fix. He waited for a few weeks but the fix had never been released. So he published his findings in soc media [yepp.. Stupid move]. That caused a national scandal. Not to mention he had been pressed with charges.

That guy and our health minister were invited in one of the tv debates. The guy was asked to explained how he found all this sensitive data. And he explained that he hit f12 in his browser, opened a network tab, issued a network request by clicking smth in the webpage analysed received data in the dev tools.

The minister looked somewhat happy, maybe a lil proud of himself - a person who has a "gotcha!" moment has that very glow he had. And he said: "what you did there was obvious hacking. I reckon you should know that true developers do not do those things you have just explained to us" [he was talking about dev tools].

I died inside a little bit.

A little back story:
A dev who left already implemented a system and modeled the data like he doesn't even care because he was going away in one month anyway.

This sucker here inherited the responsibility to remodel this fucking clusterfuck of data.

I was trying to do a good work here until today but some things came to my mind :
I don't care.
They don't care.
Fuck it.
I'm gonna do the same shit and the next person can suck ma'dick.
I have better things to do.

Look, I'm gonna do a lazy job that is gonna be a million light years better than what this sucker did anyway.

First post.
So, I've been teaching myself front-end for about 7 months now, and I'm really enjoying it, especially the actual programming aspect of JS. I also just started a new job, nothing to do with development, that I expected to be extremely boring and unfulfilling, as it doesn't fulfill any of my interests, but it'll pay my rent and it has decent benefits. I'll be mostly working with excel.
Now, like I mentioned, I'm really new to the dev world, just a little infant really. I know enough to know that I don't know shit. So, I was surprised to learn today that you can program in excel with VBA. I know the language gets a good bit of hate on here, I did a search before posting, and while I haven't started to learn it just yet (I'm starting tonight) I'm excited about. Firstly, because I'll get to do coding for my job, something I'm interested in, and secondly, because if I can figure out how to automate part of what I do well enough that it's implemented with the rest of the team, then maybe I'll be rewarded, and I'd be able to put professional coding experience on a resume for when I try to find a better job.
I've really enjoyed reading all the rants. They've been entertaining and also educational sometimes.
tl;dr Discovered VBA and was actually excited about it

Just wanted to spread awareness about a Windows 10 devRant app called "devRant Unofficial". It's literally a 1:1 clone of the Android and iOS apps.

Maybe the devRant team could contact the dev for come co-operation and get an official app for Windows 10 with little to none effort?

It works on mobile and PC so I can easily use it on my Lumia and Surface. I know most of you guys here use macOS, but for us Windows devs, having an official app would be cool.

I know Valve talked to an unofficial developer of the Steam app for Windows Phone, and gave him approval for removing the "unofficial" tag. I suggest you guys do the same.

Happy 2016's death everyone, and sorry for the long and boring post!

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)

But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.

Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.

P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)

Four years ago while still a newbey in Android Dev and still using the eclipse IDE which was hell to configure by adding Android plugins,my girlfriend had a birthday.
With my new found love of coding thought of developing a b-day app for her.With so little android knowledge I had a great idea the main activity would have her photo as the background and button which when clicked would show a toast saying happy b-day love.
After spending few minutes in Tutorial point and learning how to display a toast and setting click listeners on buttons I was good to go and compiled the app.

Later that evening I head to her room where her b-day was to be held with some of her lady friends .When presenting gifts I presented her gift said had one more surprise for her and asked for her phone and using bluetooth sent the apk to her phone.
Installing the app I was scared to death on seeing how my grey buttons were displaying on her 2.7 screen size since had no idea on designing for multiple screens.
Giving her back the phone she loved the app and felt like her superman in the room though not for long.Her lady friends had gone ahead took her phone and were critising the app:
Why can't I take a selfie
Why can't the app play a b-day song for her and this went on them not knowing how hurting that was.
Bumped on the lady who lead the onslaught on me and had to go down memory lane.Life is a journey.

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

<senior dev turns around..making some small talk about the weather and such.. then>
Senior Dev: “Yea, I’m wanting to take my hard drive out of my desktop and put it in my laptop”
<I know his personal laptop is an older 13.3” dell>
Me: “You have a 2.5” laptop drive in your desktop computer?”
<gives me a very puzzled look>
Senior Dev: “Um…no.”
<second or two of awkward silence>
Me: “Well, a desktop hard drive isn’t going to fit in your laptop.”
<gives me another very puzzled look with a touch of annoyance>
Senior Dev: “It might work.”
<senior dev turns back around>
Why the –bleep- do people talk to me!? Now the rest of the day all I want to do is take his computer away from him…poor thing…that little guy has no idea what his owner wants to do to him .

I really like my current job.

I work as an analyst developer looking after and sorting out people's old tech debt.

Once that's stable I get pretty free reign to do what I want.

It allows me to stretch from dev into graphic design, security, architecture and training on a very regular basis.

It allows me to keep an eye on tech trends, research and develop ideas using the latest shiny things.

Oh and if I say I need a thing, I can usually get it purchased.

All of the above comes with the "as long as it's for the benefit of the company" disclaimer, but when your direct managers see an IDE and think "okay he's working" the lines get a little blurry.

They keep asking me about my career goals and if I want to manage or move around. Fuck that noise, all of that noise.

Do wut I wawnt.

Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.

I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.

=====

What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.

Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.

At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.

Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.

Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

During the majority of my career, I've been the stereotypical pissed off guy with earphones in mashing away at his keyboard.

During lunch hours, I absolutely love listening to other pissed off devs. Their tales of buggy Microsoft products, oblivious project managers, dangerously unqualified directors, and severely disabled bosses are often the only thing that put a smile on my face in a workday, and here in Tokyo a workday is often your whole day. I don't feel there's anything wrong with it - the targets of their abuse often really are leeching tons of money while contributing little to nothing, so I feel like they deserve the abuse.

However, I don't like it when devs trash-talk other devs. I sympathize with those guys, even if they wrote bad code. I know writing good code is really, really hard, and I know that they were trying to do it under extremely difficult circumstances (in an office). If they're junior I sympathize even more because they're often better than I was when I had the same amount of experience.

So in conclusion, don't hate your fellow dev. Don't let hatred control you and poison your well-being. Direct your hatred where it belongs, at project managers.

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

!dev !rant
You guys talk about having too much coffee occasionally - enough to where you weren't able to even focus;
I, being the dumbass I am overachieved a little and actually drank so much once and basically seized up
My friend was driving me home and all of the sudden i felt my arm muscles contracting, and then my abdomen and chest
shit was scary
we had to pull over and i had to struggle to shove a bottle and a half of water down my throat before he could drive me home

moral of the story = Make sure you eat in the morning, and there IS such a thing as too much coffee

So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...

Not quite a rant... more of a question.

So, I'm almost 40 years old. I have a lot of work experience in varying fields, much of it in low-level management.

Truth is I've ALWAYS wanted to be a programmer.

I recently got into a somewhat competitive training program
where I'm learning to write Java, and will subsequently learn Android development. It's fairly in-depth, so it will take 10 moths to complete. My ultimate goal it's to work as a mobile dev at a great company, making products people love. Ambitious, I know.

My question is: Am I a fool for attempting to get into this field at this age? I'm starting to panic a little. I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time, or if 40 is too old to be the "newbie".

Thoughts?

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.

Fuck. I'm fucking alive. The past month or so has been hectic. I've mainly been working, sleeping, or at school (not like I've showed up much lately anyways, maybe 12 days or so since the middle of February).

!dev

I'm fucking tired.

Bought an FX 8350 with the Wraith cooler for my desktop, got it for $70 when normally it's about $140 or so. Gonna replace the PSU and case when I get paid on Saturday, cause I don't have to pay anything with this check, so it's all to myself. Cut myself putting a heatsink back on my motherboard, still hurts 3 days later.

My "best friend" is still not talking to me. But she's been talking ABOUT me. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm done with the whole situation with her. It's just her crying over every little thing.

My rants tend to be about my personal life, and this one is no exception. I just have a lot of shit going on and I need to get it out sometimes.

Pretty much right now. I'm seething, just thinking about going to work in a few short hours.

I work for a company that doesn't respect me. A fucking simpleton designer who can do no wrong has changed everything about a project that I'm responsible for, hundreds of times. She gets out a ruler (yes, really), measures stuff against her little mockups (that are also prone to changing without notice), and screams when things don't precisely match her "designs" on every single device she can get her goddamned hands on. She's changed everything except the deadline. I have gotten none of the recognition and all of the blame, and I'm completely over it. This is nothing new. In addition to being a dev team of one, I also found out that I'm the third such person in my company's employ in the last two years, and I've worked here for one.

The final straw was when I was given a schedule for the next project, which I had not been consulted on. It was a printout of an email. Copied in the email was the designer, my boss, and an intern. A FUCKING GOD DAMNED HOURLY INTERN.

Fast forward one week.

I'm in third stage interviews with half a dozen companies right now, second stage interviews with at least that many. When I do get another job, I was originally going to give notice, but I think now I'll just give my boss a printout of an email to the interns and walk out.

Shove the internet up your ass, you fucking fucks

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

This guy, in a different department to me, was bad mouthing me to his boss for about 2 months, slagging off my Dev abilities as well as me as a person. Really snide two faced little fucker.

Anyway, when I finally met his boss on a company outing we got on so well he opted to stay out late with me drinking, which was when told me about what this 2-faced cunt had been saying and pretty much offered me his job on the grounds that we'd work better together.

I've since left the company but I've heard from others that no-one wants to work with him.

Even though I bragging about how good my few projects are to the people I talk to them about, I undervalue my worth as a developer.

Even though I am desperate for money, I've only recently started trying to get work in the dev community (with little success) because I actually feel that I'm not a good enough developer..

We need to normalize not being a passionate CS guru. You can be good at your job and not have passion for it. You don't have to dedicate your life to your career in every facet.

I don't expect plumbers to sit around their house all day during their free time hooking up water lines. Why is it expected that I'm always reading some dev book or learning some new framework or reading some tech blog?

I do other shit, and that's fine. My job earns me a paycheck and I'll improve on the clock, and when I walk out at the end of the day I leave that shit there.

At most I might converse with you informally about tech but I'm not going to spend my little free time going to meetups and pretending like I care more than I do. If you do that's great, but I'm not you and that's fuckin fine too.

A note to my team, who I hope never actually reads this.

To my manager: Grow a fucking spine, you asshat! We literally ignore you, you are useless!! Other people do your job, and you can't even talk to your reporting person directly! You have us do it!

To my tech lead: You are crazy, but in a good way! I have no idea how you cram so much work into so little time, and I would march into hell for you. You are in the trenches with us, and I respect you greatly!

To dev number 1: You are hard working, but stop modifying my code and breaking it!

To the other devs: If you leave 4 hours before the tech lead anymore, I will beat you to death with a cum filled sock! My rage fucking erection is that strong!

To everyone else: fuck you!

Area of focus: Native iOS dev

Why: Spent years trying hybrid tools, dealing with the most ridiculous errors, bugs and issues you can begin to comprehend and then ... something magical happened. I got a book on Objective-c, learned a little, tried a simple app ... and it worked ... like properly worked, and on all the devices without taking half the RAM.

I'll say that again as I don't think it landed. In Objective-c, I got no issues where only the CEO's phone + OS version meant I couldn't load a map and a pin (looking at you titanium!!!)

In Objective-c, I wasn't promised storyboards and autolayout, only to find out they are completely different, and may god help you trying to google the issues, as the only ones to show up would be the native tools (looking at you Xamarin)

In Objective-c, my app doesn't instantly consume 125mb of RAM to load a fucking webview (looking at you ... well nearly every other hybrid tool)

... it just works. Then Swift came along and things only got better.

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

A frontend dev asked for my assistance in writing a tricky helper function, told him i'd be back in 5, as I was just heading out the door for a cup of coffee.

Came back a little later, maybe 10 minutes instead of 5, and he says:
"Nevermind, I solved it by installing plugin XYZ v4"

Checked out the codebase for said plugin afterwards, and discovers it's around ~30MB of code, and adds a shit ton of "premium version" ads to the backend.

YOU FUCKING TWATFACE! YOUR LAZY FUCKTRUMPET ASS COULDN'T WAIT 5 MORE MINUTES?!!

I NOW HAVE THE MISFORTUNE OF REWRITING YOUR ABYSMAL DISASTER, OR DEAL WITH THIS PIECE OF SHITWARE..

Liferay. Fucking Liferay.
I'm mostly C#, Java Dev with only a year of experience and as Kruger-Dunning effect says, I thought I'm not that bad. At the beginning of my job I've got tasked with creating an portlet for Liferay CMS which is written in Java. Can't be that bad, right? WRONG.
Liferay is real shit. Not only there is little to none community life but also documentation and tutorials are outdated! Many methods are doing the same functionality but are in different packages. JSP make coding a big fucking mess if you won't make shit ton of classes to clean it up. Also it has this incredible ability to crash whole portlet after a small change in classes structure.
I have to mention that no one could help me because company that I'm working for is a rather small one and there's no other Java developer beside me. This also means that it's hard to really get gut when no one is oversying my progress.
Also I really dislike web development. And Liferay made it even worse. I hope it will burn in hell.

As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth

Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Like a lot of people, I have created an account on a website to find a job.

The funny part was when I was asked for my city (with a little * to indicate that the information is required) and ... the field was just gray and unusable ...

The solution was simple, edit the html to enable the field and add the selected value manually because it wasn't added automatically on selection.

Today i'm not sure if this was a test, a troll of just a crapy form ...

(actually it wasn't speciallt a dev site so i suppose it's the answer 3...)

An example of today's generation:
My little cousin 22 years old wants to get into BI Dev. I tell him to read a certain book. The book has practice examples and various things that are hands on.

What does he do?
He READS the book and is like, "ask me any question and I know the answer". So I'm like, "fine, what's the structure of a basic SQL statement?", after some hard thought he's like, "SELECT * FROM?" I'm like, "ok.....how would you filter that?" and he's like, "you got me man........no clue".

What didn't he do?
Practice.

I mean.........come on.

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

Can you rant about yourself?

I was reading about the AWS outage, with little to no interest. I didn't know what it was and thus figured it wouldn't affect me.
Some time goes by and I come up with this 300++ vote post. I'm witty, I'm smart, but when I want to upload a photo it doesn't work.
Must be the app right? I restart, nope nothing. Whatever..

Sometime later I have a dashing new photo for tinder. Surely to give me all the matches. Nope, can't upload it.
Must be my phone or Internet then.
Restart everything, nothing is working. Complete madness, no devRant upvotes and I'm still single.
I surrender, give up. Which is one of the worst things to do for me as a dev.

Today. Which is the cherry on the cake. I finally see my connection to the incident. I feel stupid and annoyed by myself.
God dammit Julian, pay attention.

</rant>

So my real name is jason and I got the habit to use Json as my nickname as a little Dev pun.

I think I overdid it

When I was a wee little lad of 13, still with that hopeful gleam in my eye, I signed up to work as the webmaster for a local org.

At the time, I had played around with HTML and CSS and a little JavaScript, and I thought all I'd be doing was updating some pages with announcements or whatever

I got paid in SSL, which is a thing kids in Maryland have to do to graduate, and the whole idea is that you need to do 75 hours of volunteer work in your community

The people there promised me 8 hours a month for what I thought would be easy work, and so I eagerly signed up.

What I thought would be updating a few html files and emailing them to the org was actually having to manage a full on server running PHP4 LAMP stack

Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. I tried to make the updates they wanted, but I had no idea how to write PHP, let alone manage a database and server.

I think I got out of it by just never responding to their emails once I realized how fucked I was, but that was definitely the worst learning experience of my dev career

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions

big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with

the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while

* everybody laughs *

Hey this is the first time i post here.

I just started working part-time for this company last week. What i have to do is to change some windows from Win32 to WPF. As i was reading the legacy code i just had to sigh man. They have like 100 projects in a single solution, from C++ to C#, everything acctached to each other, with almost NO comments or docs. Wtf man? I don't know how it actually works in the industry (this is my first dev job) but when you write fucking 20 classes with each one contains bunch of attributes, methods, properties, you can't just leave all the code's semantics in their names. And by the way the app is so fucking ugly i bet they have appointed part-time developers as UX engineers... Even i have little knowledge about UX/UI, i just can't bear with this kind of ugly and confusing and unintuitive production with a cost of a good photo editting software.

Ok there may be much more to rant in the future but let me try through this and tell you more. Have a good day. :)

Hey peeps,
I got a question that is bothering me for a while now. I am from Germany and I quit my CS studies a few months ago in favor of a "Berufsausbildung". I don't know if other countries have a comparable equal to our Berufsausbildung, so I gonna give you a quick overview:

In the Berufsausbildung you stay 30% of your time in school where you have to learn the basics and theory parts of your chosen profession. 70% of your time you are in the company ("Ausbildungsbetrieb") that is training you to learn the practical parts your profession and gain work experience. At the end of the Berufsausbildung, you have to work on a project and present it in front of a committee and write some exams.

So the Berufsausbildung is more about learning by doing instead of learning all the little things in the field of your profession.

Now to my actual question. One of my biggest dreams is to work in Japan as a freelance for a few years or more. Working on projects for companies in my home country while traveling through Japan. I know that it is hard to be allowed into the country for a longer time and even working there without a good education. I always have the feeling that I am inferior to people who have a college degree and I am afraid that my "inferior education" might be a huge disadvantage in the future for me. I already gained 3 years of work experience as a dev and in February 2020 I will have finished my Berufsausbildung. What is your experience with working as a dev without any college degree? Are you treated differently than other people that got a degree? And has anyone experience with working abroad with or without a degree?

Thank you very much!

I've just got in from bar* work, a little drunk*!

My last dev employer actually offered me my old job back, but as HR are so awful I said the situation was past that and demanded compensation. A nice payout agreed for me, for not taking it to tribunal 👍

Now for the new job! I thought working the night scene would be fun, but it's not well paid and the freelance I have is but it's hard to juggle the two.

I might have a break or a month or so doing this, then look for another job.

Anyone recommend good companies LGBT friendly in London?

Co-worker: At my last job "I was technically lead dev", so don't mind me telling you what to do and criticizing every line of code you write. (He said that in finger quotes. I am also paraphrasing the last part, but you get the gist).

Me: So the fact that we are both level 3 programmers means nothing?

Co-worker: Exactly! See you understand!

Me in my mind: What a prick!

Just a little context there aren't any lead devs at our company, our boss doesn't want any. Also we have been working at this company together for 3 years, and this co-worker just said that to me today, WTF?

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

!dev

Guys, we need talk raw performance for a second.

Fair disclaimer - if you are for some reason intel worker, you may feel offended.

I have one fucking question.
What's the point of fucking ultra-low-power-extreme-potato CPUs like intel atoms?

Okay, okay. Power usage. Sure. So that's one.

Now tell me, why in the fucking world anyone would prefer to wait 5-10 times more for same action to happen while indeed consuming also 5-10 times less power?

Can't you just tune down "big" core and call it a day? It would be around.. a fuckton faster. I have my i7-7820HK cpu and if I dial it back to 1.2Ghz my WINDOWS with around lot of background tasks machine works fucking faster than atom-powered freaking LUBUNTU that has only firefox open.

tested i7-7820hk vs atom-x5-z8350.

opening new tab and navigating to google took on my i7 machine a under 1 second, and atom took almost 1.5 second. While having higher clock (turbo boost)

Guys, 7820hk dialled down to 1.2 ghz; 0.81v
Seriously.
I felt everything was lagging. but OS was much more responsive than atom machine...

What the fuck, Intel. It's pointless. I think I'm not only one who would gladly pay a little bit more for such difference.

i7 had clear disadvantages here, linux vs windows, clear background vs quite a few processes in background, and it had higher f***ng clock speed.

TL;DR
Intel atom processors use less power but waste a lot of time, while a little bit more power used on bigger cpu would complete task faster, thus atoms are just plain pointless garbage.

PS.
Tested in frustration at work, apparently they bought 3 craptops for presentations or some shit like that and they have mental problems becouse cheapest shit on market is more shitty than they anticipated ;-;
fucking seriously ;-;

I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.

When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.

So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).

Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.

He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.

He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.

Wish I had a senior I could learn off.

I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.

At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.

I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess

A year ago I was hired as a Jr dev to assist the senior dev because he was so busy. Within 2 months he was pushed out and I replaced him. I thought maybe he just got busy with other things or found a new job.

After working alone this past year, I was told last week that since I am so busy with things outside the job, they were hiring someone to help me finish the project I'm currently on.

(for context : I work as a contracted dev for a small dev company of 5 or so people. One for each language/os.)

I can't help but think that I'm probably being pushed out and replaced. I flat out asked that, but never got a reply. Now I'm 70% through a project and disgruntled with everything. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel really.

If they want to replace me for one reason or another that's fine, I just wish they weren't shady about it.

I should probably be working right now, but I'm going to take my kids to the pet store to clear my head. I'll enjoy a little time away from my computer.

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

Started about 4 years ago after losing my job in social work. Realized I liked computers more than talking to people. Picked up a beginning Java text book, and worked through it in a month. I moved over to web development to help a buddy of mine and kill time while unemployed.

Since then, I've run a small web dev business and am currently director of technology for a company with an international presence. I still code on the side an recently launched a new mobile app with a buddy of mine from grade school.

I do not miss social work even a little bit.

Warning: This is gonna come across as a little cringe/self-pitying, but whatever

Jesus Christ I'm so fucking lonely it literally hurts. I know I should be grateful I have a hobby in coding, also recently I got my first job as a developer (even if I'm overworked and paid shit all with poor job security), but I swear what will eventually kill me will be my own hand cos this empty feeling is unbearable at times.

Also, I'll try to ask this in the most politically correct way possible: how do you single guys in your 20s/30s cope with the lack of females in the industry? I absolutely do not mean this in a "making-unwarranted-advances" sort of way; I just mean that we're biologically wired to desire some form of interaction with the opposite sex (unless you're queer), and this happens naturally in most professions but obviously not engineering/software dev. It's especially difficult when you don't have a big social circle so your job basically becomes your life.

So... For those of you who can relate, what do you do? Do you make an effort to socialize outside work? Or maybe you're lucky enough to work somewhere with a diverse mix of people? Should I blame Zuckerberg for damaging my adolescent brain and turning me into a needy piece of crap?

!dev
My rough assumptions on wtf is going on with covid changing our lives - maybe leading to some business ideas.
In theory we are indoctrinated from little child that to do something we need to go to special place to do things in community.
Name it :
- school,
- university,
- job,
- college
As a result we build world around communities:
- public transportation
- sidewalks
- 4 seated cars
- parks
- sports
- shopping malls
Now due to pandemic we’re unable to do so and from some time we start indoctrinating people to do lots of things remotely and stay at home:
- remote job
...
- shopping
etc.
Depending on how strong is our character we react to this inception differently but future generations won’t have this indoctrination of commutation deep in their minds.

Interesting 🤔

My first assumption is that robotics market will start growing exponentially.

So my first dev job has ended up as fucking dat entry after one of the contractors got bored and left.

I’m an SQL Developer (at least that is my job title) and all I do is fuck around with exchange rates in spreadsheets.

The only “proper” development work they gave me hasn’t even been applied to the test server yet (should have been done over a month ago)

And the project they gave me to look into migrating from sourcesafe to GitLab has ground to a halt.

I’ve been here 4 months and I want to quit already, that must be a record (for me at least)

I was keen an full of energy, willing to do some work from home etc. But a little piece of me dies every time i open Excel

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)