An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:

I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.

Boss: You'll need to make the presentation an hour earlier than usual. There'll be 20 people attending..

Me: Sure. Will everyone show up?

Boss: Oh yes, they'll show up.

*Reschedules other work at home*
*Gets 4 hours of sleep to wake up earlier*
*Prepares material*

*Shows up for the meeting 5 minutes earlier*

*Crickets chirp*

There literally wasn't a single person there. Everyone shows up at the normal fucking time and good old boss was 2 fucking hours late.

Guess what the presentation was for? To solve the fucking issue of why stuff never gets done on time and nothing works right. I think I might have a tiny fucking idea why, at this point.

I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

A rare bug appeared. It was my duty to finish it.

SH = Manager

SH: So when do you think you can finish the task?
Me: I still have to analyze the problem. Give me a moment and I'll get back to you.
SH: Alright.

*An hour later*

SH: *Approaches my desk* Have you found the source of the problem?
Me: Not yet. Please give me some more time.
SH: Ok.

*An hour later*

SH: *the approach* You found it yet?
Me: Yes, I've found the the source of the problem, But... *explains the problem and thus concluding that it's a complicated bug*
SH: Can you finish it by tomorrow?
Me: I'll do the best I can but I am not entirely sure if I can finish it by tomorrow.
SH: OK great!

*The next day*

SH: *Le approach* Hey I have a colleague here that may be able to solve the problem, he has skills with XYZ. Ok, I will leave you two at it then. *the leave*
Helper: So can you tell me about the issue here?
Me: *explains the bug and the source of the problem*
Helper: Have you tried solution A?
Me: Yes sir, but it yields a different output... *explains what happened with solution A*
Helper: Well, that won't work. What about solution B?
Me: I've tried that, too. *Another lengthy explanation*
Helper: Welp, ok. I'll get back to you on that.

(...But he never came.)

*A few hours later*

SH: *A.P.P.R.O.A.C.H.* Hey I have this team lead from another department. I think he can help you out on this one. *L.E.A.V.E.*
Helper 2: What seems to be the problem?
Me: *Explains again with all the solutions I tried but failed*
Helper 2: Wow. That really seems to be a complicated problem.
~~
Me (In my head): -_-
~~
Helper 2: Listen, I need to get back to my team. I'll keep you posted if I happen to find a solution for your problem alright?
Me: Alright thanks.

*Towards the end of the day*

SH: *APPROACHHHH* Have you resolved the bug yet?
~~
Me (In my head): You made me spend half the FUCKING day explaining to these people who didn't even give a piece of FUCKING SHIT to contribute to the problem and you are asking me if I am done with this FUCKING BUG? FUCK YOU, YOU SON OF A -
~~
Me: No, it is not finished yet..
SH: You have to finish this because we don't have tomorrow.
~~
Me (In my head): SHDIFHWISGSIFGSISBAUDBEIQBDIWGFIEBWIDHWIQBDOSBCISBDOSHDIAGSUSVDIFBDKDJWIQKDBDIDGSUWVDIABDIXBSIDBDIDBWUWGUSVDUWVDJQBDUDVWISHDUWVFG
~~

I went home for the day.

Me: *Puts on headphones*

5 minutes later

College: Hey man you busy?
Me: *Takes off headphones*
Me: I am, but what's the issue?

Help him, Put headphones back on.

5 minutes later

Intern: I need help
Me: *Takes off headphones*
Me: Fine, I've got time

Help her, Put headphones back on.
Beginning to feel a little pissed.

5 minutes later

PM: Can i get your help quickly?
Me: Can i finish this quickly?
PM: It won't take long
Me: Fine.
Me: *Takes off headphones*

Help her out, put headphones back on.

An hour later

Team Leader: Are you done yet?
Me: *Takes off headphones*
Me: Almost
Team Leader: How can you not be done yet?
Me: Ask everyone around you?

He bitches for about 30 minutes.

I decide not to put my headphones on and just float in the river of how pissed i am.

4 Fucken hours goes by, nobody wants jack shit.
Me: *Puts headphones on*

5 minutes later

Team Leader: Hey man can you help me out?
Me: *Takes off headphones*
Me: Sure Fine.

FUCK!!! EVERY! FUCKEN TIME!!!

classmate: Hey, "friend" told me you do freelance website development. right? I need to create a new website and need your help.

Me: umm... OK... what's it about?

Classmate: It's for my dad's friend's business.

Me: OK. but I will charge the standard rate.

classmate: No... I will make it myself. I just want your help.

Me(Internally): ...not again...

Me: Do it yourself then.

Classmate: It will be quick. an hour or two max.

Me: *speechless*

Classmate: And one of my uncle who did IT told me that c++ is faster. can we use that instead of HTML?

Me: huh...?

classmate: you don't know shit.

... classmate walks away...

This guy somehow manages to get As in exams (mostly cheating. and our papers are shitty theory papers which you can mug up. so that helps) and in a year will have an IT degree.

First Helpdesk call of the day:

"My PC has been stuck on the same thing for an hour now. Its completely crashed."
"Does pressing ctrl alt delete do anything?"
"Where's that button?"
"Its 3 buttons - ctrl in the bottom left, alt beside the spacebar and delete over near the arrow keys. Press them all at the same time. Does it do anything?"
"No"
"Okay then, you need to manually power off the laptop then."
"How do i do that?"
"Hold down the power button"
"Where's that?"
"....on your laptop?! It's how you turn it on in the mornings?"
*60 seconds go by* "oh i see it. Ok i pressed it! Its Flashing blue now."
"Oh, no, just hold it down until everything goes black."
"The power button?"
"Yes."
"But that would turn off the entire PC?"
"Yes."
"Why do i have to do that?"

God help me if this is how my day is going to be 😢

A tcp packet walks in to a bar and says “I want a beer”, barman says “you want a beer?” and tcp packet says “yes, a beer” .

In high society, TCP is more welcome than UDP. At least it knows a proper handshake.

A bunch of TCP packets go into a bar, until it’s overcrowded. The next day, half as many go in.

A bunch of TCP packets walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hang on just a second, I need to close the window.”

When I try to send SYNs to chicks, I don’t get any ACKs. Just FINs and RSTs.

IP packet with TTL=1 arrives at bar. Bartender: “Sorry, can’t let you leave…and you don’t get any beer either…” 

The worst part about token ring jokes is that if someone starts telling one while you are telling yours, all joking stops.

The great thing about TCP jokes is that you always get them.

The problem with TCP jokes is that people keep retelling them slower until you get them.

I would tell some UDP jokes too but I never know if anyone gets them

The best thing about UDP jokes is that I don’t care if you get them or not.

I had a funny UDP joke to tell, but I lost it somewhere...

The sad thing about IPv6 jokes is that almost no one understands them and no one is using them yet.

I tried to come up with an IPv4 joke, but the good ones were all already exhausted.

A DHCP packet walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Bartender says: “here, but I’ll need that back in an hour!

DHCP jokes only work when there is only one person telling them

The worst part of SSH jokes is that, even when they're not funny, you suck it up and just pretend they were anyway.

The problem with token ring jokes is you need to wait your turn to laugh

I’d make a joke about UDP, but I don’t know if anyone’s actually listening…

So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.

Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.

Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.

Manager: No you have enough on your plate

3 hours later

Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long

Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.

I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.

I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)

After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.

Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.

So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.

But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

//Long rant

[Boss man]: Hey, we need you to build us a web app.

[Me]: Okay, what do you need it to do?

[Boss man]: We need staff to be able to login from anywhere, create new appointments, check room availability, display live times for the rooms, schedule future appointments, record all the data as stats and export the stats to (email address).

[Me]: Okay, sounds useful, anything else?

[Boss man]: we also need it to send all relevant data to a calendar where certain staff will be notified by email of events.

[Me]: Okay... I'll get right on starting this.

[Boss man]: So you can have it done by the end of the day? (4 hours from this time)

[Me]: *Internal screaming* *WHAT THE FUCK* Uhm, no, I don't think that is possible to complete in a four hour period by myself.

[Boss man]: Okay, well by tomorrow then, I'm leaving for the day though, have a good one.

[Me]....

//End long rant

First on the phone this afternoon and also a crapload of tickets.
*alright let's do some tickets*
*tringgggggg*
*fair enough, phone comes first*
*half an hour later call finishes*

*alright, tickets!*
*tringggg*
*alright phone first again*
*handles call, hangs up*

*Aaand tickets!*
*Tringgggggggg*
*oh come on I need to do tickets :/*
*handles call again and closes convo*

*Aaaand now: ticke... *TRINGGGG*
*oh come on!!*
*handles call once again*

*please don't interrupt me now, I need to do those ti.... *TRINGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*
*fucking hell!*
*handles call and tries to stay calm*

*now tickets!*
*types reply, presses repl... *TRINGGGG 😈*
*OH FOR FUCKS SAKE*
*handles call once a-FUCKING-gain*

*if the phone rings now...*
*goes to the reply button again and: clic.... *TRINGGGGGG - GO FUCK YOURSELF!*

FUUUUUUUCKING FUCKING FUCK.

FUCK. TODAY WAS ANNOYING AS HELL.

Last week, I notified a customer about that their webbserver spewed out several thousands of spam emails every hour, and they have to fix it ASAP.
(I also inform them for the 50th times for the last 2 years that they really need to update their websites so we can update from Debian 5).

The owner of the company forward this to their developers.

Today, I got the answer from them denying everything and blaming our "negligence" and they also dared to question all our technical expertise. shots fired

Spend some hours, finding shit on their websites, dug out logs, read documentation and old conversation and compiled that into a huge email that was designed to put them 10 meters under ground.

mfw I pressed send

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

So was first day at new job ... Boss takes me around meeting everyone. One employee stuck editing file by typing in new records data, calls boss for help.

Boss to me: "I like to get handsy with data from time to time. "
*me smiling, watch how he copies and paste the new records*
ME to boss:"why don't you just write the script to update all the records?"
Boss:"I don't trust the automation of input. "
Me:" what about human error?"
*crowd of other employees gather around awaiting answer*
Boss:"we include margin of errors in our disclaimer to the client... "
*He hears himself*
Boss:"... and we bill by the hour why would we work faster for less money?"

*me grinning, going to remember that line next time I need extension of deadline*

Me*murmurs*:" Master has presented dobby with a sock"
*Girl in next cubicle snickers clearly caught the reference "

Going to love it here.

FUCK OFF WINDOWS. I NEED TO WORK BECAUSE MY DEADLINE IS COMING BUT NO, THE FUCKING WINDOWS DECIDED TO FUCKING UPDATE. I DON'T WANT AN UPDATE RIGHT NOW, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SOFTWARE. I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR 1 HOUR TO GET TO 35%. 🖕🖕🖕🖕

Conversation with Microsoft support I had after 1 hour:

“You’ll need to wait for 15 minutes”
“By the way did you know you have 5GB free OneDrive storage with a Microsoft account?”
“I’m a customer of a 1TB onedrive plan”
“Well if you’re interested in using it, you’ve got 5GB for free” 🤦‍♂️😔

There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"

This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.

My first hack... Back at the days when phones had disks to dial a number. I was a kid of cause, I'm not that old. I used to like to call my grans. Once, when I supposed to go to sleep already, I've found out that there is phone socket in my room (the one connected to the copper wire, that is where the word "phone line" came from).
It took me about a half of an hour to detach handset from the toy phone and about two ours to reverse engineer dialing protocol (you just need to disconnect the line sequentially corresponding number if times).
And after that I've heard my granny's voice. I was literally overwhelmed that it worked.

I need more dev friends... currently drinking a beer alone. Not that I am alone but I am unable to engage in normal conversation at the moment. Just finished a 7 hour coding binge where I developed a solution which I am very proud of and which results in weeks of development time saved for the company which results in more time for proper refactorimg and Magic tournaments. I just want to sit down with a friend, show my code, ask for improvements and reason the chosen solution. And drink beer.

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)

I'm currently on my way to Japan on vacation.
This is how it went so far:
😁 - Arriving at airport early and excited
🤔 - Find out our flight is delayed. Oh well it might now be by a lot
😥 - Find out that it's 2 hours delayed and we will miss our next flight
😤 - Arrive at Frankfurt airport, and stands in line for 2 hours to the service desk
😡 - Arrive at service desk to get told that we have to go to a special service desk to get rebooked
🤬 - Get a ticket with our number in the queue. 125 people in front of us.
😴 - 4 and a half hour later, get get informed we will need to stay at a hotel for the night, and that we'll be flying at 6 pm the next day
😑 - Get to hotel and crashes (this is by 1 am now)
🤬 - Wakes up 6 hours later because we have a room right next to a construction site

Pro tips for Lufthansa and the imbeciles in their management and staff:
1. Inform people. You fucking knew the flight was this delayed, and you could actually have given people a choice at the beginning of their travel.
Now you had to put 100+ people in a hotel.

2. Bring food to people. Spending so much time in an airport leaves people very hungry. (Pssst, chocolate, candy and French potatoes are NOT food)

All in all, just fuck Lufthansa and their handling of this situation.

Fucking great start to the vacation. I'm already more exhausted than if I just went to work...

Whoever is responsible for the responsible for the refund process on airbnb can eat a bunch of dicks, watch me spill all of the fluids over his keyboard and then watch me break every single one of his/her fingers.
How the fuck do you dare to keep all of my money in some kind of internal wallet while I clearly need it to get a hotel after your starrated host left me hanging, autoaccepting but then telling me via phone that he using vacation till Friday... Half a goddamned fucking hour after I tried to call him. I want to report the shit out of this asshole, but no I can't because I cancelled my stay.
For the love of God and his creation is it this hard to punish assholes for ruining my new year and making me freeze my hand and ears of?

Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

First fucking night of being on call again.

Normally I set an alarm at 3 to check if any critical disruptions have been going on.

But why the fuck would I need that if I woke up every fucking hour at night anyways?

I'm fucking tired right now and agitated as hell.

tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining

So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))

This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"

Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.

Then shit starts to happen

I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)

So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.

Release day!

I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"

That is not true, not at all, in any way.

See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.

So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.

So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.

I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.

Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.

And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.

And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.

Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!

So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

this is the state of hiring tests:

1. can you take an english sentence, and without a tutorial, write a for loop?

2. okay now write a full parser. but not in the language we want to hire you in.

also we can afford to pay you in bananas, experience, and exposure.

p.s. we also need you to do this backend test because this is a backend job even though the ad is for front end and you specified an hour ago when the interview started that you only trained for front.

on the positive side, we have a ping pong table and a bean bag chair. and a two hour commute. Think of the benefits!

Guy I work with: Hey can I borrow you for a minute

Me: sure. What do you need?

Him: so this is a project me an the other dev worked on

Me thinking: Well I know he did it all and sent you the project so don't tell me you worked on it

Him: so we use it to do this and this and send an email to this new account I made because (2 minute explanation)

Me thinking: I don't care. Just tell me what your issue is! I already know what it is and does from what you told me the last time when you showed me. Which took an hour of my time.

Him: so he sent me this code which is called <Descriptive name> and in the method we have variables call <descriptive name> and it returns a <variable name>

Me thinking: You mother fucker! I don't give a shit what your method is named, what it the variable names are, and you don't need to read through every line of code to me! Just from the descriptive name you just said I know what it does! What the fuck is your issue!?

Him: we also have these other methods. This one is called <Descriptive name> which does...

Me: are you fucking seriously going to read me your code line by line and tell me what you named your variables AGAIN!?

Him: and we named this one <descriptive name>

Me: you mother fucker...

Him: and it calls this stored procedure. (Literally opens the stored procedure and shows me) and it is called...which has parameters called... And it is a select query that inserts

45 minutes later after he finishes explaining all 3 pages of his code and his 5 stored procedures that the other dev wrote...

Him: So anyway, back to this method. I need to know where to put this method. The other dev said to put it in this file, but where do you think I should put it in here? Should I place it after this last one or before it?

Me thinking: You fucking wasted my fucking time just to ask where to place your mother fucking method that the other dev sent to you in a project with only 3 files, all less than 500 lines of code with comments and regions that actually tell you what you should put there and 5 small stored procedures that were not even relevant to your issue! Why the fuck did you need to treat me as a rubber ducky which would fly away if you did have one because you didn't have an issue, you just didn't know where to put your fucking code! FUCK YOUR METHOD!

Me: Where ever you want

Him: Well I think it won't work if I placed it before this method.

I walked away after that. What a waste of time and an insult to my skills and really unchallenging. He's been coding for years and still can't understand anything code related. I'm tired if helping him. Every time he needs something he always has to read through and explain his shit just to ask me things like this. One time he asked me what to name his variable and another his project. More recently he asked why he couldn't get his project he found online to work. The error clearly stated he needed to use c# 7. His initial solution was to change his sql connection string. 😑

He should just go back to setting up computers and fixing printers. At least then he would never be in the office to bug me or the other dev with things like this.

Mondays - the day everyone hates and the day that I hated.

But I made changes to my routine on mondays. Instead of trying to maximize my time in the bed - I go up before 5 AM and drive to the office. Spend a hour in the gym (I really need it), eat breakfast and have a couple of hours for myself in the office.
I manage to get more things done during this time, because people are not bothering me :)

Well, happy monday to you!

I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress.

Wordpress can take a big shit on itself and crawl into a deep dark hole far away from all that is good.

Who even uses Wordpress? Bloggers? Come on, let’s be honest, they’re using more intuitive sites like weebly, wix, and square space. So WHAT is Wordpress for? I’ll tell you, it’s just to FUCKING TORTURE PEOPLE.

So, being the “techy guy” of the family, a relative contacts me asking for some help with their website because they need to install an SSL certificate but they don’t know how to. I tell them I’d gladly do it because, sure, they’re family and how long can it possibly take to install a certificate? I’ve done it before!

Well, I get to work and log into the sluggish Wordpress dashboard and try to use a plugin that would issue a LetsEncrypt certificate because they are free and just as good as any other SSL. But one plugin after the next I keep getting errors about how my hosting wouldn’t allow it.

So I contact GoDaddy (don’t get me fucking started) and ask them about the issue. The guy tells me it’s “policy” to only be able to use GoDaddy’s certificates. How much do they cost? Oh, how about $100 a year?! Fuck you.

I figured out the only way to escape this hell was to ask them to open an economy Linux hosting account with cPanel on GoDaddy (the site was formerly hosted on a “Managed Wordpress” account which is just bullshit for not wanting to give you any control over your own goddamn content). So now I have to deal with migrating the site.

GoDaddy representative tells me that it should only take 20 minutes for me to do this (I’ve already spent way too much time on this but whatever) so I go forward with the new account. I decide I should migrate the site by exporting a backup and manually placing everything on the new server. Doesn’t it end up taking an entire hour to back up a 200MB site because GoDaddy throttled the processing speed?!

So, it’s another hour later and I’ve installed all the databases and carried over all the files. At this point, I’m really at the end of my rope and can’t wait to install the certificate and be done with this fuckery.

I install the certificate and finally get ready to be on my way, but then I see it. A warning. A warning from my browser telling me the site is only partially secure. It turns out the certificate was properly installed but whoever initially made the site HARDCODED ALL THE LINKS to images, websites, and style sheets to be http instead of https.

I’m gonna explode.

I swear, I’m gonna fucking explode.

After a total of 5 hours of work, I finally get the site secure by using search and replace on every fucking file.

Wordpress can go suck a big one. Actually, Wordpress can go suck the largest fuckin one in existence and choke on it.

TL;DR I agree to install an SSL certificate but end up with much more work than I bargained.

The reason why I changed my username ( I'll just be honest here )

I was working on a website. I noticed that entries were submitting yesterday but today new entries were not showing up on database. It was like my database refused to insert new rows but there was no new error in log. I kept trying for almost half an hour, read all the answers on stackoverflow, read docs, tried different methods. Nothing worked. I was fucked up. Completely fucked up.

In frustration, I just stared my database for 10 mins without a single blink, and then I noticed this thing 'showing 25 out of 78 rows'
(-_-)
I clicked on 'show all'

AAAAAAND

I felt retarded.

Okay I can give an excuse that last time I saw a database was a year ago, but still.. how retarded you need to be to not see this FUCKIN 'SHOW ALL' when it is on the TOP of the FUCKIN TABLE!!

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

My first real "rant", okay...

So I decided today to hop back on the horse and open Android Studio for the first time in a couple months.

I decided I was going to make a random color generator. One of my favorite projects. Very excited.

Got all the layouts set up, and got a new color every tap with RGB and hex codes, too. Took more time to open Android Studio, really.

Excited with my speedy progress, I think "This'll be done in no time!". Text a friend and tell them what I'm up to. Shes very nice, wants the app. "As soon as I'm done". I expected that to be within the hour.

I want to be able to save the colors for future reference. Got the longClickListener set up just fine. Cute little toast pops up every time. Now I just need to save the color to a file.

Easy, just a semicolon-deliminated text file in my app's cache folder.

Three hours later, and my file still won't write any data. Friend has gone to sleep. Homework has gone undone. My hatred for Android is reborn.

Stay tuned, the adventure continues tomorrow...

I hate this fucking front-end stuff so hard..

How DA FUCK is it possible that I set up the whole backend including DB connection, base controllers, models, base validation and stuff in an hour but don't get this fucking fucking retarded JS framework piece of shit to display a test string after ONE FUCKING HOUR!!!

Why do we need this shit anyway? Why does everything have to be shiny with some fucking animations???

It's about the information, isn't it? Then WHY DOES IT HAVE TO LOOK PRETTY???

I gonna travel back in fucking time to the early 80's!

Stupid front-end shit..

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

So, I applied for a job lately and the first interview via Zoom went pretty good. Then I got an invitation for a second interview at the company.

I got there, was guided into a conference room and the two head of departments along with an HR woman joined. After a bit if chit-chat HR rep said I should tell them in the next couple of days if I'm still interested. HR left, the other two gave me a tour of the complex, lasting about an hour.

then we got back to the conference room, waited for HR rep and when she arrived she told me something along the lines of "Yeah, we got an impression of you now and you don't need to contact us anymore if your are interested...."

me to myself: "wait what? that sucks...."

HR: "We are impressed enough of you that we want to hire you immediately. Here is the contract!"

me (completely speechless): "oh... OH... THANKS, but... OHHHH" (having a stupid perplexed grin on my face)

I mean... I got the job and pay is good, but PLEASE don't trick me like that!!! I nearly got a heart attack!!!

Coding Guide:
wanna start coding?
it's very simple, just follow this steps!

1. prepare a notebook and pen.

2. choose a programming language you would like to learn.

3. find a nice site for study it, SoloLearn is a very good site, you can ask me in the comments for more.

4. start copying every code block and summary to the notebook.

5. don't worry about not understanding it yet.

6. finish copying at last 5 subjects.

7. start the course again, and follow the notebook.

8. do it few times, your mind will remember it.

now the hard part!
good job, you remember the basic, but don't know how to use it? well 1 more guide for it.

1. prepare a notebook and pen.

2. now, it's your time to teaching it!

3. try to explain the code in your words or language.

4. after few times your mind will remember all the necessary things about coding.

5. start to make little apps or even games.

enjoy =D
of course you need to coding every day for 1 hour+-

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

One time I had this conversation with my then PM:

PM: …so in total we need like 3 extra pages; the leaders profile, event showcase and lastly a contact page.

Me: Sure, already on it.

PM: Make it simple and quick, I told the client the updates would be live in an hour.

Me: Okay.

*{5 microseconds later}*

PM: Also the page headers need to be different from the other pages.

Me: Yes, you told me that earlier.

PM: Okay, just needed to re-emphasis.

*{sad disturbing minutes later}*

PM: I don’t know if deploying on azure would be better than having the website on AWS. The pages seems slow.

Me: Yep.

PM: Or maybe we separate the asset files from the main site using a CDN.

Me: You right.

PM: The other projects on AWS seems to perform better in terms of SEO. Don’t you think?

Me: I think.

*{this dude literally just lent me a jacket and won’t allow me put it on}*

PM: So after we are done with this update we need to inform the client about the benefits of switching servers to AWS. I believe they will agree or won’t they because the event is close by?

Me: {{pointed both hands at my PC hoping they’ll get the message}}

PM: Oh you done?

Me:

Was working on a Django thing (server-side, so no dynamicness as far as I'm aware?) under a contractor at my company.

Needed a popup to display results of a subprocess, so I asked "We're going to need to AJAX it, right?" and give brief justification. Guy says no - pretty much "Django 10/10 supports this, let me Google". Proceeds to send me a link to a python package that enables using popups as a way of inputting values for form fields. I see as much on the couple of images for the package demo/introduction, so I'm kind of just like "It doesn't look like it's what we need though..." But the guy says to trust him, and implement it.

A day later, after scrutinizing the demo code, and trying to figure out how to implement the package, I go back to him and say "I really really really don't think this is going to work" and give the same justification from the day before. He opens the demo code himself and follows the long trail of confusing methods and stuff.

After an hour of my sitting there watching him read the code and disappearing for 10 minute periods a few times, he comes to the conclusion "Okay you need to understand the code to implement it. But go ahead and use AJAX"

This is abridged and a few other super annoying things have been cut out, but I TRUSTED HIM.

I. TRUSTED. HIM.

This is bullshit.

We've got a project where we need to build a robot that can:
A. Follow a line.
B. Avoid obstacles
C. Go through a maze.

This, in itself, is fine. I can manage.

The problem is, the teacher that is supposed to support the course, is never where he's supposed to be.
Ie: he was supposed to be in the classroom to answer questions and give feedback yesterday from 09:00 to 13:00. The fucker didn't fuckin show up.

OK, so today, he's supposed to be here too, I've been sat in his classroom without him waiting for over an hour...

Also, no way I can do the maze part without knowing what defines a fucking blocked path, is it going to be a physical object or is the line going to be a different cor if you're not allowed to pass there?

I'm getting tired of this bs.

Any fellow devs located in or near Western Massachusetts??? I have been flying solo the last several months building, designing, and writing literally EVERYTHING for a massive start up company, and after about 4 months its getting close to launch. Nothing is on fire or anything like that, I just need someone to join my team because I've been pulling 80+ hour weeks since October building 3 cross platform apps along with a complex backend, a desktop application, the website, and a shit ton more. I'm killing it for sure, and have us about 2 months ahead of schedule- bit if I sleep for even an hour I lose a week! I don't even care if it's someone just starting off, I'll train the shit out of them on the technology needed to keep those deadlines at bay!!!!

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

Teacher: "Will this SQL statement work LavaTheif?"

Me: "you need to put a 'WHERE id.."

T: "but will it work like this?"

Me: "well it wont do what you're trying to do, so it wont work properly"

T: "so will it work?"

Me: "no."

T: "wrong. It will work, but it will change everything in the database, which we dont want"

Thats what I was saying??

Also, he spent 50 mins out of our hour lesson explaining how to use SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. I just wanted to get on with the work tbh.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

Worst meeting:
Boss: *calls everyone* URGENT MEETING. If you're on your lunch break, then stop and join the video call. Is it a weird time in your timezone? Wake up. But COME

Omg what happened? Is the server down? Are we getting a huge client? What is so urgent that it needs all of our attention right now?

Boss: I'm afraid that I won't be able to stay long in this meeting.

... then WHY the f did you call this meeting?

Boss: that's why we'll have a meeting next at *such hour*. In the meantime, talk to your respective departments about what you've been doing and what you need from each other. See you!

No comment

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

A tip to tech folks from my personal xp.

If you fuck up and make an impacting mistake in your company, like taking PROD down, noone is going to fire you on spot. Assign some more mandatory trainings - maybe. So you'd be more careful next time.

See, it's not worth getting rid of someone who made a mistake. You should be seated down and insisted to fix it. If you don't - then they might consider firing it. If you do fix it [with help or alone] - you become a more valuable asset to the company as you prove you are responsible for your actions and you take it seriously. You show that you can clean up your own shit and you don't need a babysiter next to you.

If you simply make a mistake and they replace you with someone else, that someone else is likely to be unaware of your mistakes and is doomed to repeat them. It's just bad for business.

Ofc if you making mistakes becomes a tendency rather than an exception, it's also a red flag for the business.

Don't get too laxed! And always answer for your shit. Never hide a fuckup - always alarm about it asap so that corrective actions could be taken by respective organs of the company while you are fixing it.
Come up with an action plan, announce it. Estimate resources you need [like help from others] - announce that too. Update concerned parties every half an hour or so about the status. If you find you need anything else while fixing it or you come across some blockers/delays/change of impact - always announce asap. Do avoid false alarms and disinformation.

// inspired by someone's rant today

I'm working in a blockchain company for $180 as a junior programmer and there is a mid-senior guy who get ~8 times more than me. So we got a project to make a backend API with its tests. When I was partly completed my part of the project I asked that "mid-senior" to share his code with me. Nothing was done, and he asked me to push my changes to git so he could start to do something (view at my code and start copying). BUT. He couldn't even pull from git. He couldn't use that fucking Visual studio's team explorer and even the solution explorer. Ok, he was working with VS for the first time, but I did too. I cloned the repo gave him the environment to start "working" and get back to my work. After that nothing changed, he was writing each one-lined if block for half hour and the code was very dirty. Finally I've got his laptop and started to writing his part by teaching him all the programming. You may say I'm mad. I really do, I think that I did all project. This is sad... How can people get this much by being this far from the programming? We need really high quality programmers.

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.

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

I'm the guy who posted Surface Pro photos recently, just in case you see some similarities.

=========

This, is the Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse.
It is beautiful. Magnificient. Minimalistic. Fast. Accurate.

I first thought it would be my future mouse.
I thought I would use it for years.

I used for an hour, and literally threw it away.

I thought it would be comfortable, since i used cheap logitech mouse which of those were all too high in height.

But, this mouse, is so low in height. It literally puts your hand in the floor.

You, the devRant members, pointed out at my previous rant that it looks, and would be uncomfortable, and I literally said shut up!

Well, sorry about that, I regret my words.

It is piece of beautiful trash.

The click sound is very quiet, the scrolling is very good, but the height of the mouse....

If I keep using this mouse, I would probably get a carpel-tunnel disease(is this correct?).

I guess I should only use this mouse when I need to use it quickly outside, since portability is number one among all mouse in the world.

Next coming, some more Surface pro coding sessions, and Surface pen.

Anything interested about the surface pro? Leave in the comments below!

When I started university, I was getting out of some really awful situations-- emotionally abusive parents, a boyfriend who was blackmailing me, a truly bizarre rape, etc. My life had been a little rough, and I was dealing with some PTSD.

My first computer science course was great. The professor was clear, patient, everything a sensitive student needed. I was able to concentrate on the curriculum without any problems.

The second 'intermediate' course, though? Not so much. The professor shouted his lectures during the entire class period in a relatively small classroom. Occasionally, he would clasp his hands and move around pretty unpredictably (like jumping out at the class), which spooked me a few times. He also always seemed like he was just hovering on the edge of madness, like he was just barely keeping it together, but he never broke.

I sat in the front row and was absolutely terrified during his lectures because it seemed like he was mad at me. I was half expecting him to start attacking me at any moment. Because, you know, PTSD.

I was also only getting a comp sci minor, so the other students looked at me like I wasn't supposed to be there, which also made me feel pretty uncomfortable, but such is life.

After most classes with him, I would need to take about an hour or two afterwards to calm down, stop shaking, and recompose myself. I looked forward to test days because he wouldn't yell. It was rough.

Later on, I learned that he used to be a gym teacher, which explains the jumping and yelling. Also, his wife, daughter, and dog all died within six months of each other the year prior, which might explain why he always seemed so on edge.

N: Me
M: Mother

M: Can you help me? I can't update pages.

N: Sure *Checks problem* it looks like you installed it with the old apple account, you just need to reinstall it using your new one.

M: What about all my pages documents on icloud?

N: *Compares documents on mac to her other Apple devices that never had the old account* See? The documents would have to be on the new account.

M: Are you sure? I don't want to lose any documents.

N: I know, don't worry their on your new iCloud.

M: *Calls apple support*

N: *Talks to apple support who after an hour of chatting to her through me because I translate customer support to mother confirms what I was telling her*

N: Reinstalls pages and everything is fine.

I was originally going to make a post talking a bit about how people love to second guess anything I say but thought this story provides a decent example. When it's something of a personal nature or someone is asking for my opinion in genral then it's perfectly reasonable to ask multiple people. It doesn't bother me when someone asks for my help, it bugs the shit out of me when someone asks for my help and then doubts everything I say in this case even after providing some evidence to back up my claim and wasting a solid hour. If you ask for my help your trusting that I have the knowledge necessary to assist, if I don't know for certain I'll try googling the problem but even in that case calling support doesn't bother me because I clearly don't know how to help.

P.S. This was my first story, how did I do?

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.

No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.

I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.

But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.

i'm feeling so sick right now.

PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!

at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.

i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.

it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.

I really need to learn to think through how many stitches I’m putting into the first row of a project.

- Takes over an hour to do one row
- Already used more than 2k yards on it and it’s not even short blanket length yet (though width is ridiculous)

Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:

"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.

"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.

A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.

When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.

When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.

People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...

When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.

rant.GetType() == typeof(long)

I have voiced my unhappiness to the powers that be regarding having to sit in traffic for over an hour to get to work and an hour to get back home, in the hopes that some sort of resolution and compromise can be reached.

The response basically was, "We've never had anyone work from home before and this is very new to us, so we wouldn't know where to start and how to manage this."

Firstly, from what I've heard along the grapevine, someone has worked from home before. In fact, it was a developer... wouldn't you fucking know!

Secondly, you're the manager... FUCKING MANAGE! Yes this is perhaps "new" territory for the company, but it's certainly nothing new to the world. Or maybe I'm wrong?

How's about, rather than fucking "ummm-ing" and "ahhh-ing" about the working from home being a good idea or not, perhaps try saying, "You know what, let's try something for the next 3 months and see how it goes. We sit down and hash out when and how we are going to communicate regarding the work that needs to be done, and when you will need to come in for meetings and the like." If it doesn't work after 2 weeks, oh well... we tried. And if we're still going strong after month 4, I think we have a winner!

Perhaps it's a generational thing, seeing as management are Baby Boomers and I'm a Millennial? Then again, I could be wrong.

The point is that I see a potential solution to my problem that may actually work and benefit both parties, but they're either to fucking set in their old ass ways and stubborn to allow this. Or perhaps it's a thing of "if we do this for you, we have to do it for everyone", which they don't want to do.

But more importantly, they don't seem to get the whole notion of "a happy employee is a productive employee".

The thing with meetings is that most don't know what a (formal) meeting is.

A meeting has a specific time frame, a defined agenda with specific topics and a moderator or an agreement on a common netiquette.

That's a meeting.

A meeting is not a place to put your willy on the desk and proof to everyone that your cock is thx to operation a long schlong who won't get hard, nor that you don't know how to shave, even less to measure the size of your genitals.

It's neither the time to eat and slurp like a fucking hobgoblin, nor to drink like an alcoholic who hasn't had a drop of alcohol in the last hour.

Parents, I don't care what your satanic offspring achieved today, nor how cute they are, even less what booboo they have.

Crybabies, keep your whining for after meeting time, maybe even stop crying and just have a nice talk outside of allocated time frames to discuss whom hurt whom the most and who has the most sand in his clit.

Get to the fucking point.

If I wanted to read a trilogy to understand what you contribute, I'd have written it on the agenda.

If it's not on the agenda, cram it in your butt cheeks for the next time you need to shit.

If you can't converse with people at all, the meeting is allocated at least 24 hours before it happens.

Prepare yourself for goddamn sake.

You could even read out a predefined text if you want, noone cares.

*Swiches on the PC and opens VS*
Probably I should get some coffee.
*1 hour later, with 0 LOC written*
I should probably code now. Umm, I need music, else I might not focus on the code.
*another hour passes by headbanging to led zeppelin and still on 0 LOC progress*
You know what, this wont work. I should eat and will code with a fresh mind..
*has lunch*
I'll code now.. Maybe I should check up on devrant...
*time goes by with 0 LOC at the end of the day.*
I'll do it tomorrow.
*Next Day, repeats what I did on the earlier day*

Tl;dr: I spent more than 2 hours and $429 on a book thats as thin as a pancake.

I needed to go to my campus to pick up my textbook from the school store for my Software Management class. The bookstore is in the building next to the construction site. I had to park on the opposite side of the campus and walk the 2.3 miles to the store, stand in line for 20 minutes to have them tell me that i need a printed out class schedule. I had to walk all the way back to the building next to where i parked to print out my schedule in the library. I then walked all the way back to the bookstore, and the line has maybe tripled in size. I stand in line nearly an hour to have them tell me that they no longer had rentals available for my book, even though i reserved one (they thought it was cool to just rent it to someone else apparently). So instead of paying $45 on a rental, i payed $429 for a brand new textbook that looks like a magazine. Its stupid thin, i could probably read and study it all in less than a week. Thinking of this, i ask the cashier about return policy. She says i can't return it, but i can sell it back to them within 10 days of purchase for about half the price i paid for it. I walk the 2.3 miles back to my car, decide to sell the book on Amazon or something after the semester, and once again leave my campus angry. I cannot wait to be done with this place.

TL;DR: If you make a contest where people get to vote online fucking make it right!

And here's the story: I play in a local coverband to make some cash on the side and because I love making music. We entered a contest hosted by a local radio-station. The first round was determined by judges and now 5 bands remain and of those 5 only 3 get to be voted into the final round. In the final round every bands wins something: 3rd place 250€, 2nd place 750€ and first place 5000€.
Now that stupid dipshit of a web-designer of that radio-station made a website where you can vote and it only fucking sets a cookie. You can delete it and vote again. You don't need no E-Mail and nothing. It doesn't even block multiple votes from one IP. It doesn't do shit.
Even my bandmates (who don't work in IT) where smart enough to figure out that you can just delete the cookies...
I think that now every band except for one is cheating. (we have over 5000 votes and combined all bands have like 4000 FB-Likes and sometimes and Band gets like 400 more votes in an hour) This is such a fucking messup and I don't know what to do. Maybe they'll look into stats but if they're so stupid to make a contest like this in the first place, maybe they won't. And even if they look into the stats it wouldn't be fair to kick out a band with much votes because how the fuck would they know if the band themselves cheated or if it was a fan of the band or even an enemy of the band just to get them kicked out.
I'm afraid of talking to the radio-station as a part of one band because maybe the web-designer there just gets frustrated and bans us from the contest entirely.
This is just fucking frustrating.

Client project manager calls me up one day

PM: hey can you make some precise estimates on some items for a project you’re not working on? It should be easy. It’s very similar to the project you ARE working on and it’s only a handful of user stories, mostly front end stuff. We´ll need this to be done by tomorrow night.

Me: um, I guess if it’s just a few simple items. ok

PM: great! I’ll let you know when you get access to the backlog.

Me: sounds good

Link to project is sent to me. Backlog contains over 20 user stories, most of which are backend related. And it doesn’t have much to do with my current project.

I contact PM: this isn’t exactly what you announced when I had you on the phone. If you want precise estimates with a minimum of design, this could take up to a week. I could however proceed to some ballpark estimates (poker planning) for starters if you need this quickly for your roadmap.

PM: no I need PRECISE estimates down to the hour for each item.

Me: ok then, it’ll take up to a week.

PM: 🤬🤬🤬. You told me it could be done in a day. I’m coming to realize your word can’t really be trusted.

Me: 🤦🏻‍♂️

Don’t work from exact place you eat everyday or sleep or entertain.

If you can’t focus set timer from 15 minutes to 1 hour and do something else that is not engaging your brain the same way your work does.

Go for a walk.
Take a break from electronic devices.
Take a shower.
Take a nap.
Take a dump.
Make a list of things todo before you eat.
Make groceries.
Clean your house a little.
Make a laundry.

Any manual labor helps if you need brain muscles for thinking.

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

An hour before my Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science final...

Have reviewed all the material available but past exams are useless because new_prof == new_format.

This is not even a rant, I'm just scared because to get into the major I need an average between this and programming of 82. I fucked up in the second midterm and got a 50/100. Everything was so perfect (at least above 80) and now I need more than 70 in this final. I'm feel I can get more than 70 but I had the same feeling during the midterm I fucked up.

When you realize that you've been been flipping between two tabs in your browser for the better part of an hour, and they have nothing to do with your project, you need the day to end.

"As a leader, you should lead by example and work every day, every hour, give 150% for the dream of the company! We are detecting that people aren't giving everything to us, so you should be harder on everyone else to ensure we can deliver!
Also, your 1:1 meetings with the team should be on the Sundays to avoid spending company time on feedbacks. There is no time to feedback if you need to deliver things!"

Fuck right off with that. Will beatings continue until morale improves? Maybe seniority will arise from the gashes of the lashes on the interns.

I have this project I've inherited, yea I seem to do that a lot, but this damn thing, has to run in php5.4, has deprecated functions for php7 everywhere and a lot of them and there's no classes anywhere beyond some libraries.

Everything is procedural with random scripts being injected left right and center.

I kid you not,

$thisThing = true;
If(x==y)
require "path/to/some/script.php";
else
require "path/to/a/slightly/different/script.php";

If($thisThing === false){
// well it was modified in that small block about 10 different times
}

Those injected scripts then accept data from the parent scope so, looking at file X, you need to have open file A,B, E, and M to understand where variables have been initialised and what there current state could potentially be.

Basically this thing was bandaid after bandaid for feature requests with 0 refactoring.

Here I am trying to implement some basic functionality (should only take an hour or so + a bit of manual testing) but no, I'm literally at the point of hitting the delete button on the entire project and starting again.

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

Best code performance incr. I made?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

Expat issues of the month is that the HR is taking its sweet time, while I'm trying to find a house and probably need to provide employment certificate or some shit.
So basically, I'll arrive in a month and either be homeless, crash on a friend's at least an hour and half away by PT, or pay for hotel or airbnb.

... Heaven and hell, could you please work together on solving this, particularly the house issue? Because neither am I made of money nor my nerves can currently take this, specially with this upcoming surgery thing. 🙏

My biggest distraction: Working at home. I have a student job at my university and work at home. Just visit my boss every other week to show him the results.
So I always thought it's amazing to work at home. No need to travel to the work space, I can arrange my time as I like, noone's constantly watching what I'm doing.
Sounds great, right? Yeah it is, but is it productive? Lol no.

I'm getting distracted by everything. New mail about some kickstarter stuff, one hour wasted. "Can you help me with that computer problem?" Yeah sure. "Wanna play some League of Legends with us?" Sure, but just one round, I need to work. Ten rounds later I wrote like three lines of code.

I could ignore all that stuff, but I'm at home and can do whatever I want, right?
Results in me working through all night, because then there's noone to distract me.

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

In my wallowing experience as a freelancer I've noticed that almost all C/C++ clients are perfectionist. You just can't please them by getting the job done quickly.

I got a libcurl job from one the other day to scrape data from a target website and within an hour it was ready. I notified the client and he was both amazed and confused assuming it would take the whole week.
C++Client: The code works but you need to take your time.
Me: Sorry?
C++Client: Yes, it works but you used "string" instead of "wstring"
Me: 😊 Oh okay... *converts strings to wstring*
C++Client: And also variable names should be more descriptive.
Me: 😏 *int foobar => int very_long_descriptive_foobar_01*
C++Client: And also use "shorts" for page nums it'll save some bytes
Me: 😕 *int => short...*
C++Client: And also use forloops instead of whileloops
Me: ☹️ *whileloops => forloops*
C++Client: And also use -- instead of ++ in loops
Me: 😤 *for(... i++) => for(... i--)*
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
===> Seven "and also" days later <===
Me: *completed 10 Java projects behind the scene*
C++Client: And also use pthread instead of thread
Me: 😧 It's day 7 already!
C++Client: Oh I see, great job. You can compile and send me the archived source.
Me: 🤩
C++Client: And also...
Me: 🏃💨

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

Junior engineer asking managers on Slack about prioritisation..

Junior eng: Hey managers, I have these tasks A & B lined up and some other type of work... Is it ok if I finish A by Weds and B by the end of week or should it be done sooner? Also, is the order fine or should I prio B first?

*silence for hours*

Random dev feeling bad for junior getting no response chips in: Hey, you are doing great, that order makes sense to me and let me know if you need any guidance or have questions!

Junior dev: Thaanks and will do!

*another hour goes by*

Manager: Hi team. I have asked other engineer X to do task B tomorrow.

what the fuck. at least answer the fucking question and say it needs to be done sooner. felt bad for poor junior here. :/

You do know that "why do I need you if I can copy-paste code from SO?" joke floating around, right? Today I had a real-life situation perfectly illustrating it.

So I bought a set of parking sensors. Cheap ones, from AliExpress. Prolly the cheapest ones I could find. Installed them w/ engine turned off. All seemed fine. Cleaned it all up, got ready to go, started the engine and beeeep beeep beeepeeeeep beepp ..... beeeeeeeeep.

fuck.

Tried unplugging/replugging them one-by-one to find the faulty one. Nada. Apparently they all were false-alarming. They must all be bad, bcz they seem to work well w/ engine turned off (ignition on) and only false-alarm when engine is on.

Allright, I'll get a new set next weekend, a more expensive one and replace them again.

There goes my €20 and another week basically w/o parking sensors (car length is >5 meters, so sensors do help a lot).

Today I spend a few hours removing my rear bumper again, replacint all the sensors, wiring, etc. Tests show promising results - all sensors seem OK even w/ engine on! Close it all up, start a car again and.... beeep bep bep beeep beeee..eeeeppp.

MOTHER FUCK!

Another 30min-hour goes by while looking for a possible culprit. And I found it. The fix could did not take longer than 5 seconds. Apparently a wire feedint the sensors' controller was too close to sensors' wires. All I had to do is to push that wire a lil further from the controller with my index finger.

I could have saved €30, a week of time, half a day of work if I only knew what wire to [literally] poke.

shit...

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

A plain computer illiterate guy rings tech support to report that his computer is faulty.

Tech: What's the problem?

User: There is smoke coming out of the power supply.

Tech: (keeps quiet for the moment)

Tech: You'll need a new power supply.

User: No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files.

Tech: Sir, the power supply is faulty. You'll need to replace it.

User: No way! Someone told me that I just needed to change the startup and it will fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the command.

Tech support: 10 minutes later, the User is still adamant that he is right. The tech is frustrated and fed up.

Tech support: (hush hush)

Tech: Sorry, Sir. We don't normally tell our customers this, but there is an undocumented DOS command that will fix the problem.

User: I knew it!

Tech: Just add the line LOAD NOSMOKE <nosmoke> at the end of the CONFIG.SYS. Let me know how it goes.

10 minutes later.

User: It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking.

Tech: Well, what version of DOS are you using?

User: MS-DOS 6.22.

Tech: That's your problem there. That version of DOS didn't come with NOSMOKE. Contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch that will give you the file. Let me know how it goes.

1 hour later.

User: I need a new power supply.

Tech: How did you come to that conclusion?

Tech: (hush hush)

User: Well, I rang Microsoft and told him about what you said, and he started asking questions about the make of the power supply.

Tech: Then what did he say?

User: He told me that my power supply isn't compatible with NOSMOKE.

Spent all morning trying to write a JSON parser in Python just to get a bit of practice (technical interview next week).

After an hour or more... Didn't get far and finally gave up...

Then I remember Python has a built-in json module... (yea no need to write in myself).

Since libraries are just py files, I open the source code... And wow!

All the public methods are nicely documented with informative comments and descriptions.

But then I look at the method calls and .... I don't understand what it's doing....

.............................. ☹️🙁😖😢😭😧😰😱

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

"Architect"(A) - Hey, StrucN, we have a bit of a problem on the module you are working on (which the previous "developers" seem to have given it roofies)

Me: Okay, what seems to be the problem?

A: There is a need to add some functionality to it, we need you to ...

Me: I see, well it can be done but it wouldn't be so simple - the module is a mess and the change would need to be well tested

A: I fear the clients deadline is for tomorrow

Me: Well he'll have to wait, rushing it is the worst possible option

A: I'll talk to him about it, thanks

After around half an hour A rushes back

A: Hey I passed a ticket to you about the additions we spoke about, it should be ready for tomorrow

Me: It won't be ready, it's too complex to complete is in such a shirt notice (considering it's already the end of the day and all the changes need to be pushed tommorow to prod)

A: I know *programmer from useless team B* did something similar so as it is close to what we need you should copy it.

My inner voice: FUCK YOU YOU USELESS FUCKING CUNT! THERE SHOULDN'T BE ANY COPY PASTE SHIT FROM SOME UNRELATED MODULE! YOU SHIT STAINED MEAT BAG ALREADY DID SUCH A SIN IN THE PAST AND I HAD TO FIX ALL OF IT. THE MODULE SHOULDN'T SUFFER ANY MORE AS IT IS ALREADY A GODDAMN RAPE VICTIM!

WHERE DID PROPER PROFESSIONALISM WENT? WHY IS IT THE INDUSTRY FILLED WITH STUPID WANNA BE "ARCHITECTS" WHILE OTHER MORE COMPETENT FOLK SHOULD ALWAYS BE IGNORED BECAUSE IT'S ALWAYS SHOULD BE READY FOR TOMMOROW?!

For fucks sake I miss my old Architect, he could really understand the essence of program development

I watched nvidia gtc keynote today. Most of stuff was about how amazing their gpu is and how much processing power we need, oh really?

Self driving cars are most idiotic way to implement rail way system on top of complicated road traffic system from last century.

The real problem is and always was problem of last mile. We don’t do shit about it, just trying to reinvent same stuff by complicating things.

I started wondering if it would be cheaper to just put small electric golf cars on railroads next to highway with automatic parkings next to cities. We could then slowly replace highways with railroads and even stack rails on top of each other.

You just drive to parking with golf cart and it hops you to railroad with auto chargers. Traffic is predictable so you know exact hour when you hop out and can drive last mile to target destination. So fucking simple yet we need fucking computer and tons of scientists to solve problems we created by bringing idiotic movies ideas to life.

Well most of stuff we try to automate is done so shitty way that it’s in fact complicate.

Fortunately it’s not my problem.

My current situation:

Manager: How is Project A coming? Project A is top priority. I would like to see a PR today with fixes to the current tickets.

Me: Project A is priority! Sure!

*after 2hours*

Manager: How is project B coming along? I did not see any PR’s coming in?

Me: I am working on project A as it is priority.

*after 1 hour*

Manager: How is project C coming? There is one ticket pending. We need a fix for it today asap!

Me: Starts project C as project A would take more time. Starts Work on project C.

*after 1 hour*

Boss: How is project A coming? Where is the PR?

Me: As you said you need a fix for project C today, i started working on project C as it has only 1 ticket to be fixed.

Boss: I told you project A is priority, why are you working on project C?

Me: *doesn’t reply*

*after 1 hour*

Boss: There is a ticket pending in project D. Did you make a fix for it?

*This is my usual day at work.

*I am the only developer in my current company. It’s not a software development company.

*Note: I do complete all the work and create PR’s for all “pending” work at the end of the day for all projects and leave for home at around 10pm :)

What do you think? Lol

Tried getting enough sleep for the Monday and failed miserably.
First, I made my kids washed, like usual, around 6pm. Then tried to put them to sleep. The younger one went to sleep, the older refused. Wanted to play, run, jump, sing and scream. After an half an hour his screaming woke up younger. Now I had two kids to put to sleep back again.
The younger is one year old and requires more attention, otherwise cries.
After serious fight the older was forced to sleep. He tried to jump over me, bite me, kick, hit, eat chocolate, wanted to pee, then jump, run and fight again. I ended up lying him forcibly in the bed, holding his hand by kind of a block, so that he couldn't move to much. Took 15 minutes, but he felt asleep. It was 22. Joys of having 3yo kid.
After more 30 minutes and a bottle of milk the 1yo was sleeping.
At 2am the older woke and cried. I woke, tried to make him calm, he pushed me away and went back to sleep. Now it's 3:40, my sleeping pill wore off, and I won't take another one, because I need to get up at six.

This is how you get a good night's sleep before having a busy week.

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

So im a programming student at university, tasked with a small group project to make a simple 3d platformer in ue4.
End up with 3 games design students where I'm doing all of the technical stuff while they do sound, graphics and design.
So I make a simpe all purpose ai that can do everything they need and hand it over. The next day I get a call saying it doesn't work. Takes me an hour to realise they don't have a navmesh. Now, that wasn't too unreasonable mistake as they didn't know what one was but a few hours later they call me again saying it doesn't deal any damage.

I'm going through the blueprints and can't find out what isn't working until an idea pops into my head.

Me "Click the damage variable for me"
Them "What's a variable?"
Me "That thing on the bottom left that says damage. Then the world value should pop up on the right with a number, tell me that number."
Them "0"

So apparently they fucked with the variable and set damage dealt to 0. Dunno why, they didn't even know what it was nor what it did.

This is my life at the moment. I hope a real job ain't this bad :(

To all the Java Teams that died during the fucking Mobile Civil War, We salute you!

1. Millionaire 2011
2. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
3. Dragon Ball Z Saiyan Fighters
4. Moto Girls
5. 24 Special Ops
6. Thor: The Dark World
7. Kung Fu Panda
8. Worms 2011: Armageddon
9. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
10. Resident Evil - The Missions
11. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
12. Spider-Man 3
13. Need for Speed - Undercover 3D
14. Contra 4
15. Rambo on Fire
16. Fast and Furious 6 
17. Counter Strike 3D
18. Men in Black 3
19. X–Men Origins: Wolverine
20. WWE Legends of Wrestlemania 3D
21. 3D Fight Night: Round 4
22. 3D Ultimate Rally Championships
23. Assassin's Creed
24. Zuma
24. Die Hard 4
25. 3D WWE Smackdown Vs RAW 2009
26. Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones
27. 3D Fight Night: Round 3
28. Super Mario Bros
29. Bruce Lee - Iron Fist 3D
30. Naruto Adventure: A New Apprentice
31. FIFA 2011
32. James Cameron's Avatar
33. Racing 2: The Real Car Experience
34. King Kong
35. Gangstar City
36. Iron Man 3
37. XIII 2: Covert Identity
38. 4x4 Extreme Rally 3D
39. Real Football Manager 2013
40. Splinter Cell: Conviction
41. 2008 Real Football 3D
42. Assassin's Creed 2
43. Hummer 3D
44. American Gangster
45. Real Football 2009
46. 3D Football: Real Madrid 2010
47. Xtreme Dirt Bike
48. Tekken Mobile
49. A Good Day to Die Hard
50. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
51. Asphalt 3: Street Rules 3D
52. GTA IV Mobile
53. 3D Contr Terrorism
54. Real Football 2015
55. The Amazing Spider-Man
56. Contra 4 (2009)
57. Mortal Kombat 3D
58. Bad Girls
59. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
60. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 3D
61. God of War
62. PES 2009 (Pro Evolution Soccer)
63. Ultimate Street Football
64. Assassin's Creed: Revelations
65. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
66. 3D Super taxi driver
67. Gangstar 2: Kings of LA
68. Asphalt 6: Adrenaline
69. Assassin's Creed III
70. Danger Dash
71. Real Football 2014
72. Gangstar - Crime City
73. Gangstar 3: Miami Vindication
74. Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
75. Zuma's Revenge!

We know you guys did your best but the world is a fucking shit hole. We still remember your hard work!

76. Mission Impossible 3
77. Gangstar Rio: City of Saints (I guess these were your last days at work. Well-done guys!)
78. Real Football 2010
79. Real Football 2011 (Real Soccer)
80. Real Football 2012
81. PES 2011 (Pro Evolution Soccer) 
82. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (My Favorite)
83. And those missing the list.

WE SALUTE YOU ALL!!! ∠(^ー^)

Fuck. The entire day to do this shit.
The screen was my first experiment, but because of a bad module (i2c) it didn't worked.
Today I finnaly got it to work.
Starting making everything almost like in the picture, everything mounted (and lots of black hot glue, no wires showing...
Didn't work.
One hour breaking everything apart without damaging the screen... Was a loose wire.
Started again... Didn't work...
The pot is also damaged, sometimes it works, others need to turn it hard.
New pot.
New set of wires.
Soldering everything right, testing all wires so no mistakes this time... But it takes so longgggg... Making everything in modules this time (to reuse without having to sordering again. And finally... It works.
By this time I should have 3 or 4 learning projects finish (I really wanted the screen to adapt all output in text, no serial, no blinking less, everything in modules, code prepared so, when I get my 40+ packages from China I already have a prototype tester ready.
10 hours... Fuck I'm really addicted, or else I would just solder everything together :D

My 5 cents about refactoring.

People often postpone it, making it harder down the line.

From my experience, it's better to just do it as you go. 5 min can otherwise become 30 min thing after a while, and combined with some other 5 min thing, this can become 2 hour thing after some time, for example.

Also good luck convincing management (especially bad one), that you need 2 weeks of refactoring. Doing tiny 5 min refactoring, no one will notice.

A colleague of mine got a ticket today from a customer. The customer complained that the website visitors would need to many clicks to see the news on the site and that the news section is kinda hidden. We were quite confused because there is no news section on the website. After looking around for an hour we saw that the customer used the FAQ page to also include news by simply putting [NEWS] in front of the caption.

Man, people have the weirdest fetishes for using the most unreadable acrobatic shell garbage you have ever seen.

Some StackOverflow answers are hilarious, like the question could be something like "how do I capture regex groups and put them in a variable array?".

The answer would be some multiline command using every goddamn character possible, no indentation, no spaces to make sense of the pieces.

Regex in unix is an unholy mess. You have sed (with its modes), awk, grep (and grep -P), egrep.
I'll take js regex anytime of the day.

And everytime you need to do one simple single goddamn thing, each time it's a different broken ass syntax.

The resulting command that you end up picking is something that you'll probably forget in the next hour.

I like a good challenge, but readability is important too.

Or maybe I have very rudimentary shell skills.

Travels to another state, about 6 hours of journey. After finally reaching the office, had to wait another hour for my turn. The interview starts
Q: How long have you been programming?
A: for nearly 2 years, I mainly code in python.
Q: Nice! (Puts a piece of paper infront) explain how the shortest distance between 2 cities is calculated by Google maps using graph theory..
I go blank and stay silent for an awfully long amount of time. Gets rejected.
After coming outside, I ask myself... Why the fuck does a normal tech company need written algorithms on graph theory used by Google maps?

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

Ah, my brain, MY FUCKING BRAIN!

Got some work from the previous company. Need to update some stuff on their website.

Fine, got the files from the server via sFTP.

Made the changes, before uploading the files, wanted to create the latest backup.

Downloaded the files again, just to realize that I forgot to cd into a different directory before re-downloading the files. All the changes are now overwritten.

Half an hour of work lost. DAMN IT!

I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.

I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.

Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.

I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.

At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?

I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?

These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.

Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?

Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.

These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.

You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.

Long meeting with a coworker presenting a huge, complicated system to track changes to configuration files.

Basically, whenever someone needs to change a config file, this person is supposed to manually enter an entry to a changelog file, and the build system is supposed to give an error if the person forgets to update the changelog.

At the end of the 1 hour long presentation, I raise my hand and say: "we are already using git for our config files, look:

$ git log <filename>

here you can see the list of changes to the file. What you describe is already available, no need to reinvent it."

Long akward silence in the room.

The presenter: "okay, I will look into that. Any other questions?"

Haven't heard about that project since then.

Why do the HR folks cannot be more passionate about their work. Everywhere I have worked, they don’t pay a lot of attention to how their processes affect their employees.

I had a Visa appointment along with my wife today. The appointment was scheduled couple of weeks back. The email with appointment schedule had the list of documents that we needed to carry.

There was one document which HR folks needed to generate themselves and share to me. Its basically the certificate of employment. Now, I had a Certificate of Employment from last year and I thought that would suffice. But then the Visa lady told me that they needed a latest one(generated in last 3 months). It was very weird for the Visa process since I didnt have to carry that certificate couple of years back. But anyways.

My issue with the HR people is that if there was a need to generate this document from their side, they could have already generated it and shared with me. But no, they will wait for something like this to happen. They will only do this when I had asked about it and then they would have generated the certificate and shared with me.

Similar experience in my previous company, when I moved to Germany couple of years back and the company had arranged for accommodation for me. The building where I had my initial temporary stay, had two entrances and only one of them had the elevator, which was at the back side of the building. My apartment was located on the 5th floor. Since there was no mention of the elevator in the email that I received from the HR folks, I had to carry 6 bags up 5 floors after my 12 hours of flight. It took almost an hour to get all of them up.

All of this could have been easily avoided if the HR folks were a bit more empathetic towards the people they deal with and tried making their life a bit more easy. A little note of elevator, or generating certificates automatically feels the lives of employees so easy and it really avoids a lot of hassle, both for employee and the HR folks themselves.

(short story)

happened a couple of months ago. I was drawing some diagrams on the board -- planning new infra for the app. While explaining all this to the analyst I needed some random number. It was smth like 1470285206. Half an hour later I need another random number. And I again come up with the same exact sequence....

It was both funny and spooky at the same time. Apparently my biological RNG is utterly broken.. Either that or my subconsciousness wants to tell me something about an early morning of 2016 Aug 4.

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

I had to implement an internal tool in C++ which parses a file and converts the content into another format.
It did take hundreds of lines of code to get it working, file handling and parsing data in C/C++ is terrible.

I'd rather done it with some scripting language, and additionally implemented it in python as a side-project (in less than an hour and < 20 lines of code, BTW) but it should be C++ "Because that is how we do it here".

At the end the tool was only used for a few weeks, because someone had an idea how to completely avoid the need for that converted data.

So, rant!

So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.

Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.

It's a big deal for the corporation.

And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...

Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.

To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...

Pointless.

It's pointless.

But I guess this is why you get payed.

Work.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.

I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Look here Mr Senior Tech if you don’t know 100% what you’re doing, don’t fucking touch the goddamn firewall with your fucking sausage fingers and you overblown call center team lead. I mean you need to have the confidence you would have if you were eating a banana and some one told you it was a poisonous berry, you’d laugh and eat it anyway, cause it’s obviously a banana. That’s the kind of confidence you need to have when fucking with the entire goddamn network configurations. I just went thru a 7 hour shit show because you THOUGHT you knew what you were doing. Not a damn thing was broken there. One service needed a hole in the firewall and you fucked all this beyond an easy fix. Now I’ll admit I don’t have that much confidence working with the firewall, that’s why I would fucking cal one of the companies that set it up even though we don’t necessarily have a support contract, it would have cost a lot damn less to have them work on it than for the whole company to be down and for me to have to stress over every fucking thing going (or not going) on.

*lunch time*
Designer: we want to put these graphs on the landing page.

Me: ok, well they are pretty simple I can recreate them in about an hour with JS, and they will look better and be inter active...

PM: we don't have time for that just use the images from the mock up

Me: ok...

*5hrs & dozens of emails later...*

PM: the graph doesn't look quite right, can we just build it in code so it looks better? Oh and we need to have it to the client to review by end of day...

Me: ...

Recently at my work everyone got all hyped about blockchain. I've spent years studying it and especially crypto so I like to think I know a lot about it. Now every time some feature is discussed (like tracking video views) someone non tech shouts out "Oh we can use a blockchain!" And I have to spend half an hour convincing them why it's a bad idea in this particular case. Like we don't need to share that data, we don't need to ensure integrity without trust etc. I mean a blockchain is a great piece of tech but please stop trying to apply it everywhere...

It's like people think that the blockchain features at its most simplified level don't work anywhere else. E.g. as if stuff you put into MySQL suddenly changes because data integrity is not a 'feature' in that sense...

“We mob every thing so that means we don’t need pull requests, because by the time the code is committed it’s had plenty of pairs of eyes on it”

Well, I beg to differ.
Today I read through some of this spaghetti mobbed code to look into a performance issue. Wasn’t supposed to but bored stiff so I ‘went dark’ and did it without the mob.

After about an hour I figured out it runs a few lines of dubious code and if there’s an error it tries many times over with an exponential back off.
And each run of the methods will fail for sure because of how it’s written.
Someone must’ve seen this problem but instead of realising it can never work, they’ve wrapped it in retries and back offs.

So many back offs and retries that it just sits there doing this for 25 minutes.

But yeah. The mobbing works great guys, keep churning out this quality code. 😂😂😂
Can’t wait to see the back of this joke job.

Migration in progress (long one, lasting over a month)

PM: Let's schedule a meeting to discuss migration progress

PM: Let's schedule a meeting to agree on what should we test

PM: Let's schedule a meeting to get specs of the new infra

Seriously, PMs. One 1 hour long meeting costs at least 4 hours of productive time (1 hour for travel, 1 hour for the meeting, 1+ hour for preparing for the meeting, 1+ hour for post-meeting discussions). And more often than not all meetings end with "We will come back to you later in regards to <some question not answered during meeting>" and it always means "we'll continue this chat via emails"

Why can't you first ask "do we need a meeting or can we sort this out via email?" ??? Or are you intentionally wasting everyone's time?

When you are the only web developer of the company... You do front, backend for the website, web development jobs which come every time for stopping you to work on the 3 websites that you have to build. Every sites and database are different that's something that my boss don't understand I cannot include stuff just like that with my magic power because i have already done it. And of course the two designers of the company have the time to spend an hour for a colour. Well a week to build a 15 custom pages website with something which is close to the CRM for the back is not enough. Not enough when you also have to spent 2 hours each day on management stuff because there is 20 hosted website and the clients need support... Stressed and pissed off.

FML, I am the most senior member of my department, everyone have a questions for me, everyone need input from me, everyone cannot exist for an hour without my input. Including my manager who picks my brain on the things that he tries to research. Send help..

A fun story on how I lost my end of year project :

Last year was my first year of college in computer science. To get to my school, I need to take two different buses with a kilometer distance between them.
The day that I had to send my end of year project, which was worth 25% of my final grade, I thought that it would be fun to use my skateboard to get to the second bus instead of walking. So, I got out of the bus, started skateboarding towards the second bus and, about 20 meters later, my wheel got stuck on a small rock which was big enough to make me do a front flip. I landed on my back and broke my left arm.
An hour later, at the hospital, I tried to send my project to my computer science teacher but I quickly realised that my spectacular fall destroyed my laptop's HDD and my end of year project.
And this is how I learned how important it is to back up my files in the cloud.

I love python, but I hate dealing with python dependencies, especially on Windows.
I was tinkering and researching with neural networks, so I wanted to try out pybrain. I wrote my project, with pybrain installed via pip, and tried to build it.
Oh, what's that? Pybrain doesn't work with python 3? Well I'll download the version that's supposed to. Oh, that version has a deprecated numpy api? Let me just install those other resources. Oh, that requires a broken module that has no publicly available source?
Let's try python 2. Oh, now that's working, I just need to export environment variables for some "bls source". Some quick Google searching and the only solution that would work is building a bunch of cywgin modules by hand. That's fine, I have an ubuntu partition.
An hour later I'm compiling FORTRAN dependencies on Ubuntu.
Coding time: 1 hour
Dependency time: 3 hours

Devops (By Azure) is so stupid.... (I won';t even start of YAML, it will be a 10pages rant).

me : Ok I have 5 projects, each has it's own Azure conexxion for deploy.
Me : Can I do just ONE shared connexion ?
Devops : Yes. You need to click 150 buttons and it's done !
Me : Ok. /* doing actions */
Me : Ok ready !
Me : Project 1 do your release pipeline !
project 1 : Sure, just wait 5 minutes.
5 minutes later
Project 1 : All good.
Me :Ok now sharing test ! Project 2 : do your pipeline !Project 2 : Sure ! It's strated !
Me : Ok I'll go take a beer
... 1 hour later..
Me : project 2 ? PROJECT 2??!!!
Me : fine... going into logs.
Message : You must accept the shared conexion from Project 1 before pipeline can run
Me : WTF ? I literally just SHARED it to project 2,3,4,5 !!!

Why that idiot check ?!

One thing is sure, I hate devops more than I hate JavaScript.

Is it ethical to charge a client for the runtime of a computation? I.e. cpu time?

I usually don't, since it doesn't cost me anything to leave my machine running overnight. But a few of my friends told me that I should.

More context:
I do sometimes freelance work for professors as an RA. At times you need to leave a script running for like +5 hours. During which I just either procrastinate or go to the gym or sleep. The energy cost for computer running is barely a dollar.

I get charged by the hour per work in my timesheet, or sometime for a negotiate price which is also usually computed by the estimated work time it would take.

YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.

Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.

Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.

I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.