My company just fired 20 people, and the next day instuted a program so salaried employees have to clock in and out. Of course not to effect our pay, just to keep their paranoid asses breathing down our necks. Also, no clocking in remotely so all the work I do from home won't be taken into account. Fucking micromanaging, ball-licking, scum-fuck, MBA, morons couldn't run a company if their lives depended on it. When will these soul-less, suit-wearing, shit-scarffers learn that treating your employees with respect and valueing actual work over bullshit metrics, is a better business strategy than treating them like fucking sheep to the slaughter. Fml, I gotta find a new job...

So, in my spare time I run a little helper business that teaches children/teenagers how to program.

Theres a new kid that's been coming for around about a month, and I swear the kid is a programming deity.
He picked programming and more importantly developing remarkably quickly.
Long story short, I paid for him to go to a Hackathon in LA and he now has more business contacts than me.

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.

Meeting with smooth suit guy:

"So, our company has pivoted"

I hate everything about this guy, not having slept well at all, I fucking snapped:

"Pivoted? Oh wow, what a wonderfully refined word to describe that your asinine business model smacked flat into the mud, that your obtuse bubble of vague ideas popped and your childish dreams of piles of undeserved gold got caught up by the hard reality that your product does not add any tangible value -- yet you tricked your sheepish retarded investors once again to fall for a new hype-filled pitch deck? Congratulations. At least you probably snort enough coke to keep believing in yourself..."

The guy nervously wiped his nose, stuttered, and walked off looking angry and a little confused.

So it turns out, my boss is apparently the major "sheepish retarded investor" in this company.

Today I got a mail from him. I expected fire and fury, nuclear ICBMs crashing into my desk.

"Thanks for your feedback, this is why I invite you to meetings. Could you take a look at their new pitch slides and preliminary API docs for me?"

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

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

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

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

I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

I'm proud of my mom.... She's teaching herself WordPress and photo editing so she can help my dad's business :D

I disagree with WordPress entirely, but seeing my mom(who can barely create a new folder) teach herself something computer related is awesome.

Guy: dot net dev (C#) on windows. (desktop + server)
Team(not his team, he just happened to sit next to us): php/frontend devs and Linux (server) people.

Team: starting a new project! We'll have to see what framework to use and what server :D
Guy: i know it's none of my business...... but I'd recommend dot net and windows server!
Me: respectfully, that hardly makes sense, you know our skillset/field... i understand that it works for you but it doesn't really for us :).
Next to that we'd rather not use windows for security reasons.

It's fine if that happens once.

When it happened for the 1748472823'th time, I had a real hard time controlling myself.

PM: 2 months? no thats way too long, do it in 1.

Director: I had a chat with someone else who doesn't work on this team, he says that developer you complained about is a good guy and we should keep him on the team.

Business: No, we don't have time for tech debt, lets build these new features as quick as possible and lets see where we are.

everyone: WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT CRASHED AGAIN??? THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE

My company needs a new Website.

ME: Boss, let me do it. It's just a simple static site with a few pages. **Dreaming about a fast and beautiful site**

BOSS: Your time is too valuable. Nobody is paying us for our website. The apprentice will do it.

Few weeks later... Wordpress page! Page loads in > 20sec. Over 150 request for css and js... It's fast on Mobile, because it just breaks and loads only half of the content.

So ashamed working in this Company. No sane customer will ever do business with us, when he sees this stackpile of shit.

New private business cards just arrived. The front page is a sticker, too. Love it!

Business: How long will it take to add that feature to the legacy system?
Programmer: When will the new system be implemented?
Business: 6 months
Programmer: The new feature will take 7 months

Coding helped me make it this far. Everything in my life has been falling apart lately. My girlfriend left me to marry some other guy. My family's 20years old business shutdown. Things got very rough at work too. Unlike real life, coding makes sense to me. Everything is under control. It is a place where you build beautiful things the way you like them and help others. It has helped me take my mind off all the negativity and has given me a new perspective to life. Everything has a logic behind it. I can calm myself down by realizing the reasons behind the events happening in my life.
I love reading all the rants here. Thank you guys.

Co-worker: I need a proxy to do this task.

Me: Why do you need a proxy?

Co-worker: So all these reviews for the company I'm posting don't look sketchy.

Me: Download the TOR browser.

Co-worker: That's kinda sketchy I don't wanna do that.

So falsifying information about the company is okay, but using a browser to do it anonymously is right out.

True story.

I had been working for 6 months at the same place surrounded by 6 people (3 of them in my work team) .

On January I receive a message on skype for business "Hello, happy new year :)"

I answered "thanks", 10 seconds later I see the name of who wrote the message, someone called let's say YYY, so I ask one of my coworkers, "do you know who is YYY?" and I hear a voice of the girl seated right in front of me for the last 6 months answering "It's me", "Oh!" I said.

Awkward silence....

Rant to myself for being a shitty non social person.

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

This is just fucking awesome.
Bought a domain name from a local registrar today and now my personal details like full name, phone number and exact address are nicely on whois.

The cunts didn't even thing to ask me during registration if I want to make it private and there's no option to do that on their piss poor website.

Oh well, tomorrow will be the day that I transfer my new domain away from them. Last time I ever do business with these shitcakes

Dear any business looking to hire new people...

Experience > Education

That is all...

Searching for new jobs when i find this:

Backend Developer

Education:

Computer Science (Bachelor's degree)

Languages:

English (spoken proficiency: Conversational/Business written proficiency: Conversational/Business)

Skills:

Ruby on Rails (+5 years of experience)
HTML (+5 years of experience)
CSS (+5 years of experience)
.NET (+5 years of experience)
HapiJS (+5 years of experience)
ExpressJS (+5 years of experience)
Django (+5 years of experience)
Elixir (+5 years of experience)
Ruby (+5 years of experience)
Python (+5 years of experience)
Java (+5 years of experience)
Javascript (+5 years of experience)

Have you ever felt that you're being overrated by your employer ?

For our front end projects we use Cloud9 IDE

Now the business have around 100k+ files.

So Cloud9 is becoming slower and slower with every new project created.

So I was tasked to build a code editor where a new instance of that code editor will be created per project ( so, the new editor doesn't need to handle a huge file tree), so I "git clone" ACE editor and add to it GoldenLayout.js , FancyTree.js and some other plugins.

Now they think I'm a genius, and I'm like ... Eh? Should I tell them.. ? Will it backfire later ?

I kinda like the feeling.

What's the best thing to do in this case?

Best client ever:
Yesterday I meet my new client. He need portfolio website for his logistics business.
So I meet him and explain my previous experience in website development.
After 1hour he gave me advance 50% of total cost.

My dad got a new phone over the weekend and asked me to help him set it up (TL;DR his IPhone broke, he likely cussed out someone on the phone and now he's on android).

Setting up his bank app, I asked for his password (I somehow knew asking a 80+ year old man password questions wouldn't end well)

<pulls a card out of his wallet>
Dad: "Here you go."
Me: "This is your business card?"
Dad: "Yep. Password is at the bottom. That way I never forget it."
Me: "Jeez dad, you shouldn't have your bank's password on a business card. You don't give these out to people, do you?"
Dad: "Sometimes. Hell, they won't know what that is. Its just a bunch of nonsense."

Luckily the password didn't work. He had to reset it when his IPhone messed up and didn't remember what he changed the password to.

Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.

Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.

Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?

Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.

Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.

Me: but…

Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.

Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…

Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.

Me: but it’s a product!

Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!

Me: I lead the frontend teams…

Manager: ….

Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.

Me: I confused but happy… I think..

I hate GoDaddy, we all hate GoDaddy. We know this. I had VPS running a single site that was there for 8 years and only hanging on there for a few business reasons. It was to move this past May to another server, then June, then July ... continually waiting for the final phase to pass so I can move it. Backups running nightly to a separate GoDaddy FTP server ... for 8 years. All good for 8 years. Our company gets a new credit card ... I'm away and forget to update it with GoDaddy ... billing fails 3 times and they delete EVERTHING. No care about being a good customer for 8 years (14 total with other servers), no phone call, no nothing. Poof, gone. Now, I know I should have transferred backups locally or, at the very least, somewhere else. I just never expected this type of treatment. FUCK GODADDY!

Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.

It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/

I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*

Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:

You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.

Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?

My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.

This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.

!rant ~dev

I use my headphones religiously every time I code, as well as for things like tutorials & courses.

I was devastated that the slider switch on my pair of H8s snapped and I could no longer use them wirelessly.

I didn’t want to be without headphones for weeks while they were replaced abroad, so...

Hello upgrade. Hello business expense.

Lovely new pair of H9is.

An old company contacted me, seemed remorseful and said I probably didn't want to work there again but kept pushing. Eventually he said a high salary and I figured ok they had easy projects and the overpaying would beat the underpaying they did while I was there, right?

The new lead dev at the place took a month to give me work, tried to pressure me by saying she was going to tell management they are behind because of me, and then progressively stopped assigning tickets to me and assign-then-reassign them from me according to my schedule/predictions I revealed during the daily stand-ups. Why hire me at all. Then they said they changed their business direction at 3 months and let me go. What a waste of everyone's time.

So mum wanted me to purchase her a new lettop.
Yeah, we just spoke.
While consulting on what she needs, I noticed that little flaw. So I gently told her :"mum, it's written with an A".
Mom goes:" aaaah! A LAB-TOP!"

Could not blame her. She made her life as first best scoring woman in business degree at her time.
And sure enough she understood laptop and we laughed a lot ='D

So I was preparing for my project assessment at school when some business guy walks up to me asking if we were students here and if we were interested in doing "internet things" for his new business..

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

Just got a new work laptop last week. An upgrade from a crappy consumer grade piece of shit to a proper business grade 8c/16t laptop feels good.
Also Fedora.

Since the beginning of this year our IT department has a new boss. He has no idea about IT, but worked with the other departments and CEO + management on an new business strategy. The other department bosses recogniced that this guy is stupid and only talking hot air, but not the CEO and management.
The IT part of the strategy is abstract and bullshit. The IT Team (we) was not included in building this. We only got the "finished" presented.
So our Team should integrate 6 big new systems (ERP, CRM,...) within 1,5 years. No system is actually fixed and the IT boss is only saying: "Its easy, just some interfaces to connect".
Nice additional: CEO says: Either we go with the strategy or we can leave the company.

My decision is made.

Welp. The startup I'm working for is going under. Ceo gave us zero hints.

I'm the lead dev and been working here for 6 months. Always built features before deadline, zero bugs, and going an extra mile. Can't say the same about the sales and marketing guys.

Kinda scared its gonna look bad. Oh you led a failed startup? Must be your fault.

Guess my side business is becoming full time now. Until new job.

#startup #9/10 #icebergahead

At interview.
Employer: We want to be the not only the best at our business, but also the best at technology.
Me: *oh, sounds good. New challenging project*
Employer: We need shopify store...

Client: Too many of our business processes take place on excel and paper! We need to modernize our business processes. Build an app that can do the main things we do with excel and paper in app form.

Dev (4 months later): Here it is

Client: Ok some of our users want to still use excel and paper so build the ability to print the app and export/import to excel so they can continue working the way they always have alongside our new app.

Dev: …

THis one goes out to the fucktards that decide to fucking change things on api systems to meet new business requirements and fail to fucking scope out the change requirements of dependent systems that YOU are FUCKING UPDATING via THIS FUCKINg API!
You fucking morons!

At least have the fucking decency or balls to walk 10 fucking metres from your stupid ass chair or send a fucking email about the changes rather then me finding out you fucktards change things through an end customer who want to know where there order is!!! FUCK!

Colleges aren't teaching enough practical applications of why we devs do what we do. Get students engaged with small business! Get them to think about how they apply what they learn to the real world!! We need creative new ideas from developers that think outside the damn book!

The freaking furniture people didn't complete things on time and our business development department is still not finished. The freaking reception desk is not there yet.

Here I am going to my new office on Saturday morning. Not to code but to monitor those guys to get things done by today.

I am a passionate software engineer.
That means that I strive towards excellence, in all aspects of software engineering. It also means that I cannot abide impediments towards those goals.

In practicality, it means that I will try as hard as I can to make the best possible solution for any specific problem. And that if I can make an improvement to the codebase that will make it easier for the next developer to work with it, I will absolutely make it.

I used to believe that my immediate manager had an understanding of my philosophy and why it was important not just to me personally, but to how the company had to move forwards in general also.

I just had a conversation today that completely flipped my perception of him and his role in the company.

I need a new job. Again. Because business people do not understand software, even if their entire business is based on software.

Tried buying the .com version of my website that some punk in FL stole right from under my nose... Offered $3000 for it and now he's saying he wants 10k. Time to find a new domain and maybe business name 😭😭😭

15 years ago I had a job interview as technical leader. They asked me about the trendy framework in those days, Struts. I didn't know much to be honest. I actually started to study java the month before. I was 30 y.o. and I managed to sell myself well.

I got the job. I never saw Struts, the real job was to migrate a z/OS application written on PL/I for DB2 (all things where new to me, I programmed something in VB when I was younger, before studying a career in statistics). Anyway, somebody else already scaffolded Struts, I implemented some business logic here and there, and mostly tried to make sense of the monster-legacy.

Fast forward now.
Two months ago I was interviewed on the last version of Angular and AWS devops, kubernetes etc. I managed not to look completely idiot, but honestly, I never went beyond an Hello World in Angular, and kubernetes, well, I like the name.

I got the job as Technical Architect.

First project I'm assigned to: migrate a 15 years old Struts application to cloud.
Somebody has containerized everything.
Somebody will scaffold a dotNet application.

I'll watch. Maybe I'll write some nice powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'll fill in some business logic in some methods.

I wanted really to be a technical Architect and do things other modern people do.

I actually wanted to learn something.

Anyway.
For 160K$ a year is not bad, I wouldn't complain.

> ticket comes, new feature is requested
> create the new feature from scratch. Code is neatly splitted in files and methods, each with clear responsibilities
> every method is documented, there are clear service layers for the business logic, which resulted in controller having 10 lines of code, give or take
> commit the whole code, everything works
> check the develop branch today, team leader littered business logic in the controllers because "the codebase is a mess anyway"

Stop calling people by their old occupation titles. .
Please address them by using their new titles accordingly
and they will like it their job more.

OLD: *Garden Boy*
NEW: *Landscape Executive and Animal Nutritionist*

OLD: *Petrol attendant*
NEW: *Fuel transmission engineer*

OLD: *Receptionist*
NEW: *Front Desk Controller*

OLD: *Typist*
NEW: *Printed Document Handler*

OLD: *Messenger*
NEW: *Business Communication Conveyer*

OLD: *Window Cleaner*
NEW: *Transparent Wall Technician*

OLD: *Temporary Teacher*
NEW: *Associate Teacher*

OLD: *Tea Boy*
NEW: *Refreshment Director*

OLD: *Garbage Collector*
NEW: *Environmental Sanitation Technician*

OLD: *Guard*
NEW: *Security Enforcement Director*

OLD: *Prostitute*
NEW: *Practical Sexual Relations Officer*

OLD: *Thief*
NEW: *Wealth Relocation Officer*

OLD: *Driver*
NEW: *Automobile Propulsion Specialist*

OLD: *Maid*
NEW: *Domestics Managing Director*

OLD: *Cook*
NEW: *Food Chemist*

OLD: *Gossip*
NEW: *Oral Research and Evaluation Director*

Which one got you more?

When you're training a new guy who thinks hes better than you and completely overwrites all the code you've been working on because he thinks UX designed it wrong and it should look "correct". Thats not how corporate business works buddy...

That feeling when the business wants you to allow massive chunks of data to simply be missing or not required for "grandfathered" accounts, but required for all new accounts.

Our company handles tens of thousands of accounts and at some point in the past during a major upgrade, it was decided that everyone prior to the upgrade just didn't need to fill in the new data.

Now we are doing another major upgrade that is somewhat near completion and we are only just now being told that we have to magically allow a large set of our accounts to NOT require all of this new required data. The circumstances are clear as mud. If the user changes something in their grandfathered account or adds something new, from that point on that piece of data is now required.
But everything else that isn't changed or added can still be blank...
But every new account has to have all the data required...

WHY?!

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

!rant

Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:

"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"

So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.

On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

Start-ups and corporations trying new things be like:
"Why should we pay a developer or a company to develop this and this for us when we can just:
- start a competition.
- get free design mockups and code.
- decide which is better.
- reward a small prize and maybe some freebies to the competitors.
- profit. FREE CHEAP CODE AND DESIGNS!!!"

It might be the reasonable and logical thing to do from a business standpoint if its about code you need to rarely maintain..

But from an independent developer viewpoint - FUCK YOU AND THE SLOW ENSLAVEMENT OF MY SPECIE!!!

Client: "We're not ready to be finished with the project but I don't want to pay you any more money to meet the terms of the contract we both signed, even though all my must-have changes led to more costs just like you had warned me they would."

Me: "Don't make any more changes, plez."

Client: "Imma make another change."

Me: "No. Stahp. Don't."

Client: "I added four new fields and probably a ton more business rules I don't care to understand."

Me: "Kill me. Just put this gun to my head and kill me."

Client: "That's not in our contract!"

Normal person : 365 + 1 = 366
Developer dealing with julian dates : 365 + 1 = 1(New year)
Business person : 365 + 1 = 001 (because they like symmetry in their file names with dates)

We found this BUG, now we are celebrating our new year by changing code in each of script to format string accordingly.

Business Intelligence, the most confused market technology has to offer. (Perhaps rivaled only by machine licking. Learning, whatever)

Step 1: develop a product that can replace a company's database guys. Make it cost more than the database guys.

Step 2: Show off product to managers using images of the product that the managers will love, but never have the skills to do themselves.

Step 3: Fucking obviously the managers buy it.

Step 4: Fire half the database staff.

Step 5: Managers give the BI tools to their remaining database guys ANYWAYS and instruct them to use it

Step 6: Database guys spend a month learning the new tool because management "wants to use it too".

Step 7: Database guys now use this new system for reports but have trouble using it for complex use cases, as it was designed for simple use cases. Meanwhile, management will never, ever touch the tool again.

Step 8: Hire new guys for reporting, because the remaining database guys can't complete both their normal tasks *and* the reports.

Step 9: Database guys are expensive. Go to step 1.

Company top execs: "We need to optimize our costs and reduce our expenditure by x€ to keep the profit margin at acceptable levels for the shareholders"

YOU ARE PUSHING OUT SHIT PRODUCTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT THAT YOU FUCKING SUITS THINK WILL BE THE NEXT BIG THING BUT NOONE REALLY WANTS OR NEEDS. WE ALREADY HAVE A TON OF THOSE BORN-DEAD SHITCAKES HANGING AROUND ABD NEW ONES ARE ALREADY BEING PREPARED FOR LAUNCH.

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? HOW ABOUT YOU STOP PRODUCING SHIT AND STICK TO YOUR FUCKING CORE BUSINESS MODEL!!!

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? WE HAVE A ZERG OF OLD FUCKS, WHO ARE STILL WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SMS TO START THE NEXT TECH REVOLUTION, ON OUR PAYROLL. ALL THEY FUCKING DO IS PLAY SUDOKU IN THE KITCHEN AND DISCUSS TECHNIQUES ON HOW TO RAISE GOATS!!!

"NO MONEY TO GIVE A PAYRISE TO DEVELOPERS"? WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCKING GET RID OF THE USELESS DUDES BASICALLY DOING THEIR TENURE AND CLOSE SOME OF THESE FUCKTARDED PRODUCTS THAT 4 PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE FUCKING COMPANY USE BUT NEED A TEAM OF FUCKING 20 TO MAINTAIN! NO!!! THEY WILL NOT BE THE NEXT BIG THING! NO!!! ANYTHING YOU SHITCAKES WHO THINK MOBILE APPS IS THE "NEW EMERGING MARKET" WILL EVER CREATE THE NEXT FUCKING BIG THING!!!!!

STICK TO YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND STOP CREATING USELESS SHIT THATS MAADE BY FUCKING USELESS PEOPLE!!!!

FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!

New business opportunity. Hire the worst, cheapest devs on the planet and get them to build a HR system.

Judging by past popular HR systems, it'd become a best seller instantly.

Kubernetes this. Kubernetes that. New tech this. New tech that. Let's ask developers to spend all their time on learning everything instead of concentrating on the fucking business problem that's no where related to Kubernetes or any fucking specific technology for many companies

Starting my first business in my life at 19. I'm so excited, but also so afraid right now. So many thoughts in my head.

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

Hi! I'm new in freelancing. I've created a program that scrapes data from a website, parses it, runs DB queries, and emails the prepared data to the customer for whom I've created this program. The whole program is written in PHP and uses a MySQL table. There's almost no front-end, it's just like an automated background process that runs with a cron job. I've bought and set up a domain and hosting for them (my cutomer paid it all). I got the core part of the program running after ~2 days, and it took me ~a week to complete the project including adding features and the testing phase. Now, I'd like to know, how much does this kind of project cost? The business operates in Silicon Valley.

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

(in a meeting between o&m team and business partners to assign priorities to various tasks)
I.T.: So what priority would you put this new task?
Business : it's our 1.
I.T.: ok, and this other one?
B: it's a 1.
I.T.: ...

HR people on LinkedIn. What the fuck? Do you seriously believe you can attract qualified developers by telling them you’re looking for ninjas, jedis or life savers? I for one am still fairly new to the job so I don’t consider myself to be by any means a coding wizard, and I don’t think any strong senior developer is gonna be seduced by your catchy terminology (I may be wrong about that). Come on, talk to us like any recruiter would in any other line of business. No need to replace the words "qualified" or "experienced" with your stupid magic words, unless you want to sound like you’re desperate

Axioms of writing software for your own business
(or working on your own projects that actually have to get produced in the real world)

Axiom #37: It is always a lot more fun to start something new, then to finish the thing that *was* new and exciting when you last tried to finish a thing.

Some people are really getting high on this Agile shit. Probably because they learned some new bullshit bingo phrases - and it suits them: lots of vapory talk and expensive meetings and others will have to do the work anyway, while they can circlejerk on how to have shorter iterations to improve the time to market, increase the business value, inspect and adapt to faster deliver a minimal viable product - yeah, do the agile transformation, update to the digital age, you noobs. Throwing around some catchy phrases will let you compete with Google? Maybe need some blockchain or machine learning?
While you are clustering your post its, the coders who keep the ship afloat, sit in their legacy code base that's so bitrot they are mainly doing bugfix releases without a single feature for three fucking years. Consider this.

I kinda feel like people trying to call Facebook "Meta" is just as awkward as people trying to use correct pronouns when a person announces that now their pronouns changed.

A person, however, deserves to be understood.

Meanwhile, Meta is just Facebook. A new name won't solve that shit pile of ethical problems and sketchy business practices that just keeps growing.

Let me tell you a very sad, sad story:

I was standing in the line at Lidl (a supermarket here in Germany) and was listening to a podcaste peacefully, minding my own business.
As I was the next one, I took out my AirPods and than it happend:

One of my AirPods felt down, jumped from the floor into a shelf under the cash register and sliped through a FUCKING HOLE WITH ONE FUCKING SQUARE CENTIMETER SIZE!!! WHAT A FUCKING MISFORTUNE!!! No way to get it back. And the biggest shit is that Apple wants FUCKING-80-FUCKING-€ for one single new AirPod.

On iOS 11, Apple is no longer allowing you to open apps that are 32 bit. Apple should have given all the developers with 32-bit apps free access to the developer program rather than forcing them to pay a $99 fee to publish a 64-bit version of their app.

This would’ve made better business sense for them as publishers would have had an opportunity to create new apps and see more revenue coming in from upgraded apps. Ultimately more money for Apple. Not sure what dumb fool at Apple HQ thought this was a good idea.

When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...

and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...

because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.

Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.

I started to work in the CreditCard / Bank business a year ago.
Now they stopped the hole server migration project, so I leave again. They could have had it all. Server 2016, SQL 2016, Citrix, Surface Books and so on.
But no, the new shitty projects are more important than security or on what technology the system is build on.

Seems like the FTP Server will run on Windows 2003 forever...

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

I got my dirty fingers on this leak of an AMAZING ML model capable of pondering EVERY PARAMETER IN THE UNIVERSE and saying if your business idea needs improvement or is good to go.
BEHOLD THIS 100% PURE PYTHON SOLUTION:

```python
import random

def magic(*args, **kwargs):
if random.random() > 0.5:
return "Good to go!"
else:
return "Requires improvement on value proposition"
```

This LEAK is from a startup that just received 4 BILLION USD IN VENTURE CAPITAL to improve their AI SYSTEMS.
Literally enough money to solve world hunger forever.
Who else is gonna invest in NEW THERANOS ADVANCED A.I. RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL INC?

Yesterday I had to merge new features. As these have been developed by one developer, I thought "hey, that'll be no problem". Little did I know that every one of the 6 branches had merge conflicts *sigh*. These merge conflicts were so severe, that there where sometimes two methods in the same class with the same name doing different stuff in each branch... Normally I would tell her to fix her stuff but as she is on vacation right now, I had all the fun resolving the conflicts of code I hadn't written and repairing the failing unit tests she wrote.

The best thing is that our software will be featured in one of the most renowned business magazines at the end of the week while simultaneously being presented at a congress in Berlin in front of over thousand of potential new customers. So these knew features have to be running stable in production by then... Needless to say I had a great day yesterday and will have an amazing upcoming week 🎉

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

I finally turned my MSI laptop into a fully functioning dev machine. I just activated Windows Linux Subsystem, and got XCFE4 to run, then installed some Jetbrain IDEs ontop of it. And I'm straight up in business. Now I don't need to go out and buy the new shitty Macbook pros for $3k

"Hey business, we've done some style changes in a new test evnvironent, can you check to see everything looks fine?"

"Page Y (which you've never heard of before) looks terrible!"

"It does! Sorry" - go check the page on the other test environment.

That's just what it looks like.

I explained last week in great detail to a new team member of a dev team (yeah hire or fire part 2) why it is an extremely bad idea to do proactive error handling somewhere down in the stack...

Example
Controller -> Business/Application Logic -> Infrastructure Layer

(shortened)

Now in the infrastructure layer we have a cache that caches an http rest call to another service.

One should not implement retry or some other proactive error handling down in the cache / infra stack, instead propagate the error to the upper layer(s) like application / business logic.
Let them decide what's the course of action, so ...
1) no error is swallowed
2) no unintended side effects like latency spikes / hickups due to retries or similar techniques happens
3) one can actually understand what the services do - behaviour should either be configured explicitly or passed down as a programmed choice from the upper layer... Not randomly implemented in some services.

The explanation was long and I thought ... Well let's call the recruit like the Gremlin he is... Gizmo got the message.

Today Gizmo presented a new solution.

The solution was to log and swallow all exceptions and just return null everywhere.

Yay... Gizmo. You won the Oscar for bad choices TM.

Thx for not asking whether that brain fart made any sense and wasting 5 days with implementing the worst of it all.

Hi. I'm new here and liking it.
My rant today: Lofty business guy tells my small dev team that he knows exactly how everything should look and work because he knows exactly what users want out of the webapp experience.... goes on to tell us to make an editable, side-scrolling table that is also mobile-friendly, for users to manually input a ton of data....

!notarant

Excited to use my new mechanical keyboard. Awwww YISSS! Been waiting forever.

!rant
But seriously who thought of combining Fedex and the United States Postal Service in a delivery method. Sure it sounds great in theory but from my experience, Fedex has the worst tracking ever and USPS is slow in delivering to business addresses.

Fucking Apple locked my email again....
'Oh, we have no idea why this keeps happening'
Assholes... You'd think locking someone's account twice within a week without knowing why would be unacceptable, but they just act like it's business as usual..

Apple used to care about its customers, now what? They think they're too big to care anymore? Why don't you go shove your new icrap up your asshole cook!

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

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

I do not miss social work even a little bit.

I just got a fucking job again after 2.5 months between jobs and the new place has been allowing (if not encouraging) the piracy of Windows Server in client environments... I thought this place had so much potential but I was wrong.

Going to start looking for another full time job or really buckledown and try to get my freelance project/business started.

BTW fuck microshaft for expensive licensing, but I’m not risking my certs and professional career for some idiots trying to pirate software.

For skilled mid-career engineers, dynamic programming problems, np-complete bar raisers.

For new engineers, simple questions that can't be taught in school (questions that require business prioritization)

For older engineers, questions they haven't done since college (big-O, writing algorithms from memory)

My business partner and I started working at our new office and this other guy who was our client and provided us Internet connection for very cheap price, asked us if he can come and hangout sometimes
My partner : yeah man, any time !!
That guy : thanks man
Partner : But only when we are not that busy and don't bring any other person unless it's a woman.
Me : what !!
My partner : what ?

Freelance Headhunters...

No idea where they got my name and the number of my work phone...

- they do not give a damn and call me 1045 am to discuss "EXCITING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES™"

- they are sure I am having a case of stockholm syndrome, because I could NEVER be satisfied in my current employment

- they call every other day with a new number and start the same process again

How fucking dense can people get?

I’ve been out of steady work for almost 2 whole months now but things are starting to look up...

I’m super stoked for some potential client projects!!! I have one client that wants me to completely rebuild their businesses infrastructure, PC refresh, server upgrade, network overhaul for 3 sites, and more. This new client has a business partner with another side business and wants to discuss potential work/projects. And I’m going to be discussing a potential contract deal on Thursday to develop a custom software for another client.

Guys! My startup is starting woot!!!

Ugh, I hate this stupid F*!

There's this new guy who's much older and thinks he's a such a f'ing hotshot that he undermines everything I worked on to drop in some a** backwards BS. Luckily I don't have to work with him often, only one day a week - else I would go nuts! He constantly name drops this same company, with little disregard for others younger than him.
Bitch, I'm close to 20 years younger than you and yet I've worked for a much longer list of much more respected companies. I've worked with legal teams on intellectual property, ran my own business, and have multiple patents. Did you ask me once my background? No, because your a selfish prick and an asshole. That's why you're likely in a mid life crisis, single, and alone. Fuck you!

Today's been majorly tough 😣, I might lose one of my fav an most high paying clients 😐

He's OK in taking risks in his business because he has money to fall back on 😐 I have none we are sorta partners in projects. So we have this one project he never wrote in this project brief/outline maintenance or sign off ,😐 it never occured to him .

So now this app is ongoing I got paid nothing they just released it I need to do these jobs to make money 😐 but I'm stuck helping him 😐

There have been so many issues it's been ongoing forever 😐 I dunno what I can do .

To make it worse the code is a pile of shit 😐 literally couldnt be worse.

Why ? Because there has been 4000 minor adjustments. I'm a good coder I swear , but this job is killing me 🙁

Here's an example start of the new year the new iOS kicked in on the 12 Dec I started get more n more bug reports! Saying iOS is messed up.

Because of an update it's not my fault. 😣, 6 months this project took 😐 every 2 weeks I've had a major issue come up like that.

😖 I'm near my wit's end I feel like the best move is to just say I'm sorry I can't anymore I understand that this app is important and that we need to get paid less to grow it etc but I can't let my business die because of that.

Times like this I really appreciate this app

I guess I have to stick it out 😧

Curious. What's your definition of a full stack developer?

Is it just about knowing all necessary languages? Does it also include various business oriented soft-skills? What about handling server and stuffs?

It is a new term I have been seeing a lot lately (especially after 2016, if I'm not wrong). Of course, I could google and look for the answers but I prefer to know devrant community edition 😀

I started a new business making yachts in my attic this year... The sails are going through the roof.

Business logic:

Meeting starts at 9:45 AM. They only really wanna talk about the features they have on the horizon and how innovative and distruptive and rich we'll be. We spend 10, maybe 15 minutes talking about UI and details of the feaure. The meeting ends a few minutes before 12, so that's 2 hours of lunch (I wanna respect the schedules we had pre-covid to keep that rhythm). I start working again at 2 PM, but 15 minutes later, I get called again by one of the managers to hear more about this new great new idea they have.

So I work about 7-9 hours a day. But HR and management want to spend 3 of those hours. Suggestion: we'd improve our productivity by about 35% if we cut those daily meetings.

Got a new job at a fairly large IT firm which deals with large scale business software for customers like the government's various agencies.

The very first job I'm assigned to: we have to strip down this software and make it more general, go ahead and delete everything related to <feature>.

I haven't had time to get to know the product and I've deleted hundreds of files and lines of code from related files...

I have a feeling this will bite me somehow

I am working with a team that's producing tons of new services..
And me being a fresher, reading new designs every other day with God knows complex implementations and business requirements and attending design review meetings(where I can barely understand anything)
having a great learning curve..
Hopefully, I survive this period and cope up with the inputs...
Note: Just don't ask what's my contribution.. I am gearing up for the D-Day to make my impact(not a negative one).. 😎

!rant

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

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

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

Going through the conversation for xxxxth time with my business partner, why we will not launch a new product on top of pre-made PHP script / plugin.

Just got our company into TDD, and automated QA via CI server & code checks etc, PLEASE stop trying to drag us back into the land of spaghetti code & bug legions in production. That's all thxbye.

So Im business partners with my ex's father for a gun store and have been working on a new system to sell to the market for the gun industry.

Since I understand how to program it is assumed I automatically know how people think when buying things online, and one of my responsibilities is listing our guns from estate sales on a website called Gunbroker.com...

It is the worst and slowest website I've ever had to use and they assume everyone uses IE...And that's what I hate most about it. They didn't get the memo that IE is for downloading better browsers. Unless you're on a Mac/Linux which I am..

Having a complete front end and back end application where the frontend is designed to look as simple as possible.

A new potential customer wants to have our app and listens to a designer bragging that its just replacing 2 fields.

After a while our manager comes by and mentioned that everything needs to be done within a few weeks....

All devs lose their mind since in the backend we need to have like 8 external sources to connect and hundreds of business rules to implement.

How a single designer ruined the year for 7 devs....

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

I was just watching a web series on X: the generation that changed the world, and damn!! Those X-ers (people born b/w 1961-1981 ) have really made changes that disrupted the whole world! Comparing to them, i feel like we millennials haven't made anything *that* disruptive.

- calculators happened which evolved to computers and then began a crave for knowledge and technology
- Netscape gave a new use to computers
- Tim Berners lee ,napster disrupted the way of sharing data.
- Google changed the way of searching.
- Amazon gave the true business value to internet.
- The revolution of music , hip hop and television.
- ...
(And these are just the first 2 episodes!)

Btw what do we millennials bachieved? Tiktok, heartbreaks, and porn fetishes :/

!rant
So on the last day before launch our latest feature I'm informed that a requirement was missed and it had to be implemented before go live otherwise the business didn't want the feature. The feature in question was pretty drastic and basically required a scheme rewrite, new tables, etc. So I spent the entire day making the change.

Thankfully I pushed the whole project for good code coverage. Therefore, all I had to do when I was done was run all of our tests and make sure they passed. *warm fuzzy feelings*

An annoying type of colleague: the kind that refuses to cooperate and insists on doing shit their own way because they have done it that way for years and they become little crybabies whenever someone new tries to work with them.

Somehow managers accept their baby-like behavior because they've been producing output. However, like my Business Processes professor said: "Don't focus on output".

It's just annoying trying to work with these guys.

It is so awkward to watch 50 shades of grey movie and coding at the same time. Especially when the **** part someone pass by and watch it with you.

That someone is my CTO . He paid me RM 200 for the pass him the movies. Sounds like I have a new business.

So anyone need the movie , it is just 200MYR... 😂😂😂😈

Actually he can get it from torrent. But why?

After 2 days of trying to understand unclear requirements I got for a new project... I discover my boss wrote them....

From the description, it read like he flipped it around from what he actually wanted (there's a difference between parent-children and child-parent)

And he always gave me the feeling that he had gotten it from some business team so I spent 2 days trying to figure out who wrote these requirements so I could ask them.

FML....

Software engineering doesn't evolving the way you think of it.

There are no new big patterns. There are no new big concepts and ideas to bring that evolution to us. Rob Pike thinks that the concepts he used twenty years ago are the best possible way of implementing everything and he creates Golang.

The evolution of software engineering, and maybe the whole evolution as a concept is a tick-tock. Software engineering had its latest tick at nineties, when the concepts we call modern were developed. And the latest tock was the rise of the internet, and it given the single-computer-centered Von Neumann architecture really hard challenges. I mean ticks are theoretical inventions and patterns and ideas and etc, while tock is more of some practical, business-oriented implementations.

PHP is still in use. We have troubles with scaling and deployment. Banking systems still run old Java, Windows XP and even COBOL. We had persistence really, really long time ago, and now frontenders reinvent it and call it 'immutability'!

We had our tick many, many years ago. It's time for tock. With not only scientific but commercial use of things such as Clojure, CRDTs and maybe Rust lang, we are heading straight to our new big tock, which'll bring us new great problems to solve.

That's how any evolution goes.

Still not sure about this new guy, not trying to be rude but everytime we're talking about code he says shit that makes me wonder how he got hired. (btw he is hanging with the IT department all the time) He's a very nice guy, but talks massive shit when it comes to bugs/new features/etc.

Should I have a look at his pc to see what he's doing when in office or is it none of my business. Help me out here, I'm really curious but don't care if he's a fake at the same time lol.

Our new project is a responsive mobile-first web system coded with HTML, CSS, jQuery and AJAX that connects to MySQL, but the main tasks runs trough a huge application written in Visual FoxPro, per client request...the web version could manage the whole business but no, it has to be Fox.
Oh, and it's the version 6, not even using the latest version 9 with all it's "improvements". What are we, back to the past milleniun?

You cannot completely delete a windows service, as long as the services panel is open. The service stays undead and prevents any reinstallation until the services panel is closed.

Thanks Microsoft.
Separation of GUI and business logic does not apply here, because it's kernel logic, right?

But at least you're consistents, there is a similar issue with not installing USB drivers if the new hardware dialog is open.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

When the client says how they would love to go live with a brand new site end of business today fml

When your PM is whining like a baby about resource issues surrounding developing new features when he/she already agreed one of the teams top priorities was getting "run the business" work done.

"Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you’re fine. If you neither trust them, nor can they defend their choices it’s time to get a new design team." - Mike Monteiro

Recieved some code from a client to review for porting it to a new system.

They sent the PHP scripts copy pasted into seperate Word Documents and skipped the most important file (containing the business logic functions).

Ok...... first day in office at a new tech company

since 9am till now 15:42 (CAT) I haven't done anything besides sitting on my computer and googling shit
and everyone at the office is busy with their business and avoiding me

New CTO.

New CTO pushes policy change to all browsers to open Facebook Workplace on every new tab and as start page.
Locks option to change it.
This also kills restoring tabs from past session.

New CTO handles the complaints
'It's fine to complain, we don't even have to agree. If this is important to you, then come up with a suggestion on how to solve this for all our employees. Business equirement is that one page is shown at startup, that's it. This has nothing to do with Workplace.'

It has been a while since my last tale. I think it was about me starting a bootcamp...

Well, a lot of things happen since that:
• I did the bootcamp: three months of code-sleep-code, but now I know a bunch of new stuff.
• I gained my passion/love for develop again.
• Made new friends.
• IDK how became the CTO of a startup (which failed, shame, but I did learn a lot of new stuff again. Plus it wont failed because of the tech side (damn business not doing his business part...)) for about 6 months.
• And next week I will start at a new job (yaaay, income again!): they give me a nice 2k laptop, work from home if I want, nice salary...

So, I think I am ok.

PD: Sry if something I write is wrong, english is not my native language.

So instead of crying, what if we create a new open internet? We could call it NettyMcNetface (NMN). 🌐 It'd be free for everybody and open for all content under all existing and new open licences for free and paid content, for personal and business use.

The only hiccup: it must be completely disconnected from the current internet. A complete reboot on a new physical network.

Does article 13 apply to that too?

Oh, and I bet there's already some initiative involving an alternative open network. Any tips?

I love working on legacy products. You just need a good shower and possibly a therapist after.

- Sensitive data sent over the internet encrypted with DES (not even 3DES). Guess it doesn't matter that the key (singular, for the last decade) is basically 0123456789ABCDEF.

- Client databases with open default port, admin/admin superuser.

- Critical applications (potential for substantial property damage, maybe loss of life) with a single point of failure and without backup.

Suggestions, to slow down a bit with sales, so we have time to rewrite this steaming pile of crap are met with the excuse: be more pragmatist, this is standard industry practice.

Some of this shit can be fixed on my own time if my conscience nags too much, but others would require significant investment of time from multiple developers, which would slow down new business.

Guess the pay is ok, so that's something...

!rant

Just had a meeting with a client. Client is a local company but they hired a new guy and he is a foreigner. They made a website with us. Since it is a typical corporate website with few pages and just text and images as content, we used WordPress.

The new guy is familiar with squarespace and asked me my opinion on using SS. I don't really find any issue and it was my reply. He seemed surprised and asked me "Wouldn't it be like losing your business?"

I have never considered developing WordPress as my business. Programming is my interest and profession. But my main passion is to provide solutions to anyone in need. In fact, there were many occasions where I told to clients they shouldn't buy our services and recommend other services including competitors.

He probably thinks I'm a strange guy.

Folks,

What static site generator do you prefer, and why?

I want to set up a website for a small business and do not want to spend a lot of time on it but it also should be blazing fast.

My familiarity with react leads me to Gatsby, but there are probably good alternatives.

It should also be easy for the (non-tech) admin then to create posts on a news page or even new pages (probably with Markdown).

Thank you in advance!

How I got started part 2:

Thanks for all of the +1. True story...

I want to say something to those who are new, or not confident, or think that they are not smart enough, or can't afford to learn.

Everything I learned in college, everything that I do in my job, every tool that I use, I can get online for free. It is up to you to aspire. I make 6 figures. Go get it!

I survived the dotcom bubble, September eleventh and the financial crisis of 2008. My passion for my profession gotten me through the tough times.

Read. Study multiple subjects besides tech (especially business and visual design). Be a jack of all trades and a master of some.

If you look at the "lightweight business laptops" or business netbooks section of the market you'll notice almost all of them seem to have 4gb

Bitch, thats barely enough to run windows 10.

Looks like a market opening. If I were still doing upgrades and repairs I'd blame everything on low memory (well, a lot of slowness can loosely be attributed to lack of memory) and upsell new machines with more and better ram. Target 6gb, which is cheaper than 8 and offers a minor but noticeable boost, just enough to passably justify the increased cost to whoever is responsible for authorizing the upgrade.

I don't understand whats so hard to grasp about this. It's like companies trip over dollars to pick up dimes.

I had a conversation that almost became an argument with a someone I manage the other day. It revolved around how we should do just the basic parts first as that's what the business needs quickly and the code base is in a bad state right now so I didn't want to build new features on a poor foundation, particularly as those new features might not be forwards compatible and might have no way of fixing.

Once basic is in, refactor and cleanup, add secondary features. Their point was to just do it all at once in a big bang. It devolved into them getting angry and telling me to leave them out of all future discussions because now we "aren't ever doing the secondary features", just give them the task and leave them alone.

I let this go, but now I've found out they went to another high up person on the team and presumably lied to them about what was said.

What to do?

Not 1 Business Unit in Company: We need this feature immediately.

My Team: Anyone object to this 2 hour old merge request?

Me: Well, yeah, I found a couple things that we should probably go ahead and address.

My Team: we'll fix that in a future release

Me: But you said that last release...

My Boss: MR Accepted

Also My Boss: Can you make a new user story to fix this?

Reading over at zerohedge.

And I just wanted to comment on what this one guy posted:

"People that show up on time, dressed to work, not stoned. People that don't stop in the middle of the day to take care of personal matters. People that deliver to the right location. People that don't steal or damage product.

We pay well over the national average for final mile truck drivers. 80% of the ones you get are worthless. The ones that do a good job we reward handsomely to keep them. We have had open reqs for two years now that we can't fill at just about any wage. "

If all the people you hire leave, or no one wants to work for you for any wage, the problem isnt the pool of new hires. The problem is you.

Like a certain fast casual chain that claim they train their employees, and then just toss line cooks on the line and scream at everyone on the line.

Saw it while I was at an interview. Seen it in other
Train your fucking people.

"Good" is now a synonym for "people I dont want the expense of training, and people trained at someone elses expense."

Train your fucking people or gtfo of busines because you have no business being in business otherwise.

I joined a a new company .. the Technical team leader .. is coming from a lawyer background.. and feel threaten by new technology and insist on using old technology so he feel relevant !
The project manager has a background of business management which I understand but .....

It's been 3 days and am asking my self if I made the right choice by joining such company ...

The longer I live, the longer I am unsure what the meaning of my life is.

TLDR; 42

Yes I am a creative person in a way that I can create something out of nothing, but unfortunately all my work is almost invisible. Is the meaning of a developer guy to be a magician? He does something and *wooosh*
//magic happens here
there is a thing which he forgot how it works within a month. Why can't I just talk about my work with other people than those from the IT business? I don't think to be that important, but sometimes it appears that without you and me nothing will really work nowadays.

And to be honest with you guys, I am too slow. I can adapt new concepts and new programming languages, but I feel like getting overruned by all that new stuff appearing each day. Am I supposed to be that super hero named"superbrain"? Is that still healthy?

wtf, my life is a miracle, an oracle and a hurricane (and some times it is even great)!

I am confused!

I’ve done it again. I started a new online business thinking that some out of the box solutions would work for managing it. Turns out, in spite of my initial thinking that I had covered the bases, it turns out that none of those solutions fully matches my business requirements. So now I have to either rely on my own wits and poor coding skills to roll my own solution or spend money I don’t have to pay someone smarter than me to code my vision all while hoping I’ll find enough customers to recover the cost. What was I thinking?!

The Director of my employer's Firmware Engineering department, an older guy, sent out a department-wide email introducing a new hire. IN COMIC SANS.

Even though I am a new employee myself, I cannot let a disgrace like this pass unaddressed. So I politely and as respectfully as possible urged him not to use Comic Sans in a professional setting, and even offered rationale & alternatives.

He essentially responded, "No offense, but I'm gonna use whichever font I choose," but with that one simple sentence riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.

Shortly afterwards, he then sent out a mass email introducing me as a new hire. With my provided bio in a business-appropriate font, sandwiched between two hideous blocks of Comic Sans.

Honestly, how the fuck do people like this make it to a managerial position? >_>

Has anyone ever had the joy of dragging their employer kicking and screaming into the 20th century?

I've been here a little over a year, and slowly but surely I'm moving us forward.

We implemented git via GitLab (our it department already had an on premise installation), I've got us up and running with basic pipelines, I'm pushing TDD, im leading the move towards APIs for new development, and I'm implementing new projects to streamline our work, mainly by automating tasks which currently can take hours with hundreds of manual changes.

It's slow going, and there's lots of legacy business critical apps which we won't be able to change, but we're getting there.

If things keep going smoothly then I might even ask for a ride to reflect my benefit to the business, and extra responsibilities I've taken on which are far beyond my official job as an SQL Developer

I decided to try a new mono font in my editor, this is a relatively new font called IBM Plex.

I can hear the sounds of a 1401 crunching through the punch cards while the printing out curlies that scream THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Mmmmm....I like it.

Needed a new website for my business, so learned how to build one

!rant
So, my friend and I want to start a small business. For that, we will need an online shop. Since it's not happening tomorrow, I figured I could take the time and build it myself.
However, I've never done anything of the sorts, so... where do I start?
I don't have any specific tech stack in mind, I am new to it all.
Help?

So, while I was hunting for job...waiting for reply to the job I applied. (As now is CNY) , so my friends and I do a little bit of freelancing...

So this business owner wanted an Ewallet app in Kaios. It's possible but he keep complaining that why me and friends so slow and can't deliver in a day. WOW! He said he "Create" software before.

To burst my resentment, I asked him to show us what platform he use for creating application. He showed us "Wix.xom"

Long story short, we dropped the project. Find a new one.

My company is getting a new website. This involves getting new hosting.

I made the old one, and it's all just static html. I'm not that attached to it but it's an important detail.

The bosses want the switch to the new site to happen instantly, but I pointed out that with DNS propagation times etc it can't really happen that way.

So I suggested the new web guys host our old site for a few days and we change the DNS now. Then when they want to launch we don't have to wait for the DNS and they can just swap it out.

This involves dropping 10MB of html files into the web directory on the new server.

For this service they are charging us for 2 hours of their time!

I guess I'm in the wrong business...

I just come up with new business👔\projects💻 ideas, once in a while, without stop✋.

Nowadays I'm implementing ☝️ of them and I don't know about the future but for sure it will be busy with useful software for nontechnical 🚶 people around the world 🌍🌎🌏,
possibly 👄 source.

happy new year! what do yall have planned for this year? I'm thinking about writing me up a miniature jarvis to automate my Web Development business, nothing really special just automated invoices, website installs, calendar, contract signing, etc. where all I have to do is type up a requirement list and code

Happened today,
A senior guy who knows how to design “says he have a creative agency as a side business” came up with a new website design with the approval from executive and asked us to develop it!

With no discussing with the developers, or the designer in our team! And his design is a full one page website filled with full page modals whenever you click something!!

And my dear manager of course approved it.

I am not against the design or anything, but I am against that we aren’t involve in something like this. The design is doable, but the page load will be heavy because it contain a lot of pictures, and SEO will be bullshit. Developers should give their technical opinion in the design but they don’t understand!

I cannot remember having seen a more unethical and pushy user interface than the one of viagogo.

I'm a frustrated to close the entire tab within the first 10 seconds. It's a sad story on on how it tries to instill a sense of urgency to BOOK NOW!

100 people are looking RIGHT NOW at the YOUR offer! Stop thinking, act fast! BUY IT, YOU FOOL OR IT IS GONE!

Here, see all those other options are already sold out m( Oh look, that option over there? Just sold out in this very instant you lazy ass.

I have seen something similar on booking.com and airbnb, yet this egregious implementation truly gets my blood boiling and sets a new low.

I'll take my business elsewhere.

If you develop a web shop, treat your customers as actual adults. Let them breathe. Let them make an informed decision.

If you need to rush them, your business model is broken.

If my employer would ask me to develop something like that, I'd escalate hard. If that wouldn't suffice, I'd reject implementing that anti-feature and would look for a new job out of principle.

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

A webcrawler that uses deep learning to find realy bad small and medium business websites. So that you could sell them a new shiny website.

Went into a client meeting to present pricing, timescales etc. for custom web app. After a short period of chit chat they tell me they've gone way over budget. They explain to me that they'll need to close their business if they don't get this thing built (the business consists of him and the other guy at the meeting). They currently have a website that is an e-commerce type deal, apart from the checkout process doesn't work! They basically want me to do it for free.

I may consider if I was going to benefit from new clients etc. but I'm not.

However, the problem is that one of my companies has been (IT) supporting this guy's other company for around 5 years. It's a bit of a shitty situation as that contract accounts for about 15% of our income.

That meeting was last Monday and I told them I would think about it. I have another meeting this Friday and am thinking I'm going to have to break the news gently ffs.

I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).

And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.

Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!

I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.

I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.

You know how people are making fun of duo lingo birb getting’ all in your business about learning new language & not missing out on your daily exercises?

Well, our jira just upped the ante.. Boss asks why task xy is assigned to him.. um dunno?! I go check activity, as I don't even remember doing anything with that task recently..

All the dates, 'just now' remarks etc. on activity tab are in Russian.. WTF jira?!
ты пытаешься мне что-то сказать?

Company tool over a Magento shop from an internal solo developer. They made a new theme based on a bought theme, but the developer who started it is leaving. The 'developer' (yes, quoting it now) made a royal mess about it; rewriting core files, overwriting theme files, leaving JavaScript alerts all over the place, placing business logic in templates and defining CSS classes with functions in custom module block classes. I could go on for a while. After the first sprint we tried to convince the customer to do a complete rebuild, but we couldn't convince him...

The 'developer' has been hold on for now to give support on his crappy code and my next few months are filled with working in this mess without cleaning up the technical debt because we don't have enough time for that... FML

Question for you desktop guys. I was thinking of making a desktop app with a GUI as a side project. It's mostly going to be business-like CRUD, no fancy stuff. I was thinking of using electron (since I'm a web developer) but I read that it's slow and bloated. On the other hand I would like learning something new. I don't want to spend too much time on the GUI so I would prefer a framework/language that already has some nice open source gui packs available. I have only ever used JavaFX before for a tutorial, is that a good choice? Also, I would like it to work on both linux and windows.

Working on a project.
New gradle update comes out.
Updates his gradle.
Nothing works anymore!

Moral of the story.
This is why you should mind your own business.

Just had a meeting about what our product's vision was going to be. Without actually talking about what that vision was. It was a statement of the business goal amd some nonsense about how we were going to pick tickets based on reaching said business goal.

Like, yeah. That's what we have been doing. You are not new here so why are you acting like it. And yet these people are the ones who make more money than me. I need to start saying more obvious things. Maybe I'll be made a director.

Facebook is the new job wall. Seen someone posting asking for a business partners for a new web dev company. Funny thing is, when asking in the holes in his pitch he goes on the defens

Just taken on a new client through my own business. Great news! They pay well, everything seems to run smoothly and they're a great team.

They gave me access to their Gitlab repos and all looked well...until...no branches! They have zero branches to determine what is the current live distributed project, dev project or any of the various other reasons. I don't often use git but this really bugs me!

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

I've been infcted with writing awful, sinful, obscure code, so others can't read or change it.

Recently i got my first full time job as a programmer (yay). It's with a company with 15+ year old system and they are currently upgrading it. But it's driving me crazy with the massive mess of old and new code. However it only gets worse! Instead of making it simple and nice to read, they want it over complex, just to get something from the database i have create at least 5 fucking classes and endless SQL code, the old system didn't requier any SQL or the creation og new classes, WTF. I've become a sinner, of corse i use the old system, but i do it secretly, and i obscurify my code so others can't understand. It's shameful, but i'm afraid to confront the older programmers, they've spend too much time in the system and they've been in the business for a lot longer than me.

In the mid-2010s, we barely had any apps in our native language and popular coupon and review sites were lackluster in our neck of the woods.
So me and some old uni colleagues got together to make a WhatsApp based "wtf is going on right now and right around here"
think Groupon meets yelp meets Google maps meet trending topics. The idea was that local business would post deals and events and people would comment on it giving stars on real time, with geolocation. So you could see what was going on right next to you, and business owners only needed WhatsApp installed to post new topics.

We... failed to go viral. That simple. Things get frustrating when infinite no-questions-asked venture capital is not available.

Then me and the other founders got very lucrative jobs in former British colonies and that was it.

This idea might still work nowadays, but it would be reeeealy hard to navigate around Whatsapp's terms of service.
Good luck to anyone who might want to try.

First post yay!
I'm a "tech" lead for my team. The "tech" stands for technically, I can go on a whole different rant there but that's not why we're here today.
So we have a new PM on our side and a new PM on the client side. I've been working on this project longer than any of the devs and PMs have.
One of the tasks that my team does is validate and ingest data. It's pretty straightforward and it's fully automated. It takes minutes, and at most an hour, to complete this task. We get these tasks from users randomly and they don't have any schedule to it. It's FIFO basis and we just add it to our current sprint if we have bandwidth or add it to the next one if we don't. Not a big deal, no users have complained about it before, it's just business as usual. And we have a tracker of when we received it, how big it was and when it's been ingested. Super simple.
So now comes in the new client PM. He's been asking us to come up with timelines for these ingestions. My project's new PM is bending over to him and saying okay we'll come up with it, no problem. Well, there is a problem. We don't know that far in advance for when these tasks are coming in. Even if we did, now we're supposed to create timelines for a 10 min task? It literally is uploading a file and our system handles everything and I've explained that to my pm but he still is like well that's what they want. It takes less effort to do the ingestion than to make these timelines. It just means project managers bothering devs about timelines.
Idk how to deal with this. Thoughts? Any similar experiences?

you literally change about 80% of your business flow then demand new features/modules for literally at least once every 3 months, then you are angry why your 2 underpaid, overworked programmers can't catch up.

I'm really trying my best to improve but the work I'm doing (both the code and the business theme) is so god damn boring that I feel like I'm torturing myself just trying to keep up. How am I supposed to learn and build myself when everything is so dull and gray? I can't even talk semi-passionately about the work I do, its all just picking up user stories with lengthy business specs on them updating old code or writing up some new code to fit some business / API standard I know nothing about. Occasionally I'll review other code from a developer doing the same thing and sift through trying to find some way to improve a project I don't care about. Hold down the nausea that comes from fighting off the mental fatigue as I struggle to find the words to explain how a component I made works in terms I don't understand too people that know and care much more than I do...

I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out. This isn't me, and every day I wake up and tell myself that my salary makes me happy because it gives me the ability to do the things I enjoy and live on my own and provide for loved ones, and then struggle to swallow the lump in my throat as I drive in the cold to a giant corporate office with a thousand other Me's doing the same shit but better and improving.

I honestly love what my company offers me as compensation, I'll likely not find any better. But once I have some experience under my belt and some debt paid off I have GOT to find a jobs somewhere that doesn't drain the will to live out of me

I had a discussion about SAAS and microtransactions with another dev. They are a little bit younger than me. The trend toward this in games and android apps were discussed. We found that we both avoid software which employs these business models.

We cannot be the only 2 people who avoid products employing these common business models. So I wonder what demographic pays for these services and products? I am to the point that if my kid asks to buy something in a game, I tell them that we will get rid of the game if they keep asking.

The only time I have paid for SAAS is when there is extraordinary perceived value. Quickbooks for small business is one such product (way cheaper than an accountant). Another is the Xbox game pass. So apparently for the game pass I am in the demographic.

Do we not like it because it is new? Or is it a kind of sleazy business tactic? I dunno. I would rather pay up front for most things. I feel like SAAS will be employed in software with proprietary file formats which require a subscription to even get to your data. Vendor lock-in.

I love business ya know, always soo damned smart.

Our current products code base is soo old it will literally up and stop working come December, from April we cannot launch new clients on it.

The new app should be production ready, at least the MVP with our most essential features.

A week from tomorrow a new senior dev starts so that he can build new features into the current app.

Can anyone tell me what getting a CS degree at CMU is like?

My younger bro is graduating from there but from what he always says, it's just work work work work...

Never told me he did anything interesting or extra curriculars though my impression was CMU is the place where all the cool new stuff happens like Pixar, DARPA, robots, etc.

I went to NYU (useless business degree) and am probably more introverted than him yet compared to him it seems I spent 4 yrs partying...

I rewrote a giant VBA workbook (lots of business formulas, custom pivots of the data) into Java apps/microservices so that new tabs, other reports can be easily added using (JSON) data from the other apps.

In general, I was the only dev in the team that understood that monoliths are hard to change or scale...

Working in an Agile software development department (12 dev teams, >100 developers) inside a very old school traditional business (15000 staff, several billion annual turnover) is an uphill struggle that I don’t know if I have the energy to persevere with.

New year is making me think I push the launch button on a product that I spent all of last year building.

For context I should add that I am a senior person / leader in the department so I have to deal with a lot of shit from the suits.

Migrating an existing report from old system to new.

Business: We reviewed the differences you raised and why they're acceptable and this seems fine. But before we provide approval for your productionization, we would like these changes...

*1 month later, changes are made*

Business: you reported new differences. We can't give you approval until you tell us explain them all

Me: `••π÷¶×¶π|``•√÷÷÷π√^°°¥®^¥€€!!!!!!!

Can someone give me a new job so I can just walk in, say fuck it, I quit!!!"

Sometimes I just want to do that now but getting a new job is hard.... for reasons unrelated to how well I can code...

We have to deliver a new functionality in 2 weeks and the client hasn't share with as the specs of the flow and the business details yet.
So until today we had developed the half functionality believing that our system will communicate with Web services with a third - not the actual one.
We figured it almost by luck, when randomly, a colleague from the third system made a funny comment.....

Started new contract recently, their main product is aiming to be some kind of automation holy grail for business, basically low code nonsense integrating with most of the industry standard tools like sap or confluence. Their entire infrastructure is setup manually, slowly transitioning from on premise to AWS. No infra as code, no playbooks, not even scripts, just "engineers" painstakingly clicking the UI. They don't seem to see the irony of being automation company that doesn't use automation, but I'm having a good laugh at least.

Working on implementing a new networking layer for business security requirements...but the requirements were talked about in backdoor "special" meetings; "lowly" implementation engineers aren't allowed in. God knows the engineers implementing the solution don't need to know requirements for what they are implementing 🙃

"Just encrypt everything!"
Oh sure let me just pull out my magic button 🤬

!rant

To all the Mac users in here, I want to get in on the iOS app business, but I kinda don't have money for a new macbook. SO! What are your experiences with MacBooks older than 2013? I'm talking about the Air and Pro. Keep in mind that I won't need to run VMs in this, as I have another new Windows PC fully loaded.

Weekend Project-A-thon

over a decade ago, I created a very simple php script, but because I was new to php, it took 2 months to code

I eventually sold half my interest in the business, and it was updated, upgraded, etc.

But now I have to clone it. And I have a weekend to do it. I've come a long way with my coding skills. I think it's possible.

Project Start Time: 9 a.m. Eastern.

My timer has started already. Wish me luck!

To keep me company, what is your weekend project you've been putting off, and do you think you could do it in 2 days?

I am starting my web development business and i intend to focus on building mainly custom ecommerce solutions to small and medium businesses or large ones too. I am just about to launch my first project and my client has been great.
Any advice from the pros in the house who have been there done that will be worth more than diamond right now to me.
I like advice mainly on how to find new clients.

The first company I ever worked for thought it was a good idea to have all business logic in stored procedures "for speed".

It worked. Except when you need to add BC breaking features.

The solution? Keep the legacy code in file do_something.sql and add the new functionality in do_something_1.sql.

It became a sordid game trying to find the highest postfix. My record was 16.

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.

Yes and we recently opened a new office in Amsterdam. Because because from Amsterdam only want to do business with people from Amsterdam.

Well great. You think i want to go over there? My company has an office in Switserland. And the previous one in Curacao. I got here because i can bike or even walk this distance if i wanted.

When I was new developer and accidentally did testing of an important internal business app on what I thought was dev but was actually production... and of course has entered some crude humor as data because it was "dev".

When the new owner of the company decide to regroup every branches of the business to use a disastrous unoptimised .NET software. When the current one is very fast, the interface kinda UX-friendly. Now its, a home hosted .NET software with Windows forms elements with multi-windows inside the main software. Just to help you create yourself an image of the situation. It cannot be installed if there is more languages then only En-US. It will freeze the updater.

The time between switching tabs is in average a 3-4-5 seconds each time.

WTF WTF WTF
FUCK YOU SAMSUNG NOTE 8 NOTES APP

FYI : I was ex iPhone user.

I bought a new Samsung note 8 mobile. It has Easy Do app simillar to Notes.

So I had a meeting with business meetup with potential ideas and leads. And i was writing on this Notes app.

After the meetimg done, I closed the app.
And next day (today) I wanted to check what I have got from meetings. And fucking found that this app does not save it until you press save button.

Okay. I AGREE MAY BE MY FAULT, BUT THAT FUCKING APP SHOULD HAVE ASKED ME WHETHER I WANTED TO SAVE IT OR NOT THE SIMPLEST NOTEPAD WILL DO EVEN YOU TRY TO CLOSE IT.

FUCK IT THAT APP.

Is disaster recovery capability to meet business requirements and testing it part of your new system implementation roadmap?

Happy new year everyone. Quit games. Invest in yourself. Career or business :)