Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

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?"

So my landlord just came up and asked why I'm using so much bandwidth (they've just had a new line installed so they're monitoring it like hell for some reason) so we had a chat, I told him I'm a Web Developer so I'm uploading and downloading a load, and bare in mind this is student housing, he offered to install a wired connection in my flat only so I'll have a decent and stable connection when all the other students come back in September.

This is the first time in my life I feel like I'm not paying enough rent!

Tried to impress the boss with my work ethic by staying late to install a new VoIP system. Wasn’t even part of my job description. A few days later I had a flat tire on the way to work. It took me a couple hours to get that taken care of. When I got to work, the boss told me I had to work 2 extra hours that week to make it up. I reminded him that I had worked overtime recently to install his new phone system. He said, “Doesn’t matter. You still need to make up the hours.”

From that moment on I never worked one second more for him than I had to. I quit less than a year into the job.

Present for my new flat ;)
There is no place like ...

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

I hate how willing companies are to let someone go over money.

I’ll use a real life example with someone I knew. This person joined a company at the entry-level developer and worked up to a senior level. His pay rises were around 3% per year with around a 5–7% promotion raise (there were two of these).

At this point, 4–5 years after joining, he was making far under what a senior developer salary was in his area. Eventually, he interviewed on the team of a friend at another company and was offered a 40% increase. Four-Zero. CRAZY.

What the company did is baffling to me.

His boss said they may be willing to increase 5%, but there was no way they could even match what the other company offered, let alone beat it. The benefits were better at the new company, but he would’ve stayed with the original for a salary match.

So he left…

But what did the original company do? Hired a new senior level developer for the same dollar amount the dev was offered at the new one, then lost about 6 months ramping up that developer due to a super complex code base, and the new developer turned out to be much less capable than the one they just let go.

So wtf? It’s flat out stupid on the company’s part. Some sort of effed up pride or something.

They’d rather let someone walk out the door, knowing it’ll cost just as much to replace them, plus losing literally tens of thousands of dollars on ramp up time, and they gamble on getting a capable developer instead of a known, proven, loyal developer.

Thankfully, the younger tech companies understand this, and many pay people appropriate to level and talent, regardless of what they were making before they advanced to that level.

1. Buy a connected armwrist that tells you the time, how good your sleep is, your heartbeat and stuff like that
2. Manage to loose the cable that charges the device
3. Get mad
4. Finally decide to buy a new one after digging in your 50 m^2 flat in vain
5. Your stuff is coming in 12 years, I mean days. Have a lot of advertisement of this particular cable wherever you go for the next two weeks
6. The thing finally gets delivered. Let's not be stupid like before and put it in a logical place, like permanently plugged in the usb port above my computer tower.
7. Find the supposed lost cable at said place.

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

New flat. Still no internet.

Time to do some reading

*Moves to another town to start a new job
*Been living in a dorm for the past month
*Starts looking for flats to rent
*Misses a few nice ones because he finds their ads a few hours late
*Starts developing an app that looks for new flat ads that matches his requirements and notifies him of their existence
*Finds a nice flat by accident before he even finish developing the app
*Refuses to rent it only because he believes his app could do better!

Me in a nutshell!

Once I moved to new flat that had no internet connection yet, so I went to restaurant located under my apartment, that had WiFi secured with password. I asked for it while waiting for the order - it was "A1B2C3D4". After a while I got anoyed that it was so slow, so checked if can acces router admin page and restrict access for their clients. It turned out I can and they used default login and password, so they ended up with only my MAC whitelisted. Seemed they had connected their own business PC ("office PC") via LAN too, so I was curious if they call ISP to check it out. I checked the router settings every day, even after I got my own internet connction and they had it blocked for about 3 weeks. Then they changed WiFi password, so I came again, asked for password (another shitty one), checked router admin page and... still default login and password...

Before I left corporate America, I worked with a guy who was basically the definition of 'idiot savant' sans the actual diagnosis. He was ridiculously smart, but couldn't stay on task to save his life.

Like one time we landed a project with a major client. My team was running backend, his was running mobile integration. After a month of little to no visible activity, we approached him and he just said 'oh yea, i got sidetracked'... but he wasn't working on anything else. Just found some random shinny pebble that caught his attention and he bailed on everything else.

To make matters worse, his personal hygiene was nonexistent (I don't think he's showered since either), and he LOVED writing things in super-obscure languages that even the best we had hadn't ever heard of, with nonsensical (and often totally misleading) variable names and no inline comments. Trying to put someone new on something he'd touched was like asking an English professor to translate a 10K year old tablet dug up in the middle of the desert. Just didn't work.

But... the CEO flat out refused to get rid of him for years, until virtually every other employee simultaneously turned in our two weeks.

So I bought myself some computer glasses after feeling uncomfortable looking at a screen with "bare" eyes (I don't wear corrective glasses).

But the other day, I lost them.

I looked for them everywhere, under each grain of dust I could find. They were nowhere to be found.

Reluctantly, I bought new ones. They arrived today, I unpack them, test them, and then do some flat cleaning. I lift some envelope and...

My first pair was sitting there, innocently.

Fuck me.

My biggest enemy is what i call "development fork bomb".
My boss duplicates code on a daily basis. Instead of creating subclasses he simply creates new files by copying lines from other files. The projects class hierarchy is as flat as holland.
You can take a comment, do a project-wide search and you will find 3+ matches, an ugly hack i wrote exists 4 times in the project, and so on.

Worst of all, we spend more time on bugfixes than refactoring. With my power i could add a commit-hook to block or lessen this behaviour, but i cant. There's no program that can detect this reliably and sometimes it needs to be done.

This is a curse i'm stuck with appearently.

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

I want to finish my masters degree, get a nice job that helps me find my place in CS, get a new, bigger flat and add some hamsters to my family to become the crazy single hamster lady I was always meant to be.

Friends of mine have a new flat.

It's a nice flat. Cheap. Noone wanted it. 100 square meters.

Reason noone wanted it...

Previous owners were bastards from hell.

Really. Every motherfucking room needed to be completely renovated by the owner.

Door frames were made of wood, nice and old - at least the part that was left of them. Splinters, scratch marks, partially broken out of the wall.

2 windows needed to be fully replaced. Rest of the windows needed to be bleached, PET abrasive cleaning solution and the frames needed repair with resin as they drilled into the frames. Then treatment with sealant of course.

Yes. There was no other solution. After bleaching you recognized the windows were white. Before... Let's not talk about it.

The previous owners even managed to destroy the bathtub.

The kitchen tiles... Fat cleaner. Bleaching. Abrasion. Polishing.

Soooo.

Day of moving.

The apartment is in the 6th floor / level.

Cran / lift was ordered.

16 people wanted to come.

7 people came.

2 including myself couldn't lift heavy stuff nor walk the stairs due to health issues.

Crane broke after first try.

Today. I want to murder the previous owners. After torture and crucification.

I'm feeling levels of pain I couldn't Imagine before.

Only hate and beer let's me keep my shit together.

I REALLY didn't think after renovating and cleaning the flat for my friends in the last several weeks that it could get worse.

Boy. I was wrong.

Thanks for letting me vent here. I really feel devastated currently -.-

And I need to help them tomorrow, too.

Bikini Atoll, tchernobyl and every other atom bomb desaster Zone combined looks better than the chaos in their flat.

Everyone who could lift shoved everything inside.

I solo carried everything that wasn't too large in the room and then, as every room looked like desaster, completely managed the kitchen (cleaning, unpacking, trash, placing everything where it belongs and so on) :( :(

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

The stupidest technical question I have ever been asked is actually more of a design question, but I think it'll appeal to DevRant people.

I had thrown together a logo for a new system that my team was making. The logo was basically a flat, solid circle of our corporate shade of blue, with the name of the product overlaid in Helvetica Light. It looked okay. Ish. Good enough, anyway.

Our junior-most senior manager came to have a look. She was the sort of person who always had to give feedback, on EVERYTHING. Everyone had given this little logo the nod, but she had to stare at it for ages, and then eventually asked:

"I like the text, but can you rotate the circle a few degrees?"

.
.
.

After an awkward pause I'm pleased to report that she realised her own mistake and we laughed it off, so I was not forced to stand up, point at her, and yell "DURRRRRRRRRR".

Here comes the story how I became a DevRanter.
When I was young, I built an expensive gamer-machnine, so I had to crack games. I Got used to computers, so I startet an apprenticeship in IT. I finished with good grades. I left everything and everyone behind and moved in a city, found a parttime job as a PHP developer and started studying CS. After 5 years doing work as developer, studying CS, creeping around as soldier, I finally finished and graduated. After a few months working fulltime (same job), as my life began to settle down and I got bored.
A flatmate (also CS) laughed his ass off about something, then he introduced me to DevRant. It became part of my life to read DevRant, to overcome boredom. But there are not enough new Rants.. I'm f'cked. OK, I resigned my Job, and my flat and signed up for the BS in natural scinces at university in an even bigger city. I will again leave everything behind to begin a new life. Now I'm planing to freelance to pay the bills and challenge me again. Wish me luck :)

So I am beginning this new life with writing this story, how i became a dev. I klick Post, and bang! "please verify your email before ranting.. blah" I got no mail, no span, nothing. Resend.. wait.. nothing. I WAS BORED AGAIN!! FUCK YOU MAIL-SERVER, WHY CAN'T YOU SEND AN EMAIL WITHIN SECONDS OR MINUTES, WE ARE IN 21ST CENTURY AND THE INTERNET CONSISTS MAINLY OF OPTIC FIBER CABLES!!
And this is, dear DevRant community, how i become a Ranter, just then when I wanted to Post my first story.

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

In an art school. 3 years into our artistic degree. They decided to teach us web development. Me coming from a background of web though that this was going to be easy.

Little did I know that I'll see a new perspective of web design. These people, many of whom do not know of flat design, are actually making real shit that looks gorgeous! I love my classmates!

My best prank: A year ago I was at my friends flat, which he finally rented with his new girlfriend. He is a kind of person, which has like constantly opened 110 tabs in chrome, three or four instances of chrome running, torrenting at full speed and in the meanwhile a few films having opened to "watch" later. He is very very secure about his computer and NEVER leaves me or anyone else alone with his computer. That day we were just talking in the same room, and he goes for some food. I was like yeah thats my chance to prank him. So I opened a new tab and came with an idea - what If I change his desktop background to some random chick, to prank both him and his gf. I knew she will not be mad but his reaction would be priceless (it was his first gf). So I started googling, found a three pretty naked chicks. This was like soft porn, they were still "dressed" but not much. I did not wanted to use a porn for this.
So I was about to download image - right click - save as - little window opened and..

...what the hell, that guy had literally like terabytes of porn in download folder, all totally in one chaos, thousands of images, millions of downloaded videos, all categories just everything from gangbang to milfs or old/ young, what the fuck that computer was like cursed station of porn.

In that point I was like fuck that. This prank has no sense then. So I just closed that little window and did nothing. Prank failed.

Nowdays, He still does not know what I know about his "hobbies". And I will never say him lol. About a months after he broke with his gf and moved to different house. He has now three monitors attached to his computer and 4tb of space. He is still complaining about "lack of space" and "too big downloaded movies" but we all know what is going on lol. We call his "working deck" a sacred porn station.

WOOOP-DE-FUCKING-DO I HATE MY ISP (well actually the company which is reliable for the cable networks which lead to my/our new home).

WhAtEvErYoUmEaN and I moved yesterday to a new flat. Not spectacular at all except that mentioned company cancelled the appointment ON THE SAME FUCKING DAY! "We're so sorry. No internet until Thursday. At least"
Dickheads.

Well, so we are here in the middle of nowhere without internet. Time for old school books i guess😅

GDPR is about to happen.
Has anyone read the provisions?
It's like they put some flat earther anti-vaxers in a room and made them scribble up a law.

For those who don't know - it's a new, EU-wide "data privacy" law that's about to take effect on May 25th.

The gist of it is that if you fuck up even a little bit, you get to personally pay a fine of up to 10 Million Euros (for companies there's a separate clause, this is for employees only), or/and 2-3 years in jail if that fuck-up has caused material damages.
That little fuck-up can be as simple as losing a tiny amount of data between back-ups, or entrusting a third party with full access to some data (which is not prohibited) without controlling 100% what he can do with that data (which IS prohibited).

I shit you not, these are the explicit articles of that law.

If it is enforced in this way, it is the swift death of European economy. Just because some retards didn't read the privacy policy before agreeing to it, and then made a shit storm, everyone has to suffer.

"there is no WiFi in hell"
- me, thinking about my new flat(that has no internet yet)
Still wondering why this sentence came to mind...

Reverse engineering an applications internal object model and creating an database model for it...

The reason: Several versions of application exist, each deliver flat data by rest. The data is a complete potpourri of several different entities. *yaaaay*

Eg. an example fictional call (real call and data would get me in trouble I think....)

get_fiscal_report returning the fiscal data for _several_ companies, the companies _subsidiaries_ and the respective _segments_ for a _year_ with a key value enumeration.

So it's an happy fuck up of N:N associative data that usually would be a hierarchical relationship...

Year - Company
Each Company has subsidiaries
Each Company subsidiary has segments
Each segment has a fixed enumeration of keys
Each key has then the monetary value (e.g. 'operating_income' - 155_000 US-$)

Example is made up, but my data contains exactly such a lovely nested hierarchical data flattened and misnamed to a point where it's close to garbage.

Yaaaay.

I had now 6 days of untucking this mess to a usable database representation...

Sprinkling Unique Keys everywhere...

Running persist script...

Getting exceptions...

Changing associations...

Running persist script...

Screaming.

Changing associations...

Violently cursing.

Running persist script.

Starting sacrificing interns...

6 days.

I need a new brain and a format of my soul.

-.-

Reverse engineering proprietary software is really an morbid adventure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New setup, in my new flat 😎

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

It baffles me that even now people still use ChatGPT to learn new things. LLMs are the antithesis of learning. They're inaccurate so you're left reasoning from flat out incorrect principles, they save you from encountering neighboring information to the answer you seek which is a central mechanic for developing a mental model, and the further away you are from common thought patterns the less their training applies which makes them fundamentally and unfixably terrible at detecting and correcting misunderstandings.

"Web design has a bad reputation for being stylistically trendy and same-looking. Some guy does a parallax scrolling site, and now your boss wants you to add that to your corporate PR website for some reason. Glossy buttons, Gaussian Noise, linen texture, new things that look fake-old, then back to minimalism and flat colors as a reaction to the glossy noisy textured fake-old stuff." - Jonas Downey

I don't know about others, but I would love to go back in time and start webdev in the early days of the internet, the idea of starting off in a place where no one knows for sure what we can accomplish with the new tech. Unlike now the small things have been discovered. Honestly I might just be crazy and narrowing my thoughts, but I rather be in the time that we would get excited over a 12mb thumbdrive than to be excited for a 2tera. Back when websites used to use flash unlike the standard "clean and flat" we have now.

I can only imagine how much fun it would've been literally starting out.

Just got the first invoice from my new flat. Who the hell writes invoices in comic sans and why? Well, I know who now. But why? So it wouldn't look so serious? But there is only few things that are more serious than invoice! Invitation to funeral im comic sans will look even weirder, but still...

Coding has absorbed my life.. I need a new side hobby for balance 😂 something hands-on, physically challenging and *social*. But I live at the most flat and boring place in germany and winter is approaching.. this will be a few boring, hazy months...

I got yet another scammer calling me, this time it's something wrong with my computer LOL calling from Microsoft.

I flat out said this:

OH so you're a scammer right? Because there is nothing wrong with my PC.

I know I was supposed to post the other number on 4chan, but where exactly would I do so? there are so many categories and I'm new to 4chan
The guy hung up immediately!

Here ya go: 05967175950 bastard deserves to go to jail scamming normal PC users out of their information!

I still have no internet at my new home. The technician will be here in 5 weeks. So I spend my time in the old flat sitting on the floor to get work done.

Roof is leaking... Due to rainy stormy weather here, I have now 3 buckets in my flat for catching the water.

Next thing that broke was the faucet in the kitchen... Whoever installed the kitchen (inherited from previous tenant) was a fricking fuck nugget. Not only are most important parts like the stove unbalanced (cooking is very fun...) - but most things were wrongly installed.

The rubber band under the faucet was a few mm larger than the faucet itself... Stretched out as someone really tightened the screws... Too tight. Friction tore the rubber band on one side. Note that the faucet is one of the large, pompous ones which weigh a fuckton. So the fucking faucet now - as the rubber band tore - turned into a sprinkler as the faucet moves due to water pressure.

Ok. Faucet out, new faucet in. Shouldn't be that hard.

Wait. Wtf?

Turns out they didn't use a milling head... The hole is a cone, top larger - then getting smaller.

Ok. No problem.

Let's do some drill action.

Uhm. Why is the place to the window wet... Oh. Great. Another leak.

*some mopping action*

Back to the kitchen. Realizing I didn't fully close the valve for water -.

Kitchen cabinet, next mopping action.

Water with saw dust is pretty ugly combination -.-

Aka: My relaxing Saturday became a full blown """Fuck you with an anchor""" day instead. Thanks universe. Love you hon. Please, next time put at least some lube on the anchor, entry is quite painful.

My first exposure to computers?

My father had bought this new machine (windows 98 "new" of course) and we put it in a very moist place (some kind of halfway balcony) in our old flat.

...which was pretty stupid.
One day it made a loud nois, started smoking and stopped responding.

I loved the animated paperclip though!

I remember back then when we were building an E-commerce website. To maintain good performance the boss insisted using flat table. This was also applied to other projects like GPS. That was already 2013 when NoSQL databases like MongoDB was around already. His concern is he didn't like to risk on new technologies and it would cost money for training instead of using the existing "MySQL" and Microsoft SQL Server.
Everything I learned from that guy was just poop.

I am forced to work with a client's notoriously slow SOAP api. Slow in this case is 1.5-2s per request.
The api is structured rather... creatively... at the same time. So we have to bombard it with thousands of requests to build our data base with historical SOAP data. Also the data sometimes is a couple of hours late, giving a flat line (all values at 0) until retroactively fixing the output for the same requests.
So to fill one dev data base with a year's worth of historical data (nice to have when testing a dashboard application) we hammer the api with ~20k requests (~1 million if we want to be thorough).
Best thing about that: There is no staging/test api and the prod api seems not to handle lots of requests at the same time very well...
Latest thought: Maybe we could put a varnish cache in front of the SOAP for testing. Better have wrong data, than nothing at all and we don't kill the prod clients every time we ramp up a new instance.
Also that would dramatically decrease the 4.2 hours of data pumping to about 7 minutes after the first run.

Applied in a company for a development work, as I have been a developer for some time now and want to switch jobs. The new company was larger and I had no experience of how processes work at larger companies.

I got a call and after the usual chit-chat I got asked if I would be interested in a support role. Since this was new to me I was afraid to flat-out say 'no', so I told them that I had applied to a developer role through their website. They said that theirs is a service-based company and interaction to clients is something everyone has to do. I started digging, as to why the current position is different from the one indicated on the website.
After some more conversation, the call ended.

Later I came to know from an acquaintance that there are both support and development roles at that company and since support positions are few people's "first choice" they first try all the candidates that call; those that fit into the support roles are assigned there.

Needless to say, the compensation and general nature of the support jobs is much inferior to proper development positions.

I dodged a bullet.

Join a new project & client site
Been a week and still no access, so no work
Told to read up on various subjects
Told to go back to internal office and talk with coworkers tomorrow
Get a flat tire on the way in, $200
Get it fixed
Comtinue to office
No one knows what I'm talking about
Call boss, no answer

What is my life, I just wanna to development

The fog of war over all that happened with my change of team is starting to dissipate.
3 people were involved and there were 4 different versions of the whole situtations, but from what I've been able to collect it looks like the company is expanding and one of the mail KPI for the current team leaders is how good they are at creating a NEW generation of team leaders, to take care of the new entries.
My previous team leader told me about all these new growth perspectives and the junior entries I could manage, knowing very well of the desire I have previously expressed of being a senior dev with my small group of juniors to teach.

I declined the offer, stating that this whole year has been exhausting. Every single time I've tried anything (using modules for new components on our old web client, tsdoc to document our types, suggesting technologies like ANYTHING BUT ANGULAR AND MONGO, telling how removing down migrations was a retarded move) my suggestions were either shrugged off or flat out refused. Let alone how every time I was proven right, except for angular but give it time and that will bite their tail as well.
Don't get me wrong: they are well withing their right when they take all those decisions, and more. But I DO NOT PLAN on selling a plethora of bad decisions to a new stack of devs as if they were the gold standard.
"I understand your reasons; you, as a company, need a well coordinated team all running towards a goal; loose cannons are harmful.
But now I need you to understand me: I do not agree with your technical direction. I never lied before and I will not start now. Promotions don't matter nearly as much as my integrity, and integrity in my world means speaking up about problems. Your position is perfectly valid, but mine is as well and they can't be reconciled. If I were you I'd make myself a favor and make sure IHateForALiving doesn't become a team leader; given your direction, I'm not the man you want right now".

As mentioned, one of the KPI for team leaders is how succesfull they are in finding new team leaders, and trying to turn me into one didn't end well; I love sharing knowledge, but being honest to myself is far more important to me. So this meant my previous team leader failed in a very big task, and thus was demoted? At the same time, I've been there for 2 years now so they're not really eager to replace me, but I'm under strict examination too as of now.

Just moved flats with a last minute confirmation, sadly the flat in question is not eligible for fibre broadband (high-rise) so had to settle for good old ASDL.

Find a good deal (as all providers are offering the same speeds/technology, all ASDL broadband is provided in the UK through BT landlines) to discover there is a mandatory 2 week waiting period to switch over ownership...

Fine, will wait 10 days for internet (torture except from dev rant on mobile internet, thanks for being text only), box arrives 3 days ago stating not to plug it in until activation date...

Fine I shall wait, today I get impatient and setup the router without connecting it to the landline so I can use the WiFi to connect to my Nas etc, login to WiFi navigate to Nas IP .... Automatic reroute to "login" page "We have detected your router is not connected to the landline, ensure your router is properly connected". Try logging into management site, works, change admin password etc. No setting to disable "self heal" functionality. No setting to setup static routes for my lab router, No setting to switch to modem only mode for when I inevitably buy a new wireless router for when this piece of crap can't handle the internal network traffic...

All this for a pitiful 10/? Mbps average, I want my fibre connection back :'(

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

New job, new city, my job is very good & coworkers as well, but since I'm an introvert I'm not good at making new friends, I'm not socializing other than talking to my colleagues at during office hours. After office I come at my flat and do nothing wish I was good enough to have friend. Or some girl to hangout with its so lonely during weekends.

I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?

Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).

Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)

I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.

I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?

I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?

I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

!dev (feel free ignore my rambling)

Fuck my piece of shit landlord that doesn't want me to provide a next tenant because they already have someone (without visiting, I believe they have some shady dealing since I noticed a pattern in regards to the last two flats that changed tenants) and doesn't give a shit about the kitchen I had built in / says "maybe you can leave it [for free] or maybeee the owner will take it but don't expect as much as 500 or 600€ and whatever the owner proposes is non negotiable [...] if you wanna take it out we'll buy a new one" (i.e. fuck you we rather pay 4k for a new one than give you the 2k it's worth)

(╯° □°） ╯︵ ┻━┻

aaaaargh this certainly doesn't help my stress levels which are already 11/10 with the flat search

So got first invoice for Internet in my new flat. Via e-mail with winmail.dat attached. WTF? Send them reply that their mailing system is broken. They replied that *I* probably have wrongly setup *Outlook* and sent me instructions how to configure my Outlook. Thank you, my mutt us fine and your instructions wouldn't work. Sent them another reply that I'm happy that they know the answer and that they should apply it to their setup as my mail setup is correct. Got e-mail with pdf. No wonder those guys don't suppprt IPv6 nor DNSSEC if they have troubles using plain e-mail. Maybe I should check whether they have DKIM or SPF and do some little evil...

"I say that flat is the new black; that 2D is the new avant-garde; that a surface doesn’t have to be ashamed of being a surface. Technology users of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your bas-relief buttons. Let us march forwards together, spurning chrome, into a cleaner, lighter future." - Steven Poole

Tl;dr:
My stupid ass needs a break, also a good english lesson, sry for grammar errors.

# rant.start()
You may want to ask how it is to be kind of stressed. I'll tell ya.
I'm half way through my semester and all of my profs had the same idea: projects. Huge ass projects for everyone with the smallest possible time to finish them. Also i'm moving in a new flat in a few weeks. Shove your projects up your fucking bleached arsehole and put a huge cork right beneath it.
I started to wonder why my stupid tkinter application started freezing after implemeting a thread for a small tcp module.
Confusion.
Frustration.
Hate.
Chaos.
Crying for help.
Zergrush on SO.
Realizing i used thread.run() instead of thread.start() .
Fml, i need a summer break.

Afraid of setting a new goal because as soon as I do I probably wont work towards it. I have this rebellious habit of not doing what I set out to some times. It really stunts my progress and is just flat out irritating.

MongoDB database with really relational data. One main collection that had refs to four other collections, all of those references necessary to populate data for a page view. Complicated aggregate to populate all the necessary data and then filter based on criteria selected by the user. And then the client decides that he wants the information to be sortable by column. Some of those columns are fields on the main model, no problem. Others are fields on the refs, which is more of a problem. Especially given that these refs aren’t one single object. They’re arrays of objects.

The revelation was that I could just write an aggregate function to flat map the main collection, returning only the fields necessary for the search, and output it to a new collection and instead use that new collection for displaying and filtering/sorting search results.

But you can’t run the aggregate all the time, you surely say. If anything changes in the main collection, it won’t be reflected in the search results!

Mongoose post(‘findOneAndUpdate’) hooks, my friends. Mongoose post(‘findOneAndUpdate’) hooks.

Never been so happy to have a thing working properly in my life.

nice, the way too old and confused woman i have to do work for suddenly remembered she has a meeting to showcase my mid-development app next tuesday.

she tells me on a friday the week before where i got holidays to have people build stuff in my (new) flat and i have a 1 week work travel thing next week...

i hate people ugh.

sure i can do this till tuesday, not like that shit takes weeks to get stable >;(

So, I'm bored at work (contract ends in one month and finished everything I could do), so I started searching for a new flat for September.
In France we have a website called "LeBonCoin" which is like craigslist, people post available flats.

But, being a nerd, instead of searching manually (peasants) (and also because I have so much free time on my hands), I coded a web scrapper in Python. It gets all the info (monthly rent, description,...)

So far so good, now need a way to make it calculate the distance between the flat and my next work place (for biking), and the city center.

I recently got into an argument with a random person on internet about the new Corsair XENEON FLEX OLED, the new fancy one that you can make curved or flat…
In my opinion it doesn't make any sense, curved is better, in particular with a 45" display, so it's a cool technology but useless in this case.

Apparently this guy thinks "for work is better flat, for gaming curved".
It made me thinking… really?
There is someone out there (and maybe here) that uses huge flat monitors or when have 2 puts them parallels to each other and not turned towards himself at an angle?

It seemed a random bullshit, but maybe I could find some valid arguments why "flat is better for work" or not. 🤔

We’re only random people living in random places, speaking random languages, eating random food, sleeping, studying and working random hours. Traveling to random points on a sphere.

Just random range is different.
Just random stuff happens on crossroads of two random dots and the entropy speed ups or slows down.

Nothing special at all.
Just a finite state machine iteration.

I mean the amount of effort we put into explanation of infinity is outstanding.

What if there is no infinity at all ?
What if infinity is just misunderstanding of our interpretation of the world around us. It’s just pixels, resolution, gaussian splatting, quantum state, you name it.

Hey man the world is flat. Just put it to the 2d space. How many space you need from a simulation perspective where your patient eyes can only see up to certain amount of light particles per second on a shitty lens.

Propose a world optimization techniques by slowing down subject perception, tiredness introduced. Compress memory, sleep introduced. Limit neurons, cpu power assigned. Deploy on cloud - put it to life. Exit 0 body failure. Exit 1 suicide. Kill -9 killed by tty from ip EARTH.X.Y

What you can do to make the world around this planet alive? Make it blink.

We developers are lazy and I believe that nature is even more lazy than us.

You think you’re going to elevator right now ? You’re going to the preloader. Looking at the window equals playing video from playback. Never goes live, just precomputed fsm. Cars, trains, airplains ? Preloaders everywhere. Highways to split traffic to cities and communication. The road and cities planning department is a matrix maintenance department. And don’t get me started about space.

Space is empty because it’s not even finished. So they put it all behind glass called milky way. You know how glass looked 500 years ago ? It was milky so it’s milky way so we don’t see shit.

If the space would be finished I’ll be starting writing this text from mars, finished it and sent from earth but no it’s light years guys, light years is not a second for a matter. Light year is a second of the the injected thoughts exchange only. Thoughts of the global computer called generative AI that they introduced on local computing devices called cloud.

Even the preloader system is not present, they left us with the one map and overpopulated demo. What a shit hole.I bet they’re increasing temperature right now to erase this alpha build and cash out. Obviously so many bugs here that his one can’t be fixed anymore. To many viruses.

Hope for 0days to start happening so we can escape using time travel or something.

I bet they cut a budget or something, moved the team to other projects. Or even worse solar system team got layoff off because we are just neurons that ordered to do it. And now we’re stuck in some maintenance mode, no new physics no new thoughts to pursue, just slow degeneration. I would pay more for the next run and switch to other galaxy far far away where they at lest have more modern light speed technology.

What do you think about it Trinity ? Not even worth wasting your time for that. No white rabbit this time.

I do not recommend this game at this stage of early access.
- only one available map despite promises for expansions over the years no single dlc arrived,
- missing space adventures
- no galaxy travel mode only a teaser trailers of what you can do in other “universes”
- developers don’t respond to complains
- despite diversity of species and buildings at first sight world looks to generic
- instead of new features bots with mind manipulation, AB testing and data harvesting was introduced
- death anti cheat mode installed

Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.

Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.

Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.

No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.

Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.

Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.

Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.

Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!

These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.

This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.

Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production.