HR: We have received complain that you have been sexually harassing an intern.
Me: No, I wasn’t. Me and the new intern all we talk about is Coding, Apps, and TV-Series
HR: You are lying. I have the words that you said to the intern. Do you want me to read it out.
Me: I have no clue what I said to the intern so please read it out.
HR: You said, “Always pull before you push”. Do you remember saying this?
Me: Yes, I was teaching the intern how to use GIT.
HR: Okay, let me call the intern and let see if he says the same.

** Intern **
HR: Was he sexually harassing you today at any time.
Intern: No
HR: Did he said, “Pull before you push” to you?
Intern: Yes
HR: What does that mean, sounds like a slang for something sexual.
Intern: haha, no it means that I should pull the changes made to the files before I can push the changes I did to the code from my computer.
HR: But he said something else like he was teaching you how to use GIT
Intern: Yes, that’s what GIT is.
HR: Okay both of you can go and don’t use this type of terms in the future it doesn’t make good working culture.

There's this guy where I work who's one of the senior linux engineers. To me, he's like a linux god. He knows how to solve the most difficult problems and somehow copes with all the stress/workload. Next to that, he's only one year older than me!

Whenever I'm at work, I consider myself a junior, which I actually am. I also, as said earlier, see this senior guy as a fucking linux god and consider myself to be an absolute newbie around him but he is the most kind/friendly guy ever.

But then, today, something happened which made me feel like a god in front of him, a very, very weird feeling.

For him, doing his stuff is the most normal thing in the world while for me, it's still a learning process.

For me, programming is the most normal thing in the wold, while for him, it's still something he just knows the very basics of.

He asked me if I knew something about javascript/jquery. Said yes as I often program/script in javascript.

Explained me what he wanted to get done, it was a very simple thing for me but after hours of online searching, his lack of javascript knowledge still got him nowhere.

Told him I'd give him a working script in 30 minutes. Emailed it to him in 10.

He seemed/reacted the way I always do when he solves something I have no clue how to solve.

It was really weird to witness *him* being amazed of something that *I* made/did.

Today was a good day where I saw that one person's limitations can be anothers' most easy thing, even if that another person sees that one person as a god.

New kid came to me in my break (while I was playing LoL) saying I should start coding (he had no clue what my role within the company is).
Said that if I won't get a career in league, I could just (as if it's done in a few minutes) learn coding and make a website with thousands of users (as if that is just done like 1 2 3).
Then with a big grin on his face he proceeded to say "if you ever have some issues with making websites, I could just come to him and he can teach me the basics of Javascript, HTML, CSS and PHP".
So I said: "and who are you?"
He told me his name and what he is going to do within the company.
So I said with a big grin on my face: "Ah, so you're the new kid the boss told me about, nice to meet you, from today on, I'll be your Senior."
I then saw his big grin disappear
then with a big smile on my face I proceeded to say: "If you ever have some issues, please come to see me and I'll be happy to teach you the basics of Javascript, HTML, PHP and CSS"

Then he walked away :^)

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.

She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.

Asked her anyways:

Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.

Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!

There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Beware: this is me expressing how I feel about my programming/my skillset, and so on. It might be imposter syndrome but I am having a fucking bad episode right now and I just need to get this the fuck out.

I work at a distribution center right now. Can I provide for myself? Yes. Do I even slightly like my work? No I fucking hate it to the point. I hate going there every day, doing shit I don't like, not being able to focus on the shit I love but that's it for me for now.

In my free time I still am able to program a little but then the (I will call it imposter syndrome for now as I have no clue how to call it) imposter syndrome comes looking around the FUCKING corner.

*What the fuck are you doing? For real man, someone else could do that like way fucking better*

*Wow man your code..... there are so many people who would write that a million times better*

*You have re-written this for 10 times now. But seriously, this still sucks fucking balls*.

Fucking hell. Yes, at programming level I am still a junior, I fucking know that. But it fucking sucks feeling like anyone but you would do the shit you're making better anyways.

How fucking down can you get yourself. How bad can you make yourself feel through just a few fucking words/thoughts.

The only thing I am happy about right now is the fact that a very good friend is able to keep me at least slightly sane right now.

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

Warning: contains swearwords!

Do you guy's also have coder-"friend" that:
- Always asks how to do things
- ask for code snippets
- steals your fucking code from Anydesk
- steals your passwords while testing
- steals your code from deobfuscated jar
- steals your jar and deobfuscate it
- steals your database to store stolen passphrases
- tries to convince you to build RATs for your users
- tries to convince you to build RATs for his users
- and so on...

??FOR FUCKING REAL THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL THAT HAPPENED TO ME!

HE IS A FUCKING SUCKER CUNT! HE PROMISED ME MULTIPLE TIMES THAT HE DELETED MY PROJECTS AND TELLS ME HE IS STILL USING THEM TO RESEARCH MY CODE FOR HIS CODE!!!

HE FUCKING RECORDED ME WHILE CODING WITH AN API I AM NOT USED TO WHILE I ASK HIM FREQUENTLY BECAUSE I HAVE NO CLUE AND HE THEN SENDS IT TO HIS FRIENDS TO PISS ME OF AND LAUGH ABOUT ME!!

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE WHY THE FUCK ARE ASSHOLES LIKE HIM NOT IN FUCKING PSYCHIATRY!

AND I CAN'T GET RID OF HIM BECAUSE I AM TOO FUCKING NICE!!

FOR GODS SAKE PLS LET A LIGHTNING STRIKE HIT HIM IN HIS FUCKING FACE!

AT FUCKING LEAST I GOT SENT AN IMAGE OF HIS ADDRESS SO I WILL SHIT IN A FUCKING BOX AND SEND IT TO THAT CUNT!

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".

So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.

We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business guy: hmmm, what do you think about getting the programmers to come to the office more often?
Me: uhhhh explain?
BG: feels like when working from home they might only give it their 90%, but in the office they'd do 100%.
Me: let's not talk about how you reached that conclusion for now. If you force them to come more often they will quit.
BG: what about the new people we want to hire?
Me: most jobs have full remote available, why would anyone pick us?
BG: hmmm. Btw next week we'll talk with some stakeholders about trying to get some outsource help. You know, for repetitive stuff that doesn't require in-house engineers.
Me: like what?
BG: you know, repetitive stuff

This is suffering. Is my only choice to tell the guy that he has no clue what he is talking about, should STFU, and let the technically capable people to handle themselves? As in, we already do but for some reason he still thinks he knows better than the people doing the god damn job? But if I do so, the salinity in his blood will bring other problems upon us.

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

Worst meeting. Hmm..

Embarrassment wise maybe the one where my boss called me the queen of porn in front of everyone. Yes, classy AF. (Just have to know him to know his sense of humor I guess).

Most cringe worthy meeting was probably when our out of state national director came in and basically told us he has no clue what we do nor does her care to learn. We brought up salaries to him as well as we're in the bottom 8th percentile for the industry in our area with HUMONGOUS work loads, like 20 sites per developer at once. This is a huge multi-million dollar corporation, mind you. We told him some of us have to have 3 jobs to survive and he basically said well you're an at will employee so there's the door. He also took phone calls and sent emails during my one on one meeting which we never finished even though he promised to. But he bought us a shirt, so you know, it's all cool. 🙄

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

I started to get super pissed off to people saying you don’t need a college, masters degree to get an IT job. Instead go and gain practical knowledge, showing your practical certificates projects is much better than a having a degree that doesn’t prove if you can do the job or not.

Is a degree absolutely necessary to get a job? No, I agree on that. You can tear yourself apart to be known make projects loads of people contribute in GitHub spend maybe years on practicing and creating stuff for your portfolio..

But excuse me what do you think people do in college studying degrees? Are we getting it from the shop in the corner on a Saturday?

Respect people’s achievements and titles. Especially Masters degrees push you hard, make you sweat apart from loads of courses you work at least a year on a practical project, dissertation, thesis and only pass if it is your own opinion and findings. It is not like a multiple choice exam certificate or you study watch videos for few months and create a web page.

Don’t throw shit on people’s efforts and accomplishments without knowing how it is achieved just because you don’t have it.

Yes it is not necessary. Does it make you learn? Yes! Is it practical? Yes! Does it help you get a job? Hell yes! Why most companies look for degrees? Do you think they might know what it takes to get it and the skills and knowledge you gain?

Don’t come and say in IT degrees not worth it without even knowing how to draw UML. Without knowing IT management you go and be a leader later on, no clue on how to manage projects, people and soft skills sweeping the floor.

It doesn’t matter if you are a YouTube celebrity or a president. What does the title say? “Master” now go, respect and digest it! Don’t be a sour loser.

Ooh I am fierce today and not done yet

Father: What is this? *hands me a box*
Me: 😯 *opens box*

The contents of the box: a white cube about an inch on each side, with a speaker on one side, a button on the other and three small holes.

Comes with a manual (square inch piece of plastic with a drawing) that shows you what the button does (turn it on, duh) and some indications as to what the various holes do.

Me: 😶 I have no clue... Maybe it's for taking calls? (though speaker mode does exist peeps)
Father: 😑What do you mean you don't know... Don't you know about stuff like this?

I love when my family assumes I am all knowing when it comes to anything running on electricity... Guys, just because I program I am not a psychic and am not better suited to fix your printer or fix your phone screens.

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

It was our first computer. probably it was 2008. I was super stupid back then. One day I saw a text file in our desktop, which says, "Hey $username, how are you? Message me here I-forgot-his-email@yahoo.com"
No matter how much we delete the text file, it kept on recreating and keep on adding same texts with multiple lines. I was really annoyed!

Yahoo messenger was popular back then. So I messaged the person using Yahoo messenger and he replied. Our conversation went this way:
Me: (after explaining a bit about the text file) what is this?
Him: it is a virus
Me: how do I delete this?
Him: if I teach you how to delete it, the whole purpose of creating it would be in vain
Me: okay, how do I create something like this?
Him: just Google

That day I was swearing at him from the bottom of my heart, not through messenger, but from my mind, because he didn't teach me how he made that virus.

I was like, "I will show you ***** that even I can make a virus better than that". So, I started googling & started learning how to make these scripts. The more I learned, the more it blew my mind. I was creating simple stuffs like, opening/closing CD rom every 5 seconds. It was so fun back then. Cause, my friends had no clue why their CD roms kept opening every 5 seconds.

After a few days, I started to thank the virus creator from the bottom of my heart. Cause, if he taught me how to create THAT virus that day, I probably would've just learned THAT one thing and stopped. But because he didn't teach me that, to learn one thing, I got to learn more than that one thing, which I'm really thankful for.

And then the journey started. Learned Batch, VBscript, C, C++, Java and so on. And still learning new things everyday...

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

//An okay long rant..

So i work at this small robotics start-up company I Copenhagen.
The first dumb part is that it only uses interns as staff, because then they don't need to pay people. (I am working part time, for free. Just to get experience (I am only 20 btw))

So.. I often get into an argument with my boss, since she is a designer with a "passion" for robotics (she has no clue how to do anything related to the work) But I often try to explain to her some current limitations in the staff, and what is possible for us to do, but she will never listen. She really wants us to design our own microcontroller board PCB, and she want it at the size of a coin. However when I tell her that none of the, non paid works has the experience or education to design such a thing, she never wants to acknowledge it, and it really pisses me off.
And her dad, who is the top boss, only care for esthetics when he is making a work environment, which is dumb when we just need to develop stuff...

Sorry if the rant was too long but had to get it out..

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

Commas.
I fix one display, and another breaks.

Now I’m getting “$$1002.99” and can’t figure out why. Where is this popup coming from? Where does the encrypted URL point to? What does this ajax call do? Where does the amount go? When does it change? Why is it a string now? Where does the total get defined? How far down the rabbit hole do I need to go?

Short short version:

I found something to try fixing. I made some changes, forced a crash to inspect, and… Joy! My log stopped updating. How long have I been debugging on stale data?

Skipping a long debugging session…

I discover a suspect instance var in a suspect method, and… i have no freaking clue where it’s being defined. It’s used in the class, but never defined in it. Oh, and the name is pretty generic, so searching for it is even more fun.

Just.
Qxfrfjkalstf.

WHO WRITES THIS CRAP?!
AND WHY DO PEOPLE CALL THEM “LEGENDS”? Like, really. That’s the word they use. “Legends.” I still can’t believe it.

I'm resignating from Arch, Ive used it this week for a school project and as a linux newb- I cant do a lot. I have no clue how to print stuff, where to find my connected networks or how to connect to them etc. I like what it offers and I know it can be good but I'm too new to all of this to effectively use it. BUT I'm not giving up, I'll try Manjaro next as I read that it's newb friendly and I really like how it looks.

Also attached an screen of my Arch setup: i3gaps, plasma and whatnot

how to become a true scum master:

- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense

- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)

- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.

- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.

- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.

stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.

Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.

My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p

Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.

PM: We don't need a spec. We'll figure it out as we go.
Me: O_O.... So what do you need the system to do?.....
PM: ( gives vague requirements)

4 weeks later I still no clue what they need.

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

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

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

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

When will I fuckin learn that
a) customers lie
b) customers are sloppy
c) customers are wrong
d) customers do not do their work (properly)
e) customers want us to do their (dirty) work
f) possibly all of the freakinly above?! + khm....

They will fuckin aaaalwaaaays say sth is not working after the update..
And I will alwaaaays assume I fucked up something..even if I didn't touch that part of the code/data..
And almost aaaaalways it turns out that the bug they complain about is how the system worked (or didn't work) before the update and/or some fuckup from their side..

Anyhow, I rushed over, grabbed the files went testing in dev..wtf, output is different, mine is ok, theirs is..wtf is that shit?!

Transfer newly built dll to test..same shit as on prod..wtf?! How?!

I assumed they have thing A correctly linked to thing B.. ofc thing A was linked to thing C in their case and in another case (our test) to correct thing B..
I got chillies when grabbing files, that
I should have tripple checked that they didn't fuck up something on the link part, but I just assumed they know what they were doing & that they checked they linked correct files with correct content already, before being pissy that the update fucked up things.. riiiight!! :/

I wanted to find solutions to this fuckup asap so I disregarded my gut feeling..yet again!! Fuuuck!
I've spent too much time trying to find ways to fix a bug that wasn't even a real bug to begin with.. :/

Fuuuuuck!!

So yeah, always treat the customers like they are 3yrs old & have no clue what they are doing & check exactly wtf they were indeed trying to do..it will save you time & nerves..

And note to self: reread this shit daily!! And imprint it in your brain that everything is not always your fault!!

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

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

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

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

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

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

2 hours later...

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

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

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

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

"four million dollars"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1st motherfucker.

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

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

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 months after starting developing my webapps I found out that I have one competitor that runs basically the same application service 2,5years already. There was no clue of him when I researched the field just came across by accident today. I feel quite desperate now he has features I didn't even think of and which are amazing. I don't know what to do now

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Sales guy: Hey, you're technical. Can you tell me how I'd go about doing (foobar) in this webapp I have here?
Almond: Err... I've never dealt with that webapp in my life. I wouldn't have a clue.
Sales guy: ...but you're a dev right? Oh well, never mind. Anyone more experienced around here that may know?
Almond: No idea, but I seriously doubt any of the devs will have used it. Maybe one of the other sales guys will?
Sales guy: So you're telling me *none* of the devs around here will know how to do this?!
Almond: Very unlikely (thinking why the hell would any devs be using a sales app, but whatever)

...15 minutes later...

Sales guy: Ahah, I figured it out! (Explains what buttons he had to click in crappy app to do foobar)
Almond: Glad you got it sorted!
Sales guy: I'm really surprised none of you devs could figure this out, but I could. Perhaps I should change careers and be a dev.

...what?!

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

One of the soulless parasitic drones commonly referred to as a "recruiter" happened to find a good fit. Pure coincidence, as he had no clue what the company did, or what the tech stack was.

If I'm ever switching again, I'll do it on my own. Just thinking about the fact that this guy pocketed €30k for 3 phone calls makes me sad.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I use a library and it gives me some strange error message. No problemo, just file an issue on GitHub asking the maintainer if I'm plain stupid or the lib actually has a flaw. As it was a question, I have not posted a dump and all the shit.
Maintainer responds with a snarky comment about his crystal ball being broken and I have to submit a log, a dump, debug information and a bunch of other stuff.
Well, what choice do I have, I collect all the requested information, create a wall of text comment, all nicely formatted.
And the issue ends here. Myths say, the maintainer got asked to join Elvis on Mars.

I mean, why do you ask all the shit from me in a unprofessional manner just to stop answering? Just say "I have no clue why it behaves like this" and I know whats playin. But that's just ... sad.

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

My internship is starting to make me feel really stupid

The issue seems easy but I literally have no clue what to do or even where to start. :(

My last boss, one of a kind:

Despite being an officer and me just a lowly enlisted, always closed the door and asked for my honest and unfiltered opinion on why whatever we're doing is a stupid fucking idea. Understood that when I call everyone idiots, it's not out of spite or disrespect. It's because they have no clue what they are doing and making nonsensical requests, and I just want to get us back on track.

A good boss doesn't say things like "I'm in charge so this is how we do it" or "I'm an officer so you can't criticize me because that's disrespect!" But instead listens to the ideas and thoughts of those that nobody else takes seriously.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

I don't wanna hear anyone dismissing college education, specially from people that can't do asymptotic analysis and have no clue what a pointer is. It's not fine. What do you think people spend 4+ years studying for? For this shit? There's a reason why a diploma has a weight, it's not just decoration.

I get it that the american educational system is fucked up and you guys have to pay a shit ton of money for it, but you can't just pretend it's worth nothing.

How diminishing it is to hear people shit on a life long struggle to get where i am today. I had to study a ton to get into college, and I'm still pouring my blood and mental health into my studies, only for some random to say that a youtube tutorial is worth the same.

http requests

literally the bread and butter of any software engineer building applications, you would ASSUME they know what they are doing...

and you're gonna write a seperate http get and post function for every type you have?

apparently stuff like this that is written by "senior" developers? you don't even have a basic understanding of software...

i'm won't do it that way, becuase i'm an adult, not a child

what i'm going to do is write a HTTP request util function that can be used for any type and HTTP verb. DRY, single responsibility, etc.

imagine making the http request itself a responsibility coupled to the type 😂😂😂😂

get a clue and come back later

i can't tell anymore if my thoughts are so outlandish compared to everyone else that no one understands them, or if i've been doing this so long that i just immediately understand what needs to be done and don't know how to explain it to anyone else anymore (or take the mental effort to)

peace out

oh P.S.: imagine thinking the SOLID principles are only applicable to OOP

stay safe out there folks, its getting more painful every day

TL;DR;

I was asked to give estimation on an app, that:
1. No one has a clue what it does, even though there is v1 on the store with almost 10% of functionality working
2. No one has a clue what should be in the new rewritten version
3. We are already behind schedule and I have no clue why, I've just been told that
4. They need UI flow that shows how the app will work with static data and when API's are ready (because ya know, writing code is easier than creating wireframes and modifying them accordingly) I will then need to link app with API as if it is as simple as drinking a cup of water, especially that: 1. What is water? 2. Do I have a cup or is it given, and 3. Relax bro, drinking water is like eating a burger, piece of cake!

I'm not sure what to do, not enough that it's React Native but also spaghetti requirements that no one was able to answer my simple question: What is the app responsible of?

P.S.: Some say I must rewrite the old app ONLY, no new features, others say: Turn the new web portal into mobile app, I say: WTF is going one?

So my uncle just bought an old hp server round that he didn't use at work anymore and I have no fucking clue what to do with it 😂

Spent around 5 hours last night trying to do honestly one of the most basic things in PHP with a classmate of mine.
We are making a website kind of like Google Photos where the user can upload their images, store some information about the images they uploaded. (Basically just an online photo storage site). For what ever damn reason we could not figure out why our images that the user would upload from a form where not being put into their associated user image folder; Hell for the longest time they weren't even being loaded onto our LAMP server.
We still have no fucking idea what made it start working, we went over our code and iterated it probably over a hundred times and suddenly..... Like I said we have no fucking clue why; it started to work.
Over 2 hours in a hangouts call and around 500 messages later it worked.
I think we all know how this feels.

What a fucking mess.

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

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

What didn't he do?
Practice.

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

it is a lazy weekend. no clue what to do.

Today on incompetent profs & classmates...

Dumb student forgets to exit vim and rewrites program 3 times before calling d prof
for help

I ask the prof for approval to use an IDE or a text editor in lab and she has no clue what an IDE is. I installed atom just as she left.

Another kid fooled into thinking web dev has no future.

Apparently I can't use laptop in class to execute programs as "other students may be at loss" i mean wtf that's their fkin problem why do I have to suffer.

Student questions unix prof about the file size limitation in fat32. She had a poker face.

Prof gives "hello world" program to sophomores. Nice.

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

Fuck my boss.
He's making me do non-dev work that I'm absolutely not qualified to do and he's even writing to me on Slack to make me do some of it outside my working days.
I'm getting so fucking anxious whenever I'm trying to work with this shit because I have no fucking clue what exactly am I supposed to do.
FUCK

I think I like teaching.

Today I was helping out a friend with an algorithm for an assignment because he had no idea how to do it (we're on the second semester). You could see that we was completely lost, without a clue on what to do. So I showed him how to think about programming, how to figure out the problem and the solution before going to the code. I was so goddam happy when I saw he understood it. At the start I was guiding him heavily, but towards the end I'd just loosely describe what he had to do (and, of course, explain why) and he'd know how to do it. It just made me so fucking happy and so fucking proud of him, I was dancing on my chair, you guys have no idea. He went from 0 to 60 in 2 hours, I could teach him what the teacher couldn't.

I college I'm kinda explaining a lot of stuff (mostly programming and calculus) to my friends, even to classmates I don't know (I made a few friends this way) and I fucking love it. Seeing people completely lost, shining a light on them and seeing them fly, it's fucking awesome. Idk it's just very fulfilling.

Not sure I'd like all other responsibilities that come with being a teacher, but teaching in of itself is **g r e a t**, definitely a career path I'm considering.

Today was a good day :)

Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...

FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.

Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

For robotics I decided to write a program that would automatically tune a PID loop (a loop with three magic constants that tells you how much power to give the motors).

Being a high school student who hasn't been taught anything about the theory of PID loops or the right way to tune them, I had no clue what I was doing. So instead of actually learning the calculus to do it, I just made an evolutionary tuner that keeps guessing slight variations of the last-best three constants.

Basically, you press start and the robot spins in circles until you come back in 15 minutes.

I'm fucking done.

I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.

After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.

Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.

For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.

What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.

They all think I'm a hacker.

My parents have no clue about what I do.

My wife is starting to understand (at least she knows I make web pages 90% of the time I'm working), but still doesn't get close to see the full picture.

Btw, they are all very supportive and I love them for that :-)

Thoughts on forced emergency support?

I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.

I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.

I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.

Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..

Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.

What the actual fuck?

Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..

#confused and #annoyed

Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?

Thanks.

I was working on a new feature for this legacy project.. Just minding my own buisness then all out of the blue I got an email from our client (before the email I exported the live database because I needed to reproduce a weird bug) saying the sync stopped working
<backstory>
The database needs to sync every 15 minutes because it has a master-master relationship with a 3rd party database..
</backstory>
So I was like shiiit! Did I do that!? So I checked the logs, nothing... I called the 3rd part to check if they have problems, nothing.. Then I checked the network logs... Again all fine... 30 nervous minutes later, I got a new mail... Saying it finally synced... Still have no clue what happened or if it ever was a problem... God damn clients man...

Hi everyone,
I got an hardware question. Im planning on getting a personal home server. I want to use it as a small gitlab server, continues integration, and the like for personal projects.
It has to be power efficient otherwise my dad will start crying.
I want it to be relatively cheap and running linux.
Ive got no clue what the best thing todo is. Should I get a prebuild one or build one myself.
For prebuild ones, what brands should I look at?
For a custom built what hardware do you recommend me?

There's this thought that keeps popping up in my head more frequently recently.

We are people who do heavy mind work. Our quality of life directly depends on our ability to come up with solutions. We've been training our minds for years, for decades, to get to the point where we are now.

Now stop for a moment. And imagine. You wake up one morning and you realize you can no longer code. You forgot all of it. You still can copy-paste answers from SO, but you don't know what questions to ask to get to those answers.... Your mind has pulled the DROP TABLE PROGRAMMING;COMMIT; stunt. From hero to zero in just 1 night.

You have no clue what happened, no idea whether you will recover. How does that affect your identity? Would you still try to climb the programmers' tree to the sweet spot you are in now? Would you choose some simpler profession instead, considering your age and time required to master that other profession? If you choose another profession - what would it be?
What would you do with your personal projects? You can't continue them yourself obviously... Would you let them die with the loss of your skills?

How closely is your profession related to your identity?

Now that I consider myself a person who's quite good in the field, this is becoming one of my fears. Sadly, it'll most likely come true someday. Either some accident or just old age, or even diseases/conditions at younger ages - there are so many things that could mess up your mind - the sole tool critical for our profession [to the picky ones: lumbers can't swing axes w/o hands, postman can't deliver mail w/o legs, politics can't lie without tongues, and we, engineers, cannot build with our minds even slightly off].

Since roughly 1 year ago I have been making "leftoff" comments in my code, whenever a work day ended or so, with a few notes on what I was doing and what I was about to work on next.

And I recommend it, I think that's good practice. Because I forgot to do it on friday and I have no GOD DAMN CLUE what I was working on :|

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

Notice how the Apple code samples have moved from the very well designed Objective C to a mature Swift... (sorry, typo, manure Swift) Swift 1.0, wait 2.0, no hold on 3.0, oh yea 4.0. It's a moving target for their developers with code samples all over the place...

Once Swift stabilizes, sure, ok, force everyone and everything to change (seriously?).

Apple, why the FUCK do you think we want to deal with your beta crap forced down our throat? Its bad enough the language is an inconsistent illogical mess but having to come along with you for the 'we-don't-have-a-clue-what-we-are-doing' ride is utter bullshit. Leave the GOD DAMN Objective C samples up for crying out loud.

TLDR; Default admin login on WEP encrypted WLAN router for getting free stuff at my hair stylist studio.

Free WLAN in my hair stylist studio: They had their WEP key laying around in the waiting area. Well, I am not very happy with WEP, thought that they never heard of security. Found the default GW address, typed it into my browser and pressed Enter, logged in with admin/1234 and voila, I was root on their ADSL router 😌 Even more annoyed now from such stupidity I decided to tell the manager. All I told him was: You use a default login on your router, you give the WiFi password for free, WEP is very very insecure and can be hacked in seconds, and do you know what criminals will do with your internet access? He really was shocked about that last question, blank horror, got very pale in just one sec. I felt a little bit sorry for my harsh statement, but I think he got the point 😉 Next problem was: he had no clue how to do a proper configuration (he even didn't knew the used ISP username or such things). Telled me that 'his brother' has installed it, and that he will call him as soon as possible. Told him about everything he should reconfigure now, and saw him writing down the stuff on a little post-it.

Well, he then asked me what he can pay me? Told him that I don't want anything, because I would be happy when he changes the security settings and that is pay enough. He still insisted for giving me something, so I agreed on one of a very good and expensive hairwax. Didn't used it once 😁

Some weeks later when I was coming back for another hair cut: Free WLAN, logged in with admin/1234, got access and repeated all I did the last time once more 😎

HOW CAN YOU NOT LEARN FROM FAILS??

Holy crap, just started working again on a personal project after a 1-month hiatus... Really struggling to get my head back where it was, I have (almost) no clue what I was doing or why.
Even the commit log and the comments and docs I've left around seem empty somehow.

Any good tips/tools for retracing steps? How do you start working on a codebase you've never touched before?

Is it just me or is it really fuckin amazing when ur teacher tells you after a year that you are a better programmer than he is 😒 even tho ur just a beginner?

I just started learning to code and i was already better at it than the person who is supposed to teach me... which is great if you ask me #sarcasm

And when we finish a simple task on if statements - which he thought was gonna take us a whole hour - in like 5 minutes, he doesnt let us work on our own programs: "Can you close that? Its not related to the lesson"
Ffs man! 😤 Am i supposed to sit here for an hour just staring into the void, doing fuck all, while i could actually improve my skills?

Then you go home and learn more in two hours than you'll ever do throughout the following 3 years in school.... 😧

If this is not a complete waste of time then i have no fucking clue what is.

GCSE Computer Science sucks (at least in my school). Is there anyone out there with similar issues or is it just our lucky bunch?

My advice to young/beginner programmers:
If you really want to learn, please just google what ur interested in and use stackoverflow

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

This is gonna get someone illogically upset, but idc about that.

I know it's ignorance of semantics but I'm tired of propagated ignorance changing the meaning of things.

Non-binary is NOT a legitimate term for whatever 'gender' you are!

I get what *whoever-started-it* was going for, but it's NOT valid. If you want to say that youre not male or female, fine... just don't abuse binary systems to do it. Just say youre non-bool/anti-boolean or identify with one of the, apparently 50, shades of gray.

I keep getting into logical loops to nowhere about this nonsense. No one is even defining what's supposed to be the 1 vs the 0. Which then makes me think '1 must be male... genitalia=1 in many ways...' which then sources back to the historic validity of males vs undervalued/less than human interpretations of females...

Then <brake>.
Ofc these people aren't going into the historical significance... they don't even realise how binary works! Ofc they'd have no clue that all 0s= no data... and 0s only have significance when viewed in placement to the 1s.

Let's all start using proper terminologies, like non-boolean. Maybe i can start a trend by paying people pennies to learn/teach wtf a boolean value is, and that binary can represent anything. With proper encoding the array is limitless... so being binary is actually a giant spectrum... therefore makes no sense to be "non-binary".

Ok... im done. It had to be said.

Who wants to start identifying as non, or educating wtf is, boolean with me???

I have 2 states:
- Having about a dozen interesting project ideas and not being able to decide which of them I want to tackle first
- Having 0 ideas and absolutely no clue about what to do now.

my brain feels like an AI. It just slices things it sees and layers them over and over again. It doesn’t even change things, leaving them pristine and intact, it doesn’t filter stuff out. I cite memes exactly, word by word, with the exact intonation, because I literally just lip syncing to that meme playing in my head as if I was watching a youtube video. Some days I’m not even conscious of my surroundings, I don’t realize where I am, what I do, I’m just caught in that process I can barely put in words. People ask me to do something for them, I do it, and they’re like “no! it’s not what I asked for, well, it is, but not in this sense!” If they asked me if I could make their company the most profitable one in their niche, my brain will probably decide to instead sink and destroy other companies there. All that unspoken, “common sense” knowledge, I don’t understand. I feel detached, as if everyone else was “in” on something, some common notion, meanwhile I’m alone with my perfect things. I feel like a perfect Haskell codebase trying to interact with biker bar gloryhole dirty equivalent of an API. I want things to be exact, I want things to be precise, I want words you say to have specific meaning that I can understand, and I’ll ask you even though it takes overcoming my anxiety and guilt for asking “stupid” questions. If you throw in some clue, my brain will generate a Vsauce video worth of elaboration on that, and I’ll just tell it to you. Sometimes I feel like I just don’t fit, I can’t have fun at party with other people, if there are more than five of them, I’ll probably cry for no apparent reason. My consciousness operates smoothly, and then it don’t, it overheats, crashes and burns, then comes the numbness and derealisation.

I’m not okay. Now more than ever, I sometimes want to just end it.

So, I'm supposed to do a project in Haskell that is due next week. It's a group project and it's me and 2 colleagues. Unfortunatelly one of them had to drop college because of some personal problems. I feel bad for him.
The thing is, the other one has no clue what Haskell is. I mean, he has no clue how programming is. He doesn't even know what an array is, like, wtf.
Sure, I can do the work all by myself and take the credits for it. But he's a nice guy and has been asking me to teach him Haskell in my spare time. He even told me to tell the teacher I did the project all by myself.
I'm kind in the middle of an existencial crisis. What should I do?
Life sucks, dam.

Who the FUCK thought "let's completely redesign the Doodle mobile app and make it as unusable as possible!"?

The app RESETS every selected option EVERY time you switch to another app and back. Like yea, you don't need to use the calendar app to check at what dates you're available.

Fucking morons! What. a. shit. piece. of. software. How can any PM approve of this? I bet even ChatGPT could do a better job. Fucking hell. "Let's save money with developing hybrid apps! We have no clue how to do it right but: we spend less money, yay!" Fuck. You.

(First rant. Don't know if I did this right but I had to let this out.)

"Please move the logo left. The text goes a bit under."

Do you guys think people realize how unclear they are, and are just too fucking lazy to write the full spec? Or are they just so fucking stupid they don't realize I literally have no fucking clue what to do exactly with comments like these?

I guess Hanlon's razor applies here, but some days I just don't know...

Happy Friday! ☠️

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Teach things properly, most teachers are confused and they start throwing keywords at even more confused students who then have no clue what they are doing and they then ask me to do their work for them showing me their unindented(well... kinda, they all seem to fight with the IDE, which is trying to properly indent their mess, for some reason), teachers think that Turbo Pascal is the way of life and that it is used everywhere(one teacher tried to tell me that Pascal is used in the stock market and in modern operating systems - U wot m8?! how high are you right now) and they don't teach user input sanitization and type checking, they stare at you like you are the fucking satan when you dare to use objects, collections and abstraction because they are scared to death of that stuff... and then they think 60 minutes is enough to teach HTML, CSS, JS and PHP in one go(which they even don't know properly - the teacher that made and maintains the school's website is probably stuck in 1998 judging by the design and functionality of the website and his clothes) and they then send absolutely clueless students to compete in a web design competition (and then they get angry at the judges for giving the students 0 points)

Heya. Now I feel like a fool for asking and it has been bothering me for a while.

I want to get into native application development, but I simply cannot wrap my head around how to connect a backend to the frontend.

I have been doing web development, I understand the concept of endpoints and I am able to do http requests for web apis etc. But when it comes to creating it in some native application, I have no clue what to do.

Does anyone have a good post or video that describes these connections, as for some reason I cannot seem to find any.

Hope it's understandable,
Cheers

My worst experience has actually been trying to fix someone else's code. One of my friends is in a graphic design class, and right now they have to do a basic site in DreamWeaver (a small nightmare on its own, I've found that the previews they show are never quite correct). I decided I'd at least pop in to help out a bit, cause they kinda have no clue what they're doing. They are graphic design students, NOT developers, and it's very easy to see that.

One of the first things I noticed was EXTREMELY unorganized code, but that's forgivable. But...I once saw probably 5 </body> tags in someone's code, a JavaScript function inside of the <body> tag, and a bunch of CSS statements in the <script> tag that they had one if the JS functions in.

I remember seeing this stuff, and I thought "what the actual fuck?". The dude was like "yeah it's unorganized as hell, I know"

...That's not the problem. CSS goes in either a <style> tag or a separate file (THEY HAD A SEPARATE CSS FILE). JAVASCRIPT GOES IN A <script> TAG OR A SEPARATE FILE

But, I get it. They're graphic design students. They can outdo me in probably everything in the Adobe suite (except DW as I learned). I once watched a girl in there do a project in Illustrator. I had no fucking clue what was going on. And when I was talking to her about it, she said "that's what I was thinking when we were watching you fix our code"

Kinda got a little sidetracked there. Basically, worst experience is non developers writing code for an assignment.

So, I joined a hardware company as a software developer few months back. I'm working on a c++ code base with thousands of files and no idea what the code is supposed to do.

I got one overview of what the product is supposed to do, which contains mostly electrical engineering jargon that I have no clue about.

Now my manager wants me fix a bug in this code. I have no clue what the expected behaviour is and no documentation whatsoever, and literally no one in the entire country who understands the code.

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

So, a few days ago I went on an interview for a position as a web developer, and during the interview they tell me they are thinking about getting into hosting, and that if they decide to do so I would be the one responsible for managing all of it.

I have no idea how to set up web servers, let alone make sure they can handle heavy loads and so on, so I'd be taking on a huge responsibility and workload, along with the task of making websites.

The company consists of 5 designers, and at the moment, no developers, and they have about 30-40 customers, all with sites that would need to be moved to the new hosting platform.

My question to you all is this:

How much does quality hosting equipment cost, and is it really worth it for such a small company to get into hosting, or should they rather look to make a deal with an existing host for some kind of monthly kickback/rebate?

I'm thinking they should find an existing host and enter some kind of partnership, as that would be easier and safer than doing all the hosting inhouse.

What do you guys and girls think?

How much experience do you have in asp.net? Answered. Next question - How about web development, how much in that? These so called fucking tech recruiters in India are making this industry a mess. These fucking donuts have no clue what are they hiring for, study done on profile is next to zero and then they call you and ask you such questions.
The day was going pretty badly already and this tech recruiter calls me up and starts evaluating my profile and whether it matches with her clients requirement or not! So she starts with some basic stuff and then drops the said pearl of wisdom. After listening that question I went full retard in less than 3 seconds. But our miss mumbo Dumbo proceeds and asks me how many years of experience in xml and Json and whether I have worked on html (!!!!!!). You fucking knucklehead why don't you fucking first have a basic knowledge about your job first and then start dialing? You just caused me a massive migraine attack you dimwitted slack jawed idiot.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

A long time ago you sent me an email with the subject 'I love you', I then got so excited that I forwarded the letter to all my contacts, and they forwarded it too.. I can't describe the words for the feelings I had back then for you. I felt into love with you, really. But there were always troubling moments for me.

For example when 'Code Red' showed up and found your backdoor. Man I was pissed at that time. I didn't know what to do next. But things settled, and we found each other again.

And then that other time when this girl named 'Melissa' was sending me some passwords to pr0n sites, I couldn't resist. She was really awesome, but you know, deep in my heart that was not what I wanted. I somehow managed to go back to you and say sorry. We even moved together in our first flat, and later in our own house. That was a really good time, I love to think back at those moments.

Then my friend 'Sasser' came over to us one night, do you remember how he claimed that big shelf in our living room, and overflooded it with his own stuff, so that we haven't a clue we are reading yet offshelve? Wow that was a disturbing experience.

But a really hard time has come when our dog 'Zeus' got kicked by this ugly trojan horse. I really don't want go into details how the mess looked like after we discovered him on our floor. Still, I am very sorry for him that he didn't survived it :(

Some months later this guy named 'Conficker' showed up one day. I shitted my pants when I discovered that he guessed my password on my computer and got access to all my private stuff on it. He even tried to find some network shares of us with our photos on it. God, I was happy that he didn't got access to the pics we stored there. Never thought that our homemade photos are not secure there.

We lived our lives together, we were happy until that day when you started the war. 'Stuxnet..'! you cried directly in my face, 'you are gonna blow up our centrifuges of our life', and yeah she was right. I was in a real bad mood that days back then. I even not tried to hide my anger. But really, I don't know why all this could happen. All I know is, that it started with that cool USB stick I found on the stairs of our house. After that I don't remember anything, as it is just erased from my memory.

The years were passing. And I say the truth here, we were not able to manage the mess of our relationship. But I still loved you when you opened me that you will leave. My 'Heartbleed' started immediately, you stabbed it where it causes the most pain, where I thought that my keys to your heart are secured. But no, you stabbed even harder.

Because not long after that you even encrypted our private photos on our NAS, and now I am really finished, no memory which can be refreshed with a look at our pictures, and you even want my money. I really 'WannaCry' now...

I talked to the client how functionality should look like on UI, draw a mockup, designed and made changes to db schema, created REST api, made documentation how to use it, told frontend developer to make changes on frontend application according to the documentation and mockups. Still no one have fucking clue how to do it. Fucking testers can’t write anything, only clicking.
So I sent curl code how the fucking request should look like exactly then resolved bugs they reported as won’t fucking fix because I will not be also making fucking frontend. Probably they even don’t know what curl is. What a fucking fuck.
And that’s what I am mostly doing from Monday till Friday to keep this project going.
It’s cause client are nice guys and we are doing something good, not some fucking ai, blockchain, big data, financial scam everyone is wanking around.
And friends are asking, why I drink.

At work, we have a lot of daytime spenders (they just hang around so they do not sit at home all day).
I'm the only one in the entire company with somewhat decent programming experience (and I have to admit that I'm still pretty bad at it).

A few (4) of them have been assigned to one of the biggest projects (potentially even bigger than the one I work on daily) the company has ever had.

here is the fun part:
- 2 of them only just started coding and have no clue what they are doing at all (they heavily struggle with HTML).
- 1 of them overengineers everything (in a bad way) because she doesn't know how to do it somewhat properly.
- 1 of them doesn't even code (only sitting there giving ideas n stuff... basically the "client").

As a bonus point:
- None of them knows how to database
- None of them knows how to back-end
- None of them knows how to design

This is going to be fun, especially since I'm going to refuse to have my hands in there even the slighest outside of recommending stuff (like using a framework, certain libraries etc.) :^)

I have two potential client meetings next week. The first one now knows she needs a website (but I have no clue what her budget is), I think she wants me to host the site as well as do site maintenance. The second potential client I'm working using the barter system (but I think she will end up owing me some money at the end). We will see how they both go.

You know these people who want your support but do everything they could possibly do to prevent you from helping them?!

This one is about text-based support.

Basically, I told them to use a software. One guy said: "There is always an error right in the beginning when I start the app."
I ask: "What does it say?"
Another dude joins: "Yes, I get the same. Update fails or something..."
I ask: "What's the exact error message?"
Second guy: "Retrieving update failed or something similar..."

*whaaa, guess what: this is by no fucking way what I meant with "exact error message"*

Well, I ask nicely to look it up again and tell me the details.
Then, I suggest a possible solution for this abstract problem. Answer:
"No, it only happens at start."

What the fuck do you think I am? A stupid monkey who cannot read?! I know that it happens at start, that's why I suggested what I suggested! And don't think you're so intelligent to believe that deleting an update.exe in %appdata% had nothing to do with your problem. You don't have a single fucking clue how software works in its simplest manner.

What the fuck.

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

It's a great start of the week when your general manager asks you to get in to touch with a guy to ask about their return merchandise authorization system. And when I reply, sure, what would you like me to accomplish. You get the reply, I don't know, don't bother me with the technical details, they told me it should be super easy.

I don't know what 'it' is, but I'm happy that the man who can hardly use his macbook says its super easy.

Context: large project moves to touch friendly UI, request and initial specs late last year, specs initial mockups early this year, designer promises final design before end of Q1.
Two sprints into development no fucking design, meeting today about it, designer has no fucking clue about what we actually agreed to last time. Promises again to have it for next time.
What the actual fuck? How difficult it is to least read up the fucking notes and do your fucking job that you are being paid for? Had a half fucking year!
After meeting...
Me: why do we even keep him around?
Pm: he is really overbooked...
Me: my balls are overbooked, don't promise if you can't deliver! (Leaves meeting room)
Fairly confident that this is the last project with this guy...
Am I the only one who just hates working with designers?

Email this morning: "Program X is not working".

Wow thanks. That's not fucking helpful at all. We have like 100 different applications and I've only ever seen about half of them so far and have no clue how to even use it or what is supposed to do.

I'm literally one junior developer building a front end stack for a company that uses the waterfall method of building shit...

My application has not been fully tested and none of the real user base has actually tested it. I have no clue what potential egde cases exist in my application. I did as much testing as possible but it's keeping me on edge that there is potentially something broken lurking underneath that I don't know about.

If it is broken it's all erupting into flames and there's nothing I can do about it because the application will have to go through a whole beuacratic process to allowed to be fixed.

What the fucking shit, Arch. In what universe/reality is a user expected to easily/quickly address GPG/PGP bullshit when they install Arch. It's already hilarious enough as it is for the user to input every single command in order to install the thing. -- That's actually what's great about Arch; you get return and assurance from each command. -- I understood the fact that you need the latest ISO release in order to even install Arch, but now, if you decide to pacstrap linux-hardened, or god forbid, a package that is who knows what, less maintained?... fuck knows what will happen.

The fantastic part, is that you can't do shit when you're in an arch ISO install. All of the simple and possible solutions that involve GPG DBs/keyrings/etc require you to have the all of the shit installed already; which is fucking impossible if the package manager is bitching about keys not being imported. The most fantastic part, is that there is probably some complete bullshit, ultra-exclusive command or simple solution that will fix this crap. - And if you even dare ask the Arch forums, you'll be branded as a "newbie" and sentenced to read the fucking wiki. - ??? -- That's not a fucking good thing. -- The majority of people who are installing Arch right now, are people who are installing it for the first time, and chances are, most of those people have no fucking clue what is happening; they're learning what is happening. Furthermore, they're probably the kind of people who aren't inclined (or they don't know how) to scour Google or the Arch forums for answers to vague, lazy-ass error messages. The whole point of this thing is show and confront the user about what they're installing and what they want on their computer. Holy shit. This is all the more reason to ensure that total, stupid, ambiguous bullshit errors do not occur. -- "error: key "dogshit master <dogshitmaster@dogshit.org>?" could not could not be imported". -- That's it. That's the error in it's entirety. For a fucking OS install. What the fuck.

Hey, you, my new colleague, you are annoying. I have reviewed your PR and left about 50 comments on your mess. I even explained to you why half of your code is shit in a very polite way. I have explained why you have to rewrite that and even how to do that in the best way possible. Result? Half of the code is gone, it works as before but without the overhead.

Now you're annoying cuz I have to go again on conventions and best practices. I totally understand that you've been doing it differently and throwing buzz words at me won't help. Just stop and do it as it's needed in this project, don't reinvent the wheel only because you can.

You know what? Fuck it! I'll approve all your PRs, anyway I am leaving soon. There is no benefit for me to teach you stuff. You're one of those guys that I voted against in interviewing process. But guess what? My manager decided to hire you anyway! Ha! I rarely vote NO and you were a one of those...

Your confidence doesn't impress me. That works on people that have no clue on what you are doing. Your just average at best, not a superstar.

Fuck it, you're on your own now!

Lead dev runs the program I gave him to set up a bunch of processes that run for one database.

It has a GUI that seems native to his windows environment......but it sort of is not.

The program runs, asks for the .csv file that is to be parsed into the database.

Lead dev: Ok, what is this though?
Me (his boss) "Don't worry about it"

Him: "Holy shit what the fuck is this??? TELL ME!!!"

Me: DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT

Him: "WTF DID YOU MAKE THIS IN???!

ME: DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT

CMS Admin (another one of my employees) "Would you TWO SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!?"

New Guy (mainly a frontend dev): ........

Meanwhile, in production, no one knows if your gui app is built in Lazarus and Free Pascal, as long as it works.

I really need to stop doing this to the lead dev, dude already keeps trying to choke me for writing things in perl.

On another note, Object Pascal is pretty cool. Might write a book on it for those that want to do CLI based applications on it, I have no clue why every book on the subject costs in euros, but there should be more shit written for beginners, language is awesome and one can get lots of mileage from Lazarus and FPC

This is getting kind of annoying now. Everytime i am planned for a (small) project, there is less to no briefing and nobody has a clue what to do.
Then how the hell am i supposed to?

Not a rant but I kinda wanted to see if anyone else feels the same way and might have advice on how to overcome this:

So I work as a student in research. Meaning there is not much documentation and things are chaneging fast, some things are also fairly complicated.
I have a really good supervisor.

However. I am super scared of asking about how things work. Whenever we discuss things and she notices I'm insecure about how something works, she explains it to me patiently. No probs. But insead of asking I just try out random stuff for hours. Having no clue about how things work and what I'm doing. In the end she is able to explain the issue to me within a minute.

The thing is, I think that trying to figure stuff out on my own, is the right approach. Not daring to ask questions or express my theories is really bad. I get super anxcious. Most of the time my theories and assumptions are correct. I just never dare to voice them.
The irony is, that I'm perfectly fine whenever I talk about or hold presentations which are not CS related. But if I have to do that on a CS topic I just die. I freezze, stutter, everything.... T_T
Like come on. They can't do anything to me except correct me... jeez.

Why do these e-marketing companies always have some kind of manager/consultant/strategist/marketeer/whatever to handle emails between me and their devs. Instead of emailing with another technical person and quickly fixing the problem I end up sending one billion emails to someone who has no clue on what needs to be done to fix te problem. From now on my emails contains a part called "to your developer:" explaining the technical part of the email.

And no - I don't want to plan a conference call... just let me code dammit!

My first computer was an old Pentium 2 running windows 98 with no internet and just a CD Rom and Floppy Drive. Got it for my 7th Birthday I think and immediately wanted to make it do my biding.

Didn't work out. Had no clue what the words on screen meant and batch scripts looked like sorcery to me.
Hell even the options menu in German was a cryptic puzzle to me.

Got a little better in the meantime.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

Why is tech management so f-ing distant? Very often NOT in meetings which they created and very not interested in anything the team/teams do. It is really a large offset between the work actually being done, the day-to-day operations that we do and the competence of management to acknowledge the fact that we actually do those things.

A lot of times they just stay silent in meetings and in the end they say something to try and make some conclusion and perhaps something ”funny” to try and lighten up the atmosphere. They fail on both of their tasks. They have no clue and are not interested in learning.

I feel like many of them don’t actually do anything. They are often ”away” but it is really unclear what that means.

I think it is symptom of a truly dysfunctional tech process. Bad leaders tend to hire more bad leaders and it is a toxic circle ending in good competent people leaving wanting more in the leadership.

dev && !rant

I am thinking about picking up a functional language. Currently I use Kotlin (and I fucking love that language) but I have to admit that it's support for functional programming is limited.

But I think their lies a certain beauty in fp and I want to do some project with it.

The 2 main problems are:
1. I have no experience in functional programming. I have no clue how to structure my program (potantialy without oop) and write clean testable code.
2. I don't know what language to use. Scala seems great since it has good IDE support and I like the Java ecosystem and Haskell seems to have more beauty but is missing that IDE support and it is very unfamilar for me.

So what do you guys think I should pick up? And how do I learn to write good software with it?

Can there be a happy rant?

This is going to be a bit of a rambling semi coherent story here:

So this customer who just doesn't know what their data schema is or how they use it (they're a conglomeration of companies so maybe you get how that works out in a database). For every record there's like a ton of reference number type things mapped all over the DB to fit each companies needs needs.

To each company the data means something different, they use the data differently, and despite their claims otherwise, I think there are some logical conflicts in there regarding things like "This widget is owned by company A, division B, user C.". I'm also pretty sure different companies actually don't agree on who owns what... but when I show them they just sort of dance around what they've said in the past...

So I write a report (just an SQL query that outputs ... somewhere ... I mean what isn't that?) that tells them about all the things that happened given X, Y, Z.

Then every damn morning they'd get all up in arms about how some things are 'missing' but sometimes they don't know what or why because they've no clue what the underlying data actually is / their own people don't enter the data in a consistent way. (garbage in garbage out man...)

So I've struggled with this for a few weeks and been really frustrated. Every morning when I'm trying to do something else ... emails about how something isn't working / missing.

In the meantime I'm also frustrated by inquiries about "hey this is just a simple report right?" (to be clear folks asking that aren't being jerks, and they're not wrong ... it really should be simple)

Anyway my boss being the good guy he is offers to take it over, so I can do some things. Also sometimes it helps just to have someone else own something / not just look it over.

So a few days into this.... yup, emails coming in about things 'missing' or 'wrong' every day.

Like it sucks, but it's nice to see it suck for someone else too as validation.

Fuuuuuuuck!!
CR estimates:
Part 1: 2h including testing
Part 2: 2h-2days-maybe never (small changes on horrifically fucked up project noone understands with tons of tech debt)

Managed to pull off the part two in one day.. //yay me?!

Additional day to unfuckup git fuckups (including but not limited to master head not compiling because a smartass included *.cs in .gitignore file which he also pushed..don't ask, I have no clue why..) which was a huuuge deal for me as I usually use only local repo and had no idea how to tackle this.. coworker helped out.. seems I was on the right way, but git push branchy was acting up & said I had to login & ofc I had no clue what the pass was set to (first setup was more than 2yrs ago)..so new key, new pass.. all good.. yay!

Back to the original story/rant: Now I'm stuck with writing jira explanation why it was done this way & not the way customer suggested. They offered only vague description anyways which would require me to do a hacky messy thing, ew.. + it most probably would require major data modifications after deployment to even make it work..

Anyhow, this expanation is also easy peasy in english..
BUT...
I must write it in my native tongue.. o.O FML! Spent almost 40mins on one paragraph..

Sooo.. if anyone will petition to ban non english in IT, I'm all for it!!

A colleague changes the location of a test helper file imported in a bunch of tests. Doesn’t bother to check where that file is imported (except where he’s specifically using it himself).

As a result good dozen tests fail later on. The culprit doesn’t realize. And the rest of us have no clue why.

Multiple people are asked to look into why the tests are failing.

"Ok, who’s working on what?
We’ll create a shared document to track who’s working on what test."

Document is created, people get assigned.

"Hold on, looks like it’s just a faulty import." "Oh yeah same here." "Yeah for me as well."

"Ok we could simply appoint one person to fix all the imports."

"Well I’ve already gone ahead and opened a pull request to fix the test I was appointed to."

"Ah ok, well who can take care of the rest?"

"Wait I also opened a PR."

"Ok so I guess we can each open a PR?" "No we can just have a single branch we can all push to".

"Sure, who’s branch are we using"

"You can use the branch of my PR"

"Guys let me handle this, it’s ridiculous for us to all be doing this separately."

"You’re right, go ahead".

——

The culprit? A senior dev.

What would have literally taken a minute to do (or even no time at all with proper use of the IDE) turned into hours of wasted time. People getting interrupted, having to drop what they were doing to fix the consequences of this guy’s laziness (seriously don’t know what else to call it).
Ok maybe our reaction could have been more efficient, but we never should’ve even gotten to that point in the first place.

Client deescalation needed and intervention by company leader...

Client refuses to test - too much work they say.
Client wants a lot of changes - but cannot define what.
But most frustrating... Even as we tried to with all patience that was left to find out what they were doing aka how they work, what work flows, documents and so on were involved, they basically started a team discussion and seemed to work all differently...

And the project should be a complete sale and warehouse solution, suited and written for their needs.

Really? How can a company like this work?

It's not the first time I've dealt with hard projects or 'weird' customers, but really the first time I have no fucking clue what I should do.

Can someone please summon Ctulhu?

GoDaddy. Is. The. Worst.

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

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

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

I have absolutely no idea on what to make in python and when I do get an idea I realize that I have no clue where to start

My manager had someone else manage me for my whole time at the company so far. Nearly two years now. Anything I’d come to him with, he’d direct me to this other person.

Fair enough, dude’s really good and I learn a lot from him. I see why they trust him with so much. I think he’s a genius. I’ll never be that good. Embarrassed I’m only a few years his junior. Wonder why he’s okay with being a manager for employee pay. Don’t think about it much, normal corporate BS.

Well it got way more “normal” when his ass got laid off without notice. Feel terrible. Him and 70% of my branch’s full timers. Wonder how I got so lucky. Everyone’s gone. We barely have enough people to do a standup. They all had 5+ years on their belts minimum. Only the contractors are left.

Manager emergency meets with me. Tells me all his best staff are gone and I am now the only front end guy on the team. He tells me he is not confident in the fact I am responsible for all of the old guys work and he is worried. He thinks I can’t do it cause he thinks I suck. Fuck me man.

My manager is pissing himself realizing he has lost the only people keeping HIS job for him. He has no clue my skill level. He sees my PR’s take a bit longer to merge, yet doesn’t realize I asked that friend of mine who was managing me to critique my code a bit harder, mentorship if you will, so we’d often chat about how to make the code better or different ways of approaching problems from his brain, which I appreciated. He has seen non-blocking errors come through in our build pipelines, like a quota being reached for our kube cluster (some server BS idfk, all I know is I message this Chinese man on slack when I get this error and he refreshes the pods for me) which means we can only run a build 8x in one day before we are capped. Of all people, he should be aware of this error message and what is involved with fixing it but he sees it and nope, he reaches out to me (after the other guy had logged out already, of course) stating my merged code changes broke the build and reverts it before EOD. Next day, build works fine. He has the other guy review my PR and approve, goes on assuming he helped me fix my broken code.

Additionally, he’s been off the editor for so long this fool wouldn’t even pass an intro to JavaScript course if he tried. He doesn’t know what I’m doing because HE just doesn’t know what I’m doing. Fuck me twice man.

I feel awful.

The dude who got fired has been called in for pointless meetings TO REVIEW MY CODE still. Like a few a week since he was laid off. When I ask my manager to approve my proposals, or check to verify the sanity of something (lots of new stuff, considering I’m the new manager *coughs*) he tells me he will check with him and get back to me (doesn’t) or he tells me to literally email him myself, but not to make any changes until he signs off on them.

It’s crazy cause he still gets on me about the speed of stuff. Bro we got NOTHING coming from top down because we just fired the whole damn corp and you have me emailing an ex-employee to verify PATCH LEVEL CHANGES TO OUR FUCKING CODE.

GET ME OUT

Any idea where to start as a beginner programmer as I just completed my first year in CSE and still have no clue what and where and when to do. I just know C that's all

Currently trying to make a multi boot machine, with a lot of linux distros inside, like debian, fedora, gentoo and arch.

I know I will have to format everything a lot of time, because of stupid mistakes, I want to try to put /home in common, and play with some more SSD, and to put a preempt_rt patched kernel somewhere.

I am starting from debian,
Format counter: 3

Reason 0: because i need to install at least once...
Reason 1: I am stupid
Reason 2: I disconnected the SSD,to connect a disk with windows. Now bootloader doesn't find any os in the SSD anymore... still no clue, and in case of doubt: give windows the fault 😠😠😠

DAMN YOU WINDOWS, how did you find that I want to use debian? What did you do to break it?? (Despite it wasn't even connected?!?)

I have checked everything about secure boot, and I am sure it is disabled...

And every search online gives results about dual boot, but it is not my case... :/

In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.

One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."

It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.

So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.

That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD.