Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.

After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.

The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.

This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

When I interviewed with for an EA internship, they gave me a coding challenge after on GitHub. I tried it out and when I asked politely over email on the status of the challenge a week after, they rejected me with literally I shit you not "no :)". It wasn't even a answer to my question that makes sense. I was an underclassman so they probably didn't think it mattered that they were disrespectful to me. The lack of empathy and professionalism that truly proved to me what a toxic company they are. Any one have any horror stories like this?

I've fancied the thought of being petty enough to try for their interview again now that I've graduated and have more under my belt just to reject them with a :) but I'm not going to get down their level enough to do so

Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.

I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.

But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.

After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.

I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!

I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!

I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.

So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.

I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.

This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.

I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.

My boss said to me to make an E-commerce website.
I make E-commerce website within a month. All coding done by me no CMS only (HTML5, Bootstrap, CSS3, etc)

Boss: You wasted 1 month in this single website. You should do this within a week.
Me: 😠 But... (Fuck you, You Asshole) (in my mind).

Me: Sorry, next time I'll do it within a day.
Boss: 😂😂😂😂

I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.

Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.

Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.

He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)

But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done

Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.

How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.

Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.

Was coding and tired as hell, my light in the room blew this week and I haven't got around to replacing it - the darkness is not exactly that exciting.

Pressed a wrong button by accident, lo and behold my laptop has a backlit keyboard. I had no idea that it had this. Blew my fucking mind (I have never had the time to just sit and look at the function keys - I suppose that is one downside to never having to look at the keyboard when one types).

A new flow of inspiration came upon me, I opened up VSCode and put on some Pantera.

Code beware, I'm fucking hostile.

So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).

Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.

Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.

Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.

Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.

This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.

And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.

10/10 for incredible bullshit.

So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.

So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.

Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.

Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.

Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.

I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.

Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".

Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.

You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

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

May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?

@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :

Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.

We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.

Thank You

here is her cheerful photo.

I love static sites and fancy new frameworks. Had an interview some time ago at a medium sized company. They specifically wanted someone to build static sites and introduce the company to Vue and Gridsome.
I got really excited for my first project. It was a wordpress site and I had to build a custom WP theme for it. Not exactly what I expected. Also I had no prior PHP knowledge, nor any experience with Wordpress. So I got really upset, because it wasn’t the technologies I was used to.
The first week was hard, I wanted to quit. But once something clicked. And I realized I know this. This is not PHP, not Wordpress, not Vue, but just simply a programming language. At the core everything programming language is the same. PHP became comfortable, Wordpress conventions didn’t bother me. I realized I can use great technologies with WP too. I get to know twig, added some sass, compiled everything nicely with webpack. And after a month I have a beautiful, fast and efficent site. I love it.
I realised that I don’t love the languages and frameworks. I love coding itself. I love creating efficent and reliable, clean code. No matter the architecture.
And my advice for you is to stop hating particular languages and serious debates on what is better, and hating your job when you can’t code in your new shiny framework. Love coding itself, because it’s a wonderful activity. We are creators, we are artists. Not <insert specific programming language here> developers.

College rant:

I have finals next week. I am sitting here learning about things which have no benefit to my career. My college requires me to take Calculus based physics 2, which makes no sense to me at all! I do appreciate physics however I would much rather be coding. In my CS courses you learn theory which is fine, however very impractical. I last October I realized how much more you need to do and a degree just won't cut it. I spend about 50 hours a week learning TDD, git, hashes all this stuff that is not taught in school. Then on top of this I'm learning pointless crap that if I ever needed in a real world situation I would go to Kahn Academy or simply Google it. I'm upset because I have to stop coding for the week to study information I will forget 2 weeks from now, and most likely never use again. I have a job someone offered me which will be extremely beneficial to my career however I have to wait a week to even look at it. I'm just bitter.

Got an email in response to an internship application asking "if you can just complete a coding challenge within next 24 hours thanks". They also wanted to me to setup a phone interview today or tomorrow. As if they expected everyone to drop everything with no explanation.

Told them I'm busy but can get started on Sunday, and was told they have assessment centres next week so it can't wait. No real apology.

I didn't set the date for the assessment centre, this is your fuckup. You have to at least feign respect when you ask for a day of my time with less than a week's notice. Been through too many bad interviews to waste my time on a company that doesn't have its shit together and/or doesn't respect interns.

Idk, maybe I overreacted. Thoughts?

I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.

Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

Ever dealt with people who don’t understand a damn thing they’re coding and just copy and paste stuff around and say that it works? It’s amazing how long people can skate by with only knowing 50% of how what they’re working on works.

We had some dumb know it all on our team who would regularly ship half-done stuff to production and then scramble to fix it after the users bitched about how it didn’t meet the requirements.

This stupid person changed an else to an if having no idea what any of the logic did in this section of code, didn’t adequately test it, and it somehow made it through code review because the better devs were out of office.

This bullshit goes to production, fucks up 200,000 records, and users start complaining about it. Shitty developer refuses to revert the offending code until multiple people on the team overrule them. They spend the next week unfucking the data and decides to just take a day off on Wednesday because it’s been “too much mental energy to fix.” The shit wasn’t even fully resolved yet.

Some people seriously do not belong in this industry. This person’s thought process was:
“Changing an else to an if can’t possibly have significant consequences. Let’s just change this so my code change executes to see what happens.”

Still not sure how they weren’t fired when this happened. They unfortunately got to quit on their own two months later.

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

Finally on vacation.

As an American the first surprise I got in Berlin is that Burger King serves beer. Never seen that ever back home. (Okay I was in Denmark on a plane but it still was cool darn it)

I've been thinking for the year about working here, but now that I showed up the idea is scaring me a bit. Go figure. 😭

I want to see more of Germany beyond Berlin, what do our German natives like here?

Chat apps. What's the idea? Those are basically tools of violence. They give you a possibility to in real-time stop someones work and start demanding service. Now. Immediately.

Usually people send you first email and then they after 10 seconds chat "did you see my email?? read it! serve it! please me!" Usually it's just a small request to document something, review someone else's document. Do it ASAP. If you were coding something, then drop it and do someones job for them instead.

You got a request for me to create some verification case list? Put it into my backlog. I might start doing that in week or two. Or month. In case there's nothing else more important. Since I know that you are working with something that you think is the whole universe, but trust me, I got my own problems already.

But hey, if I don't reply to your chat in a minute, please feel free to walk behind me and start explaining your life. No need to wait even for me to get my headphones off. "Oh you are in conf call? Well, this is just a quick thing blaa blaa..."

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

I usually find Fridays really exciting 'cause they mean the end of a long week of work and a nice weekend where I can just relax and chill or do whatever the fuck I want, And also because nothing really major happens regarding work happens on Fridays.
Till this Friday, my boss who I really respect and who I find a nice boss to work for starting complaining about the speed of an app we developed and comparing its speed with 2 other versions of that were built using different stack, different architecture and another environments. I explained that it's absurd to compare these and expect the same performance from 3 differents implementations.
He was not convinced and I just kept my mouth shut 'cause I don't want to explode in anger. Because of all Friday night sucked, felt all depressed, wanted to distract myself by watching a movie, but I didn't find anything that I liked, I remembered that a new episode of this series I watching will be coming out that night, when I went to my usual streaming website I didn't find it, and discovered that it'll be coming out on March 1st 😣.
I had no video games to play, didn't feel like coding. By then i realised that tonight will be another nigh where I would be crying myself to sleep... which happened.
I woke up this morning with a resolution that I will go out and do something fun.
Little did I know, my depression was still there, now it's 8pm, I spent the whole day in bed. I wish I had someone to talk to, I friends are all busy living and I didn't want to disturb them.
I have another chance to save this weekend by doing something on Sunday, otherwise next week will be a hard one with my current mental state.

Excuse any typos in my rant. I have no energy left.

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

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

I have been coding for 2 years, 1 month at a company

Teammate1 has been coding for a year, a genius, learns everything in a week, knows all major js frameworks, refuses to adhere to any rules except no rebase on pushed (luckily)

Teammate2 has been coding for a year, learns slowly, very reliable, has no common sense at all

Teammate3 the designer, really has the skills but always busy, never has time for a meeting, gets very mad if it looks different from her original plan.

We're all college students short of money so they all want to work for clients. I don't have the leadership skills / charisma for this.

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Week 1 Day 1

It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.

So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.

I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.

in my previous company , we used to create 4 custom ui states for just 1 screen in android app, and we would have task to create 3-4 new feature screens in 1 sprint (of 14 days) the states would be :

empty state : a state where data is not available. usually consisted of message, a graphic and some action button

data state : the usual state where data is filled on various elements

loading : a shimmer ui showing loading. it was supposed to be pixel perfect to that of the data state. it was basically a different xml, but with grey colored views instead of colorful. the tricky part would usually he to create the dynamic views

error/no connection state : as most of the screens couldbget api error or no internet error, this would be the screen for asking user to retry connection

all of these screens combined with their ui in xmls + kotlin code with barely any stuff being reusable , made the life incredibly difficult. however a lot of our customers would appreciate the interactivity of our app

doing these stuff again nd again , i had become trained to do all those 3-4 (x4) screens and the whole ui stuff in first 4 days of the sprint. but now i am in a company where i am getting passed on to managers after managers and getting tasks to change documentation in 1 week, i find those coding stuff incredibly tough.

gotta get back to shape

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

**random rant**

So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:

What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...

I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.

And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).

But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

So there is this project of my firm that is comepletly dependant on Facebook api, I've actually told it many times to managers at first but they've just waved their hands over it.

Now what didn't happen. Facebook data leak and the api being taking down ..juust a week before the project going public.

Our app is still not reviewed and not able to access the so vital api and there are actually many similar projects getting published (even Facebook Local greatly rivals to our app, actually killing it because they have native data... And we don't have any. )

I told them again. "Nah we will have this and this feature that makes it soo exceptionall."

And you are sitting here thinking if the salary you have asked for is still good enough to stay or to run away.

(Well, I am still getting some coding experience from this so that's why I stay, and oh yeah I have the backend repo only for myslef because except the frontend dev no managers knows what git is. This is how freedom feels. )

My week was going great, started an online course on coursera.org. It was on algorithms, somone recommended it to me here. After spending like an awesome 3 hours learning about dynamic connectivity algorithms, I find out I have to submit code in Java!!! If you hate Java then u get me, then there's a deadline, OBVIOUSLY!!! I only know the basic Java syntax, can't even believe I got this far without coding a project in Java. So now I have to polish up on Java and write a percolation java project, no biggie!

My last week of 2017 sucks! The function that been assigned to me has been 7 months until i doing it without any priority tasks. The bad for this, is becoming worse for the clients and they really want it until the end of 2017, so happy new year motherfuckers.

Here's the story, the function i am doing requires a heavy calculations, and i am no brainer in math, though my logical skills, hopes me up to made it quickly as possible. However i am full of workloads/to-do for the past 3 months, that i am unable to comply my documents regarding my employment!!

Much worse for this is the coding guidelines. There no fucking guidelines at all, like do what i want just to make it work, but my team lead ironically speaking that never touch that because it's already working. Dude, the server response was the real issue there and i was supposed to handle that function because your fucking json was not formatted well! Shout out to git for giving me a saving grace not to fire me.

Lastly, the leader's attitude. You're so sarcastic as fuck! Of course i won't get mad at you on personal matters, i understand. But on work, the way you communicate was not like my any mentor/prof that i ever met!! I hate my fucking work. Hope my 2018 would do my best, AND I AM GONNA MAKE MY OWN GUIDELINES ACCORDING TO YOUR ASSES!! HAPPY NEW YEAR, GODDAMNIT!!

// Pretty long rant.

Already made some rants some months ago about coding experience in Smalltalk for a school project, but to sum it up :
Because of administrative things, Smalltalk change from option to obligatory course to everyone (we were told that "we had 3 choices out of 3" for options. Not even kidding)

So whole prom got to do a Smalltalk project, a basic shapes editor with Drag'n'Drop and keyboard shortcuts implemented.

But literally everyone didn't get a grasp of the language nor VisualWorks, the IDE. So we got projected in a "Do-it yourself, learn by yourself" project with a language that nobody understood.

Took me 1 week of browsing on Google to find books explaining more than the teacher did. Took me another week to notice that the teacher actually provided VisualWorks's manual. (No one would have noticed if I didn't tell them, and the teacher went silent on it.)

And then the coding started. My teacher thought this project would require something like 20-30 hours of coding. Took me 2 whole months and a half to do moist of the features he asked (only the Keyboard shortcuts weren't implemented, explanation below), and I was the most advanced of whole prom, so I had to answer every single question of fellows. Not complaining, but this took me a lot of time.

But why didn't you ask the teacher ?
- If I ask him every question I had in mind, I would actually harass him since I had too many of them, and I wasn't the only one.
- I actually went twice to his office to ask him question. First question, that was pretty straightforward, I forgot something, blablabla all done. Second time, that was for the keyboard. And then, things are getting even funnier. The teacher didn't have VisualWorks installed on his Mac, so he tried to install it while I was waiting. And he took too long time to actually launch it, because VisualWorks asked for him to log in, to provide an email, the download is a little long thanks to the network and the size, etc. When he finally was able to launch it, I had some classes to attend, so he couldn't answer. And since then, I had no time because last year, flooded with work, exams, classes ,etc.

All of that to have only 13 out of 20. I kinda shrugged, knowing that I wouldn't get more, and said that Smalltalk will only be a line of my resume.

Pretty long rant, sorry about that, but had to explain so you can see how bad it was to me.

Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?

Bad experiences this week

One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.

This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.

“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”

I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.

I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

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

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

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

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

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

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.

I'm not sure if I'd say I'm "deeply inspired" but I spent more time coding a personal project this week than I've spent on any other project in a similar timeframe for the past several years. All because I wanted to build a personal dashboard/startpage that queries the APIs of a couple of MMOs I play and displays it nicely on a grid of cards.

I wrote my own API wrapper, built a Flask site for the first time in years, tried out a few things I've never done before, and stuffed the whole thing in a docker container.

I'm no web developer (my job is more about the infrastructure than the web apps which run on it) so I'm learning a lot just through trial and error and it's actually kind of fun.

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

I don't know if someone has noticed but I haven't been on DevRant lately. It's not that the community is awesome. In the last month or two, I've had a blast of an experience here. I've just been avoiding screens, specifically texts in screens. I think something snapped on my head last week. Here's why:

As I've said in other rants/comments, I study history, and at the moment, I haven't found any career that has to read more than this one. Sometimes I've had to read about 1200 pages in less than three days. Last week I had to read 6 books which accounted for about 3500 pages. I was actively reading more than 600 pages a day. Now, this was for an investigation, and each of these reads had to be properly summarised with their respective arguments, thesis, etc. So I intensely read everything before Thursday, the day in which I had to present my work, in which I referenced about 10 books.

Apart from that, daily, I spent 4 hours coding. That's been the minimum I've done daily since I started learning.

I wasn't too tired. I'm used to read a lot, and coding is always fun. But the problem came in Friday when I woke up with a strange headache that spanned from my eyes to the back of my ears. Hurting especially on the sides of my forehead.

It eventually dissipated, but whenever I read something, the ache slowly came back. Loud noises and bright lights also brought it back. So you could imagine, everytime I tried to read a Rant, comment, etc, the headache came back. The same for coding and reading. For fucks sake I feel like I'm fucking crippled.

And no, the pain isn't the worst. Pain is pain and you can't do anything about it. The worst is that I'm developing some anxiety here. In all this time I have been learning daily nonstop. Coding was something I craved for everyday. Now I'm fucking wasting entire days in non-productive activities. I'm losing my fucking time here guys!

I'm afraid I have some anxiety problem with time. I've already fucking wasted entire years, now I don't want to continue wasting them and push my goals further away, I want to get to my goals as soon as I can because time and life can't be stopped and once time is lost, you can't fucking get it back. And, considering I'm still 21, I do notice this feeling is somehow irrational, but for fucks sake, I'm wasting fucking LIFE :(

/* me coding along, making good progress on a project I'm currently working on. About to implement the next feature, which could be implemented in a few different ways. */

Me: this is going swimmingly! Let's get this next part started!

Brain: careful mate...

Me: *spends hours implementing the next part.*

Brain: listen here mate, you should have used the other method. It might make it easier.

Me: *spends hours re-implementing the next part.*

Brain: wait. No you were right. The other way was way better, my bad. Sorry

Me: *slams face in keyboard* I guess I'll try again tomorrow.

/* repeat this process for the next week or so, never actually making any real progress. */

YouTube... for video creation.

Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.

If you are reading Coding for dummies book to learn software you are doing it alllll wrong lol ... Please while I appreciate your effort and willingness to try but no.. just no.. put the book down that book won’t teach you shit.

Same thing if you are one of those folks who got conned into believe “you can land a programming gig by signing up and paying for this 6 week course!!” Bullshit.. I like your initiative but there’s soooooo much more than that and it won’t even touch the surface. You will end up believing a false reality that you think you know what your doing but you don’t know how much you really don’t know. But like it doesn’t even scratch the surface don’t even attempt Get a job after those courses or coding for dummies book. You will be laughed at..

In fact I almost want to buy the coding for dummies book to have it in my collection of software books to not read. Which I will say is very small. There’s more really good books than really bad.. and obviously plenty of average. But the bell curve lands above the better half.

Hey fellow devs,

i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.

little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:

i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.

BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)

BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.

I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.

The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)

PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!

Thanks for reading, potato potato

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

typical dev offer

they look for a dev that should migrate their existing system to a new one

the old dev wrote a system that is archaic now and he wants to quit developing

and if you "want" to do more than just coding they would like you to support them in
- managing social media
- layouting / photoshop
- creating videos

they search ONE developer to do this
and are not really planing on expanding - I got only very vague respones regarding this topic

typical We search an "allrounder / one man show"...

what do you guys think? they invited me for a meeting next week. I think i will go for the impression and see afterwards how I should proceed. But kinda iffy and the fact that I will be the only dev makes me wonder about the fact that I may feel lonely fast, stressed aaaand no real option to educate myself because I will have no free time and if potentially I (the whole dev team) don't work, then no work gets done.

Last week I conducted a FE React-JS tech interview (high-level, no coding challenge) with a potential new hire. He knew his stuff in React 16.8+ but I was baffled npm install was the only npm command he could name, he'd never heard about semver, never used SASS, and didn't have any Nodejs exp. I asked him to name a tough situation he encountered and solved in React, and he said "too many re-renders, so we used useMemo and useCallback" but that's kind of basic and it was evident he didn't understand this meant passing props by reference under the hood. So I wrote a very mixed report, but this is only the 3rd interview conducted. Was I too harsh? To me this signaled a lack of curiosity (especially for a self-taught programmer which he was). My manager was kind of disappointed about the guy following my report.

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

I'm in my 4th week of a coding bootcamp. I left last nights class in tears and ready to give up. We were barely introduced to JavaScript last week and this week we're on jQuery, not to mention, I'm supposed to have mastered HTML and CSS by now. I don't understand SO MUCH of this!!! Every YouTube, CodeAcademy, TeamTreehouse, etc. video is DIFFERENT!!! No time for this, I have to make a hangman game by Saturday!!!

Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?

I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.

Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.

My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more

Starting my Java developer position this week. Turns out it involves absolutely no coding... pretty disappointed, but I'm just starting out. What do?