The colleague:

- I can't work, my chair is uncomfortable
- I can't work, my chair is not ergonomic
- I can't work, my desk is too small
- I can't work, my legs are uncomfortable
- I can't work, my keyboard is not ergonomic
- I can't work on this task, John knows how to do it better
- I will only work on <this> type of tasks. I will not work on others
*gets assigned <other> task; browses the internet all day; at the EOD task isn't even touched*
- I can't work with Jack, he's too noisy
- I can't come to the office on time, there's traffic in the city
- I couldn't come yesterday, I was out of town. No, I will not log a vacation day - I was NOT on vacation. It's personal
- I can't<...>

Manager, 2 days to the end of said colleague's probation period:
- I am very sorry to tell you this, but our attitudes are not in line and we cannot continue working together. Since this is your 5th warning, we have to let you go.

The colleague:
- What?? How come?? I did NOT see this coming... You can't do this! I work here! This is where I work and you can't fire me!

*got his things from his desk and left. Never came back*

Everyone at the office:
- YAYYYY!!!! Let's have a shorter day today and let's celebrate this riddance in a pub! (manager agreed)

Them: But what if the internet is down how will you Google things?

Me: Well considering our entire application is hosted in the cloud our operations would be halted as we would have no access to GitLab, Azure, Teams, Puppet, or the few dozen critical systems running our business. Googling things would be the least of our problems.

here's a shoutout to 90% of websites today:

NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR F*CKING NEWSLETTER! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR F*CKING NOTIFICATION! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT TO SHARE MY F*CKING LOCATION! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT ANY F*CKING COOKIES! STOP ASKING!

website publishers ary whining about adblockers, but keep shoving so much shit down our throats that even a dozen browser addons can't make the web usable. the internet was such a great place once, where did we go wrong?

(rhetorical question. it's when we made access to the internet so easy, that every 100% tech-illiterate idiot could get online.)

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Yeah sure, the Metaverse will be bigger than the Internet.

I really believe that. Short of a system collapse, there's nothing which will stop some Web/VR/AR amalgam from eventually going mainstream. If anything, a prolonged pandemic will make humans hunger for more digital entertainment and socializing options.

Might take 5 years, or 25, but it will happen in some form. Eventually, people will even readily accept various augmentations to their bodies to further immerse themselves and connect to digital experiences.

BUT:

We're still pre-bubble.

Does no one remember the dotcom crash?

Facebook/Meta will become the new Yahoo, decimated to a sliver of its former glory. Million dollar hype NFTs will become the new $10 parked domain names. 99.99% of all current efforts and content will end up like a modern day Geocities Archive.

So yeah... when I read that my pension fund is considering "investing in metaverse technologies"...

...you fucking bet it's time to transfer to a different fund!

Years ago I used to work a guvmant site. They had really strict security rules for internet and how you spent your time. Makes sense considering what that site did. I was a support engineer for some of their process control equipment.

I was approached by an operator supervisor to install dvd player software on a business machine (non process related). Basically just a general purpose PC with no function other than time cards and general office use. I was fine with the request, but the reason was for watching movies during a holiday period by the operators. Not for anything official. So I made some noise about my dislike of this request feigning moral superiority. But the supervisor swore up and down it was for "training" dvds.

So I wrote a simple windows script. The script basically popped up a window that said:
"Security has detected unauthorized media inserted into this machine. Please state the reason for this infraction." It provided a dialog to enter a justification. After you entered the justification it said: "Security has been contacted and your user logged. You will be contacted shortly."

This script was then attached to the supervisors Start folder so it ran when he, and only he logged in. We made sure the "training" video (some movie) was already inserted at this point.

He logged in. He just about shit his pants when reading this. He promptly logged and left the building to walk somewhere else in the site. We called him and let him know it was a gag. His response: That son of a bitch Demolishun!

nearly cried.

I had been working on this file for the last 4 or so hours.

And accidentally deleted it with NerdTree (mdy).

300 loc. poof.

scoured internet for recovery procedure.

and.......
... to no avail. just about to give up.

here comes the climax: .....

It was stillllll...... in the NEOVIM. BUFFER.
vim got my back.

praise you vim lord.

#vim_pope

I have this pact with my neighbor - if someone delivers a package to them, I knock on their door when I notice it to let them know and if they don’t answer, I take it into my apartment and leave a note. Same goes if she or her kids see a package delivered for us and we don’t answer.

So last month, we have a flooding incident in our complex and her flat’s damaged so they have to leave to stay at a hotel for a bit. It’s only supposed to be until the 20th (of last month).

So when she gets a package a few weeks ago, I knock and when there’s no answer, take it into my apartment and leave a note.

Note stays on the door for days.

And then it disappears, so I assume she’s home.

But she never answers the door.

And then I see workers in her place.

So now I don’t know if it’s the workers who picked up the note or if she was back and I missed her.

But it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m starting to worry about her. Like, the day of the flood she almost died and I ended up coming over to help (getting her oldest to do CPR, talking to 911, trying to keep people calm), so I know she’s not feeling great lately.

And I’m the kind of idiot that never thought to exchange numbers.

So I’ve resorted to internet stalking and messaging her on Facebook.

And knocking on the downstairs neighbor’s door since I know they’re related. They didn’t answer. I’ll try again later.

I have no idea what else to do. I mean, I don’t think I can contact the office and be like “Can you please provide me contact information for my neighbor? I have their stuff. Thanks.”

#awkward

I hate my freelancer life.
1. No weekends
2. No particular time to close
3. Work for 12 to 14 hours without sleep sometimes
4. Keep explaining the dumb clients about how development is not wordpress.

Its all fucked up. I have no life.

My average Lines of code this month is around 700 LOC/day. Whereas the average that showed on internet is 100 LOC/day.

I have choosen a hellish life.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

I swear the amount of self proclaimed "i am the top 1%, i figured out the system" bullshit social medias has enabled, makes me sick down to my core.

STFU you fucking retard, how the fuck do you manage to be this stupid and retarded you waste of space trash, when you have access to the internet with a lot unlimited information, how the fuck do you manage to come out with such idioicy bullshit:

"moon landing was fake, the moon is made out of cheese, vaccines injects pest, you are being controlled and brainwashed by tv waves"

Of cause you without any education and being jobless are smarter than scientists, astronauts, rocket scientists, doctors, military personnel and experts etc.

I swear comment sections where every idiot can say anything they want (specially on news related things like videos and articles) are unbearable and i simply ending up being dumber by reading them. And yes i useually read comments, in the hope of finding decent comments, so i hear other opinions etc about something.

This is in no way a rant about i find myself smart or shit like that, since i am useually wrong about a lot of things.

I just lost it and got tired of all that retarded bullshit idiocy mixed with fake news and conspiracy thories bullshit. People who are spreading that garabage trash, are completely worthless toxic waste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!

Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.

Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.

😒 I just found a new method of how to stay awake throughout the night without sleeping.... No coffee required

.. By 10pm
Start a project and name dictionary.py
On visual studio make sure you are not using internet because this is an exam and cheating ain't allowed..

Now start coding until it fully functioning and can generate random words out of predictions...

😩 Feel free to hate me after trying that

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

Confession:

Owned a smartphone for 10 years, this month was my first time ever getting 3G/4G connection ...

I prefer no internet when I'm out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

some call
- yo bro do you have some time ?
- quick cause I'm taking a dump
- I think I have been hacked, got black screen kernel panick, linux freeze seldomly I have to reboot, no internet connexion
- save your stuff and reinstall linux
- I don't have enough stockage to backup
- Then buy one and save, probably either OS is fcked up or you have some hdd problems

Time that it will take: ~30min to reinstall whole shit
Peace duration: ~2years

Later on the same day
aunt
- I can't log into windows
- Did you change the password ?
- Yes but it does not work anymore
* looking at shit
* logs successfully. Reason: interface changed after automatic update.
* wait.
* wait some more so fucking windows fucking starts
* Desktop is ugly as fck.
* Some stupid settings messed up (like high contrast set, black theme or so)

aunt (the same)
- I can't log into my (other) laptop either
* logs
* wait more more more

Guess what: automatic updaaaates. Freezes 100%cpu

* Being a very experienced user: wait before reboot because this suckass os will probably fail to boot otherwise
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates...
* reboots
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates continuing...
* finally boot (feels like a miracle windows succeeds lol)
* still slow
aunt now sleeps
* look at running process and install programs
* sees shits like camera recognition (vendor installed), candycrush
* occasionnaly get adds

time lost: 2h
peace duration: ~3month

FFS I am a dev, not a fucking trash lover
It is already pain to fix someone os, but windows is the cream of cream

It brings no ease of use for novice user
It is so insanely slow
It has stupid settings set up by default!!!!!!!! Who FFS wants candycrush and ads
The maj are so fcking hazardous. It is 2022 pretty much the same as 15y back then. Updates take fucking eternity. And needs reboot. and are not even finished!!!

I swear I am gonna stretch my ass and install linux and any fckin other toolsuite needed so they can use Micro$$ word, which is the only fucking usecase they need windows for in the first case anyway
I SO wish this OS would die

I mean, even more than safari

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

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

Got a little better in the meantime.

hey devs, hope you all are doing good..

I was frustated by my salary.. I mean in this job I am good but I didn't got the expected growth..

So I find a job .. but before resigning because I know my boss is cool atleast he will listen .. so I leave him a message that I wanted to do more.. and got the other offers.. He said no worries.. we will match your package.. but now you can be associate TL and handle the team also..
I took the offer..

atleast I am satisified. The thing is new team is mostly are dumbo :( Will see how long I can pull..

or I am hoping my next rants will be something like.. I will join as junior dev pr same salary.. just take me out from this fucking TL role.. because I know what team is going to do.. someone stuck.. ask TL.. someone have internet issue ask TL.. don;t know css.. ask TL.. dont know logic.. ask TL. its look like I have to be google for team

Anyways will see how it goes.. I wish me luck

Ohh yeah if you are in TL roles.. could you share your experience please

Quick question for you all: How do you deal with a problem in production that you cannot fix, even over an extended period of time (say 2 months)?

For context I feel like I’m losing my sanity here, we’ve had this problem on our production API since the beginning of March this year. I’ve done so much testing, got in contact with various teams of my company to try to figure out any potential candidate that would explain the bug, but none worked out. No need to say I’ve spent a considerable amount of time searching on the internet for others with the same problem or similar… We’ve even opened a ticket with the cloud host to see if they would have more details about the problem without success. So how do you deal with that ?

How many fucking hours have I wasted with Flutter.. the random and abstract error messages, running differently on OS X compared to Windows, finding no help on the internet and some packages that are already abandoned years ago.. Mobile development suuucks

I'm mostly self-taught, but there are a couple people who defined my understanding of computing

- My amazing elementary school friend whose father worked at IBM and who initially turned my interest from astrophysics towards computing. I don't know whether physics would've been fruitful but I know computing is.

- My high school friend, who taught me the basics of OOP. Though we agree on almost nothing today, his explanations about code quality defined my understanding of the matter which I then used to draw completely different conclusions

- My high school mathematics teachers, who tolerated the way I abused every tool at my disposal to construct proofs that resembled a rollercoaster, and helped me develop my own understanding of mathematics

- 3blue1brown for producing replayable videos in a similar quality to my high school maths lectures with additional stunning visuals. No content on the internet fits the way I think quite as much as that channel.