Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

I AM FREE!!!!

I no longer work for that unappreciative, condescending, dolt driven company!

Time for bigger and better things!

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

Hey everyone! As most of you probably already know, months back we added the ability to change your username on devRant (every 6 months, via settings). We've had some people recently express a desire to change their username again, beforr that period, for whatever reason.

I just reset the 6 month period for everyone, so if you had changed your username previously, you can now change it again.

Please keep in mind that when you change your username, any @mentions of you in comments no longer link to your profile.

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know!

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

*signs up for Skillshare*
> Sorry, your password is longer than our database's glory hole can handle.
> Please shorten your password cumload to only 64 characters at most, otherwise our database will be unhappy.

Motherf-...

Well, I've got a separate email address from my domain and a unique password for them. So shortening it and risking getting that account stolen by plaintext shit won't really matter, especially since I'm not adding payment details or anything.

*continues through the sign-up process for premium courses, with "no attachments, cancel anytime"*
> You need to provide a credit card to continue with our "free" premium trial.

Yeah fuck you too. I don't even have a credit card. It's quite uncommon in Europe, you know? We don't have magstripe shit that can go below 0 on ya.. well the former we still do but only for compatibility reasons. We mainly use chip technology (which leverages asymmetric cryptography, awesome!) that usually can't go much below 0 here nowadays. Debit cards, not credit cards.

Well, guess it's time to delete that account as well. So much for acquiring fucking knowledge from "experts". Guess I'll have to stick to reading wikis and doing my ducking-fu to select reliable sources, test them and acquire skills of my own. That's how I've done it for years, and that's how it's been working pretty fucking well for me. Unlike this deceptive security clusterfuck!

"We have another major incident spinning up. QueenMorgana, are you free?" NO, I'M FINISHING UP THE NOTES FROM MY LAST TWO CALLS THAT JUST ENDED, WHY DON'T YOU CALL IN, LAZY FUCKWAD.

Why is it so damn difficult for my boss to cover a call when we're all busy DOING ALL THE LITTLE POINTLESS SHIT HE GIVES UP. He had me follow up from my coworker's call yesterday, not seeing the logic in, IF IT WERE STILL A FUCKING ISSUE, THEY WOULD HAVE CALLED US BACK THIS MORNING.

So now, I have to sit on the line AGAIN and take notes for shit that's not even a major issue BECAUSE IT'S BEEN DOWN FOR A WEEK. IF IT'S DOWN THAT LONG AND YOU DON'T SUBMIT A TICKET TO ME OR CALL OUR MAJOR INCIDENT LINE, I DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH TO RESPOND LIKE IT'S AN EMERGENCY.

Also, fucking lazy asswipe of a "teammate" bitching about being on a call for over 8 hours, while the rest of us are on back to back calls. He's never been on a long call and has been here a year longer than I have. I've been on a 14 hour and a 16 hour, and my other teammate has handled a 26 hour call. 8 HOURS IS FUCKING NOTHING AND YOU WORK FROM HOME SO DON'T EVEN HAVE TO WEAR PANTS.

**spilled 3 cups of coffee this morning, and have an expensive maintenance on my car today, likely to explode on just about everyone**

I'm currently rewriting perfectly clean and functioning Scala code in Java (because "Enterprise", yay). The amount of unnecessary boilerplate I have to add is insane. I'm not even talking big complicated code but two liners or the lack of simple things like a range from 5 to 10.

Why do I have to write
List<Position> occupiedPositions = placedEntities.stream()
.flatMap((pe) -> pe.occupiedPositions().stream())
.collect(Collectors.toList());
instead of simply
val occupiedPositions = placedEntities.flatMap(_.occupiedPositions)

Why on earth does `occupiedPositions.distinct` suddenly become a monstrosity like `occupiedPositions.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList())` where the majority of code is pure boilerplate? And this is supposed to be the new and better Java8 api which people use as evidence that Java is now suddenly "functional" (yeah no, just no).

Why do APIs that annotate parameters with @Nullable throw NullPointerExceptions when I pass a null? Why does the compiler not help prevent such stupidity? Why do we use static typing PLUS those annotations and it still crashes at runtime like every damn dynamic, interpreted language out there? That's not unfortunate, it's a complete waste of time.

Why is a simple idea like a range from x to 10 (in scala literally `x to 10`) not by default included in Java? There's Guava's version of Range which does not have a helper for integer ranges (even though they are the most used ones). Then there's apache.commons version which _has_ a helper for integers, but is strangely not iterable (wtf I don't even...).

Speaking of Iterable: How difficult could it be to convert an abstract Iterable<T> into a concrete List<T>? In scala it's surprisingly `someIterable.toList`. I found nothing like that so I took to stackoverflow where I found a thread in which people suggested everything from writing your own ListUtils helper class, using Guava (which is a huge dependency!) to using the new Java8 features inline (which is still about three lines long). I didn't know this was such a hard problem in computer science, TIL.

How anyone can be productive in this abomination of a language is beyond me now, even though I've used it for many years while learning to code (back then I didn't know there were much better ways to do things). The only good part is that I have to endure this nonsense for only about 3 days longer then I'm free again!

This was a fun thing that just happened:

I was sent a timed questionnaire by a potential employer for a software engineer job. I'm like okay, I will do it on Monday (today) because that is when I will have a free minute.

Well I sit down to do the thing and I had had a few beers, because the Ballmer Peak is real to me when I have to answer bullshit programming quizzes.

Well F me right in the A, it is a 38 question true or false logic quiz. And I am no longer a college kid trying to get into grad school so I have no patience for that crap, and apparently less with a little beer in me. Long story short, there was no comment section for me to rant in so I decided to go on YouTube and watch cat videos instead.

TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

So new PM is forcing everyone to use Google sheets as our main project management tool as it's free and does what she likes... Was so close to just quitting.

More rage: how the fudge does she think it's acceptable for every 'to-do' no matter how big or small needs to be recorded in a sheet with roughly 30 columns @#&#&£ work is going to grind to a halt whilst we fill it in. So many better tools to use! Oh it gets worse it's 1 sheet per a person so the longer you work there the bigger the sheet gets the more time you need to spend to find, record and even open the freaking document up.

Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.

Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.

What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.

How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(

PORTFOLIO INFLATION

when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.

Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.

And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.

And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.

And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:

Welcome to costco. I love you.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.

YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.

But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?

YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.

A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.

It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.

TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

Sad story of how software die 👻!
When do you call a technology obsolete 👴?
Mac user: when you have something new and costly 💰!
Linux user: when it is old and free 🆓 open source alternative are released!
Windows user: when antivirus 🕵 can no longer protect you!

imagine having kernel memory leaks in 2020

AT&T or Huawei, whichever, pushed an update for my already-struggling-to-exist phone that made the kernel memory leak go from 480KB/hr avg to 22.5MB/hr avg. When my free RAM is never under 50% of 2GB after the kernel starts loading other shit and i'm able to express free RAM, at any time in use, in megs, with 8 bits... this means my phone crashes, with no apps running aside from a trimmed list of stock apps, every 3-4 hours due to running out of RAM. The only usable (read: not R/O because unrooted) swapfile is located on a tmpfs, so it's completely fucking useless (and eats another 100MB of RAM that I could be using for LITERALLY anything else, that's like another 3 hours of full idle between crashes) and I can't unlock the bootloader to fix any of this as Huawei no longer hands out keys and it'd take 7 years or so to brute (32-bit @ 10/sec)

tl;dr: fuck

Elon Musk is no longer buying Twitter because he realized he can get it for free in the App Store

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

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

It's fucking never worth it, to be decent to colleagues. I got prove of that just this evening. Sorry, this rant will be a bit longer.

A colleague of mine inherited some legacy project that I worked on in the past. He clearly hates working on it. And tbh. I can't blame him for it. It's not very fun. He also makes virtually no effort to become more proficient in it.

This usually leads to him calling for my aid, whenever any problem arises, that would require any kind of effort to solve. I would normally cave in and help him. Mostly due to the fact, that without any intervention from me, it would end on my desk sooner or later.

That changed in the last few months, as I simply couldn't make free time to help him. anymore. I was working overtime and the associated project barely got done on time. During that time I would, as politely as possible, deny him. He knows fully how stressful the project was getting.

Today he asked for help again. I denied again, as a task was due very soon. He didn't reply to my message afterwards. After a few hours suddenly I got a bunch of his jira issues assigned to me.

The motherfucker simply shoved _all_ of his support issues to me. Not only that, he also assigned the issue he was asking for help for earlier as well. All without consulting me or anything. Then he pissed of into his vacation.

Some of his support issues have been created last year! And they are still not solved. He simply isn't replying to questions in those issues or just assigns them to others colleagues without any instructions.

Fuck him. Other colleagues don't even respond to him anymore. He fully fucking knows that I have a tight deathline on my current task. And still he chose to dump all his work on me, so that I have to waste time to reassign it and report it to our superior.

Fuck him for creating more stress in this already stressful situation. Enjoy your vacation you fucking leech. I will have quite a "nice suprise" waiting for you, when you return.

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Holy shit Docker. I can’t believe you just did that. I guess it’s time I finally learn PodMan.

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

We don't have a designer yet in the team so we had to learn Adobe XD on the side to prototype our ideas. After months of getting the hang of it thinking this semi-free tool will work for us to save some money, Adobe decides to change their pricing plans starting in April 2020 and it will no longer be free. It feels like Adobe trapped us to get used to their platform and then secretly slap us with a price tag halfway. We can't blame them since we're all trying to put food on the table here. We started exploring Figma today and oh boy was it a gift from the gods! The features are so much better. They make our workflow faster!

When I met her she was just plain html, I took my time and styled her with love, I never loved intruders so I kicked bootstrapCss outta the way,

made my custom queries, and with some vanilla JS she looked like the DOM of my dreams, but now our relationship has grown through the users(years) and things are becoming more object oriented and it feels like I'm no longer in control, first it started with jQuery and some Sass and maybe I thought we could get along, but then came React and his Routers and though they said they'll be partners, 😅😅
Now I know they ....
FEEL FREE TO GIVE THE PERFECT ENDING 😊

End of my rant about 35 day recruitment process for anyone interested to hear the ending.

Just got rejected by a company (name Swenson He) for a remote Android Engineer SWE role after wasting 35 days for the recruitment process.

First intro interview went good, then I did an assignment that had 72 hours deadline (asked for couple days longer to do this task, did it in around 40 hours, it was purely an assignment not free work, I could have done it in a day but I choose to overeenginer it so I could use the project as a portfolio piece, no regrets there and I learned some new things). After that It took them 2 weeks just to organize the technical interview.

2 days after the technical interview I received an offer from a second company with 1 week to decide. I immediately informed the Swenson He about it and politely asked whether they could speed up their decision process.

Now I know that I could just sign with the second company and if the big Swenson He would decide to bless me with and offer I could jump ship. But out of principle I never did that for 7 years of my career. If Im in a situation with multiple offers I always inform all parties (it's kinda a test for them so I could see which one is more serious and wants me to work for them more). Swenson He didnt pass the test.

6 days of silence. I pinged the techlead I interviewed with on LinkedIn about my situation, he assured me that he'l ask his hiring team to get back to me with feedback that day.

2 days of silence. I had to decide to sign or not to sign with a second company. I pinged the techlead again regarding their decision and 10min after received a rejection letter. There was no feedback.

I guess they got pissed off or something. Idk what were they thinking, maybe something along the lines of "Candidate trying to force our 35day recruitment process to go faster? Pinging us so much? Has another offer? What an asshole! ".

Didnt even receive any feedback in the end. Pinged their techlead regarding that but no response. Anyways fuck them. I felt during entire process that they are disrespecting me, I just wanted do see how it ends. Techlead was cool and knowledgeable but recruitment team was incompetent and couldn't even stay in touch properly during entire process. Had I didn't force their hand I bet they would have just ghosted me like they did with others according to their Glassdoor reviews.

Glad I continued to interview for other places, tomorrow Im signing an offer. Fuck Swenson He.

P.S. From my experience as a remote B2B contractor if a company is serious the entire process shouldn't take longer than max 2 weeks. Anything outside of that is pure incompetence. Even more serious companies can organize the required 2-3 meetings in a week if they have to and if they are interested. Hiring process shouldnt take longer than MAX 3 weeks unless you are applying for some fancy slow picky corporate company or a FAANG, which is out of topic for this post.

I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.

The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.

None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.

The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.

I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.

First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.

Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?

Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?

Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.

How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?

But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.

But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.

But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.

Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.

Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.

Hello, world!

Okay, guys and gals... I need your creative minds. I need a concept for sort of a property manager for my game.. I have an idea of my own, feel free to tear it apart or throw it out the window.

So basically.. You'll no longer have one Computer System (and you wont instantly hit the login screen for that System on startup) Instead, you'll have a lot of things. They will probably only be represented using text and menu's (likely no 3D or 2D environments or anything.. Though, a setup like News Tycoon would be epic, but I think that would be too much for this game.) You'll basically start off with a small space (probably a basement) with x amount of free space. In that space, you'll need to add things like a desk, chair, and a laptop, or tower + monitor. You can also buy things like server rigs with a ton of space, but those are pricy and bulky. Each item costs X amount and takes up X amount of space. Also, you'll need a desk for a monitor (or multiples..) and other things.. (Like your rubber duck collection ;P JK) You can also rent and manage servers. (renting is more exspensive in the long run, but things on your server are not on your property. But, if you own a server on your property you can rent space to to NPCs) As well as manage your devices, properties, stocks, etc..

Also, there will be in-game time. Depending on how "comfortable" you are will determine how long you can stay up in a day. In-game events will take place later on at specific times so staying up (or not..) will need to be managed well. Especially if you're being targeted by a rival (NPC) hacker.

Originally a comment, but thought it made a good rant.

My experience with Amazon so far... (I live in the colony known as Puerto Rico)

2011: Can no longer get free shipping on books. Apparently, we could before because of a "bug"

2015: Your Prime membership no longer gets you 2 day shipping. Only standard shipping.

2017: Free shipping 3-7 days? Now it takes 3 weeks to a 4+ weeks. (Packages get here faster without Prime for some reason)

2018: Tax of 11.5 when buying directly from Amazon.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

Linux is great - to tinker, to pull in all your FOSS, mess around...
But it's so fucked up, if you actually build and maintain a product on it, i.e. try to distribute s.th. in binary for money even. It's just not intended. If you offer your code for free, you can always say: "Ah, just compile it yourself. You might need these 29 dependencies, of which 2 are not even checked by configure, oops, and now it crashes, maybe in that qt library version, you picked there's still a bug?.. you know, it worked on my machine, sorry."
But if you sell it, it better install and run! And even if you target only the main distros of all that fragmented Linuverse - let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, and if you're in Germany OpenSuSE and SLES, you'll start to see the crap of work you're up with. What you could try is to orchestrate a docker fleet with one container per distro, where you take the oldest version you still support compile a newer gcc there (to at least have C++11) and all your third party libs and then hope the resulting binary runs on all the newer versions of that distro, too.
(You could even be so brave as to try to pick a deb and rpm distro to build for all other distros.)
But ABI incompatibility can still bite you. For instance we once had the insane case, that our GUI would no longer start just by switching the Window-Manager to KDE.

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.

I've been a consultant in the area of mobile apps for five years now and have stayed at the same company since getting my degree.

In the beginning I had an immense passion and worked on a lot of side projects/pro bono stuff during my free time. Around the same time as the pandemic hit I simply lost all my interest and energy, life has been going to work, go home, find something to eat and go to bed. I can't even find joy in playing video games, working out or cooking anymore, it's always browsing youtube/netflix because I can't find it in me to commit to anything that requires focus.

The project I'm currently in no longer gives me the ability to grow technically, it's just the same old stuff over and over with no opportunity to do proper maintenance or explore new approaches/frameworks/etc.

I recently found out that I make around 25-30% less than my peers in the same field and location, this was a blow for me since I keep getting praised both from customers, management and my fellow developers.

A year ago I asked management to find me a new project with the motivation that I don't want to stall my growth, they have yet to heed this request since I'm not easily replaced.

Been working in market research for the past year and a half while doing a part time masters in business.

I officially quit in a week and will be a full time student and reviving my dormant programming skills.

Gone are the days of colleagues asking why their pirated Microsoft office crashes on then 8 year old laptop. No longer will I be subjected to attending client meetings where my sole purpose is to ensure the projector is working as I am "good with that sorta thing".

Friday evening, I am free!!

I understand the reasoning behind switching to a new, maybe better, technology, but for fuck sake, it’s against typical Microsoft strategy to “kill and shoot to the dead corpse” something instead of maintaining backward compatibility. Why they’ve changed?
I still can develop VB6 software for Windows 11 that just works. But you removing newer tools for no reason.

In short: Xamarin is dead, and that’s alright, but they are even deciding to “remove” development tools from future updates of VS 2022. Why?? Keep it optional, allow me to write legacy code (just 4 years old actually) a bit longer. 🙃

And also, .NET MAUI doesn’t seem “great”, at least at the first sight.
Why you’re forcing me to switch to it if there are 0 benefit for my product?
It’s so bad the only way to bring developers is this one?!

What is incredible to me is that the “industry field”, which is HUGE is so often ignored because of the “customers field”. Keep them separated. If you don’t want to support old tools, just don’t, but leave them there.
They killed Windows Mobile 6.5 which was old but still alive and fine in the industries, you had the biggest market share in PDAs and decided to give it to fucking Google.
The manufacturers kept selling WM devices even in 2020… and they stopped just because you stopped selling licenses.
You acquired Xamarin, gave everyone for free the tools to keep writing .NET for Android and move the industry apps, and now you are saying “actually fuck you, do it again, even though nothing really changes, but convert your entire project to this bs we’ve created”. Why???

Microsoft response: it’s just a few clicks and everything works fine.
My response: No, it’s not… the entire UI is rendered in a different way, I have to rewrite the whole UI of my app and a lot of modules stopped working because of nuget packages I can’t install anymore…
I have to spend additional time to make it work THE SAME as before, not better. So what’s the fucking point?

Tldr: intern here, I like staying in my workplace for longer than my work hours. Is it going to cause me trouble if i become a permanent employee?

Long story: So as per my previous rants i joined a startup as an android intern, company is of around 80-90 employees with many teams and standard/sad rules like 9 hr shift, 1 paid leave per month etc.

I was worried of these rules due to being a regular clg student and living very far from office, so i complained and got a little compensations like 7 hr work shift, few half days and work from home days, etc

Now the thing is : i actually have kind of started to like this work. Its been a month and i took around 12 days leave last month for papers, but marked some of them as wfh and half days, so deductions were not what i expected (although payslip is yet to come, which would have given a better explaination). But overall Pay is decent, work environment is chill ( people work in teams here, but since am the only android dev, i got no timelines, or tech leads. Just the ceo, whom i send a daily progress message), there are good refreshments available and after papers, i am pretty much free.

So I like staying here for longer hours like 8, or 8.30 hours. My family is also working, so they are usually not much worried, tho my mom starts sending messages when i leave after 7. But this friend of mine, keeps saying "its wrong, your managers are gonna call you weak and would force you to work for more hours when they notice you can come for 9 hours , etc"

So am i doing the wrong thing here?

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...

And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.

But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.

So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...

Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.

But what the fuck... What the fuck?

I have been using an app through Slack for months that helps me to get specific emails related to users needing help into a Slack channel for the whole team to easily see, manage, and talk about. Just found out that they updated their app to version 2.0, and with this, the free service, has now become a paid monthly service (along with a lot of other things I will never use.)

So now I have a workflow that no longer works, and have to put a pause on everything else I was doing to find something else that can work, or code something from scratch. There goes my day.

I might have just fucked my linux installation. Deleted the windows partition, resized the linux over the free space, can no longer boot into ubuntu.
This might have been a stupid idea - I don't know.
Can someone educate me as to why this happened and also how should I've done it?

I love automating things and tomorrow I will finish automating yet another repetitive work freeing not only IT stuff but some admins and moderators too. It feels satisfying but at the same time w/ each next automation I am going closer to the moment where I'll no longer be needed...

but then again I have to hop before that moment...just need to sacrifice some of my free time and start poking the market again...

some time soon...

and since this is in the question section, how do u feel about the automation and all

I first try to figure out why I really want to build this and (if the project is intended that way) why someone would use it.

Then I strip the idea down to its bare minimums so I know what I should build for it to be of any value.

And then I start building until I no longer think it's worth working on the project.

For instance:

I am kind of surprised to see that in a world where cloud and apis become more and more leading, there isn't really a commonly accepted and flexible api management platform.

There are some cloud based platforms out there that can be configured using some interface but why is it like that? Surely you aren't going to deploy multiple versions of your core with different platforms right?

That's where my latest project comes in. I want to create an on-prem api management platform which you configure to work with your api during development. Then you can deploy it to any infrastructure alongside your core api.

This way you:

- are not bound to a specific cloud
- don't have to worry about security and firewalls
- get user management and rate limiting for free

I will probably create a collab for this once the platform is mature enough.

Got an email “Welcome to Amazon Web Services” to an old GMail account I no longer use. Seems genuine with no links to shady websites or anything. Does Amazon not verify email addresses or how does that happen?

Also, the mail says I have now 12 months of free tier access, so will they start billing me instead of the random fuck who signed up with my email address?

Hey Everyone, first of all I’d like to start with my usual, hope all is well today as always! Today I’d like to post my first official rant.... so anyone that knows me in person or in general knows me as a good helpful young man, right now Milo is happy but has the urge to rant..

So... not naming anyone specifically from uni... one person specifically always on Facebook messaging me for my assessments, now me being me i try to say No, but the issue is i want people to do well, i put my heart into my work and people just want assignments handed to them on a gold platter, it takes me a lot longer to try and get concepts around my head , I usually always stay up late nights to get a better understanding of things. As you may see my work means a lot to me.

I always mention to my friends if they wish to do well, they must sacrifice going out clubbing or other social things for a later time. I spend my majority of the week learning new things related to programming Monday - Saturday, and on Sunday i have my free time , with the usual work out session thrown inbetween :-).

So anyways, thats it for my rant, I’d love to know if anyone has been through a similar instance? If so would love to hear about it!.

Thank you for taking the time to read my long rant once again :-)

Milo 🥂☺️

Friend hands me a computer with a fried motherboard and asks if I can fix it in my free time. Mind you, this computer is no longer used.. 😑

Just discovered someone I told about a hack for the computers in school (nothing difficult just booting from a USB) had a link to C2K the company that provides the system and told them about it and now they've patched it up, so in a way, it's my first security vulnerability report, in another way, I can no longer play games and program in free

I no longer have commercial licenses for Visual Studio at home.

I'm looking at getting VS Code. I can keep support for C#, and also do any HTML5 and PHP here. It looks promising because it is free, open source, and uses an environment I'm already familiar with. Projects I work on at home ate usually single developer projects.

Thoughts?

OK, so, I see PY files shared on GitHub. All I know is, it is code for certain apps or pages. I download SEVERAL DIFFERENT PROGRAMS trying to get PY to open. Some didn't work, others were in Console and not Form. I asked for help on the Forum, how to open it, they do the same BS; gave me a Console app that just stays black for less than a second, and closes. I ask for a Form version. They made the excuse that it wasn't a program like I was thinking. They rudely tell me to be polite, but something like this IS GOING TO HAPPEN if they can't get their crap working. Eventually, after I TOLD THEM I WAS FURIOUS, THEY HIDE MY QUESTION FOR 10 MINUTES. When I replied, I DID NOT CUSS, I REPLACED LETTERS WITH ASTERISKS AND SYMBOLS, AND STILL GOT SUSPENDED, FOR A MONTH, AFTER TELLING THEM I WAS FURIOUS.

On the other hand, I was using Audacity. I upgraded and a plugin stops working. I thought they messed something up, so I wait using the outdated version for the fix for a few months, and so a few months later I update again, at this point I was a little upset; 2nd update and it still doesn't work. After the 3rd time, I thought they just didn't want to take the time and fix it, as people probably would have reported it by then. So I rant on Audacity's Forum saying they didn't fix an error, showed them screenshots in all versions I got and the 3 newest ones show an error. THEY TOLD ME WHAT WAS WRONG! I was trying to run a 32-Bit plugin on a 64-Bit version! I downloaded a 32-Bit version of the newest Audacity, and the plugin worked fine.

Python could've done what Audacity did, but, "No-o-o, we enjoy banning Winston when he is peed off!" And just so, the Suspension ends a day after my Birthday.

I might just ask when I'm back on, "How to remove my user off this Forum", so they can say "I can't", and flag it as malware because I almost no longer want they're help, and CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT.

Freak you in the butt, Python.

PS - If anyone knows how to use Python files in Windows 10 or know a free, non-demo program that will more-advancedly edit, save, open PY files in a Form, please, give me the name or link to the software, program or app in the comments.

Before anyone says anything, this page says "Rant", so don't ban this or I'm deleting my account. If this isn't a "Rant" site, please tell me, and/or rename this site.

That is the reason I came here, just to get my frustration out.