As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

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

Some context first and then the rant!

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

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

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 months ago I sold everything, quit my job, gave up my apartment and left the country with my 11kg backpack. I booked a one way ticket to South America. I wanted to travel, get lost but also finish up some personal projects and do a little tech books challenge I came up with. I learnt so much over the past half a year, it's crazy.

Not looking back. Projects paid off and it turns out that my dream company actually found me themselves without me even applying... and so still from South America I'm in final rounds of the interview! 🤗

All my worries about a gap in CV, no employment along with other problems I thought I was gonna have... It's all BS. So if anyone here is waiting for a sign. Well, this is it now. Go!

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.

It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.

One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.

While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.

During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.

After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.

(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)

But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.

One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!

Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.

Weird and scary.
Very scary.

Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

User: Bobby, please update this quality controlled document because I screwed it up.

Me: No there is a process for a reason, multiple people need to sign off on this. Also, we talked about this exact issue a year ago that you did not fix.

User: But its a minor change, several hyperlinks in the Word document need adjusted.

Me: Ok, you do it and submit it through the process again.

User: Can you make the changes to the document? It will take me forever and I'm very busy. I know you can do it much quicker than I can.

Me: I really don't want to edit this document myself. It doesn't apply to my job at all and I cannot verify any of the changes would be correct.

User: Oh it's fine. Make the changes and I'll look over it.

...

I hate my job sometimes.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

I'm so over the politics....

System team: So, we've rewritten the entire site and the stats are looking pretty great. We're more than a year into the two-month transition period, and hey, that's cool, no judgement. But now we're gonna hit a license expiration on the old site, so we need to shut it down, or otherwise pay a ridiculously big amount to renew the license.

Business: nooooooooo you can't shut down the old site!

Systems: but nobody is using it

Business: yes, they are

Systems: no, they're really not, we checked and everything

Business: ...........

Systems: ok, well are you gonna pay for the license renewal?

Business: oh hell no

Systems: ok then we're shutting it down

Business: ..............

Systems: ok, it's down

Business: how dare you! We didn't sign off on that! Bring it back immediately!

Systems: are you gonna pay the license?

Business: no! now bring it back!

FML.

What do you mean you no longer want the feature? We have developed the feature, we have tested the feature, we have sign off for the feature. You are getting this feature, whether you like it or not!

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

A colleague of mine had to debug performance problems in a foreign, proprietary application that is ancient.

To be crystal clear: Only reason that thing exists is because some old geezers fear change.

Asked me for help cause it's an _ancient_ MS SQL server that is luckily running on hardware owned by us.

Finding the credentials was already a funny task.

We had to access the vault (not joking here, we have a physical vault for storing sensitive data and critical backups), grab a folder and find the necessary data cause no one ever dares to touch that thing.

The application is btw for a sort of ERP / inventory system that is used in some ancient shops not yet migrated...

Yeah. Story speaks for itself.

Anyway, after dusting off ourselves, we were able to connect.

Was a bit ... Interesting. Everything's in german. The worst kind of german.

After looking at the first tables, I started giggling.

My colleague knew immediately that this was a sign of danger (insert Simpson meme here), raised his eyebrows and asked "How bad is it....".

Me, still giggling, "lemme take a further look, this is gold".

*long sigh from the colleague*

Well... It ended with me putting my hands in front of my eyes, turning around and saying: "I cannot look at it anymore, it hurts too much...."

To summarize:
- German table names
- When a table exceeded 300 plus columns, they added another table with the same plus suffix "_ddd"… where ddd is an zero filled integer sequence like 001
- To join this mess, they created views... Named "generator" - Sequence Number ... Some had the beginning of table names appended, which doesn't make it less confusing.
- the process list was listing queries running longer than 5 mins.

Which isn't at all surprising when generating carrtesian products of N tables with left join.

I've seen shit.... I've seen a lot of shit.

But that shit scared me.

Tl;dr: I do not care. Just read it or fuck off.

A friend of mine who is a paki classmate, as well, had applied for the same "Ausbildung" offer as me half a year ago.
The company is based in Germany, but is working in the US, France, UK, Turkey, China, [...], too.
After 2 interviews, they told us to contact us back within the next week. We have had our interviews on Sundays.
In the list of all candidates I was the second best. The top candidate was my classmate. The third best candidate was a guy who was involved in the last interview with both, me and my paki friend.
The candidates list was not shown to everyone else, but my paki friend.
They wanted to give him the job. [That is a big company who is creating a new dev team and expanding their IT building. Nonetheless they only accept only one candidate.]
My classmate had been given a letter that he had to sign within the same hour he was with the managers. He discussed it and said that he has other offers open and want to compare them first. They gave him a timespan of only 1 day afterwards to sign it.
He told me he is going to decline it and he did.
Normally, I should have been the person who gets the letter to sign to be accepted for the job, but no.
After letting me wait for almost 2 weeks, they sent me an mail (they usually sent ordinary letters to invite me to interviews lol) in which they said that I am unfortunately not taken for the job yada yada yada and that they wish me luck for my future.
Fuck yourselves. How about that?
I was the second best candidate. The best candidate did not want the job yet you fucking morons do this type of shit. You want the best for me?
I want the worse for you. Death to both of you managers who sucked all of my energy, patience and time.
I am really fucking pissed rn

Postman needs to learn it's god damned place.

No, I will never sign up for an account you god damn crappy wrapper for curl written in electron. Stop giving me banner ads. Fuck SO FAR off.

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.

First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.

But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.

I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.

When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.

So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.

Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..

Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"

Simple there are four other developers on my team. Yet, I do all of the work.

I'm picky about spesific tasks, so I would rather do THOSE by myself, by we have a Trello board where I've marked the tasks I want to do myself, and everything else is open for grabs.

Some tasks I will asign others (one developer specifically) and days will pass and no code gets touched. So I end up having to take it over. :|

Like, guys, I get it. You have other things to do. But could you atleast *try* and help me without me having to ask? If not, then why did you even sign up? I want to get this out the door so our project doesn't go under and we can make some money. I have other things I would like to do as well, you know. Like take a day off, or spend time with my girlfriend.

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

How many times a day do you guys get interrupted ? Sometimes I just want to place a huge sign over my head saying "NO! Fuck off"

In the past: "Alright, have the day off, so can do some serious work (work on my game project). Let me just check my mail first... And a cpl of sub-reddits... And see if there are any updates for Unit3D, or any interesting forum posts, or new assets on asset store that look nice... And check some online newspapers just to see if anything is going on... And check if anything new has been posted on slashdot since I last checked 5 minutes ago (nope)... And maybe see if there's any updates to Sublime Text or new useful packages that can help improve workflow... Ooh came across article on how to improve workflow... Hm someone mentioned a new task-management system in comments, gotta check that out... I'll just sign up for a demo-account and... Hm but what if there are any better ones? Better google for comparisons. Wait, isn't there a new episode of Silicon Valley today? Gotta see that first, no time tmr. Hmm also new episode of Archer, and American Gods. Better get watching these out of the way first, or I can't concentrate... Ah, wait, it's dinner time, no point starting anything until after that."

Now: All of the above, plus "I'll just check devRant real quick before I... hmm... interesting rant... *scrolls and reads rants and comments for 3 hours*"

How am I supposed to get any work done? :_(

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Update: for those of you who know cougar woman/ my self proclaimed "work mom" in my previous posts (bitch who keeps stealing my lunch), yesterday she really tipped me over the edge. So I'm fucking hauling ass on my sprint work because I had to take over another team member's tasks (because he "doesn't have time" for it being prod support but all I see him doing is shitposting at his desk) and someone from another team asked the cougar a question about something. she comes up to me all demanding like "HEY you, you got the worksapce open?"
I was like um... no I don't. I'm working on the other application.
and then she's like "Look at my laptop and show him". Okay bitch let me just drop everything I'm doing to help a random person. The fact that she commanded me instead of just asking me pissed me off. Not even a single sign of "please". I'm tired of her truly. She is a snake. Even to her friend on our team. Every time he's out she's like "hey where is _____? huh why isn't he here??? hmmm" in an instigating way to remind everyone that he might've taken off for no reason. When I was too sick to volunteer at an event she organized in the morning on Saturday, she asked me the following Monday, "oh did you drink too much? lmao. a spiteful, grudge holding bitch for sure

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

What the hell is wrong with the browser on iOS....
For Christ sakes almost no input attributes work. I have a Sign Up feature that validates passwords with a pattern attribute; doesn't work, required attribute; doesn't work, input type number; doesn't work.
What the fuck is wrong with this thing. Even Internet Explorer knows what those attributes means. Absolute joke now i need to implement it manually. Fuck off apple.

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

Received a contact for a new job today, 3 months notice if you want to leave, 1 if they make you redundant. Working hours are 9- 5:30, but evenings, weekends, holidays can be requested with no extra pay or time off. Recruiter recommended I sign it within an hour of receiving it, before I had time to read it, despite them taking over 5 days to get it to me. Suddenly my new job is soured.

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.

Was recently in a motorcycle accident and haven't been cleared to go back to work yet so I'm trying to build my first Android app.

I don't know Java, XML, kotlin, Android studio, or what the fuck a Gradle is; but I figured I'd take my app idea and download Android studio then try winging everything from there.

Needless to say, I'm having a damn hard time lol. I have been watching firebase tutorials on YouTube to try and figure out how to add authentication to my app. I kinda got it working in the AVD. But my personal Google account has 2FA enabled so I can't seem to get the app to sign me out, or sign me back in. (I was able to authenticate once successfully.)

I have no idea if having 2FA enabled is even the problem. I tried turning on debugging and can't seem to figure out how to actually get the app to debug or get a debug console open.

I seriously feel like the world's biggest n00b right now. Going to go YouTube/Google how to get the debugging working. Then I'm off for a round of learning how to read a debug report!

Hahahaha... Kill me now -_-'

So an update on my last health rant..

It's got off to a great start... not

My intentions were to go into NYC to walk around in Central Park.

I'm currently wandering around aimlessly in the park, taking a break..

On my way over though I passed a bubble tea festival that was happening...

Gotta get bubble tea now... *Bad* but easier it's so expensive.. They're price gouging!!!

*good? But more I want a drink... I have water but I want something tastier...*

**Sees Duane Reade, goes in no sole, too expensive**

** Sees McD...pass... sees sign saying any large drink for $1**

...

I'm now waking in CP while drinking a large Sprite.... and I want cake bc I'm already in NYC goddammit... might as well get some as it's in the way... And I won't get another chance until.... **Some far away date** ( I know is probably not true...)

Help?

Engineering manager and I have a chat last Friday about some working performant code that needs to be refactored for future reusability. Not my favorite stuff but ok, let’s do it. We talk about things VERBALLY, one way of doing it, then another way. She’s in a rush to her next meeting and has to go. I feel very clear on what she wants and how it needs to happen.

After the call I do some thinking and I give her the estimate and brief her my plan. I tell her exactly the way it’s going to be done. She says do it and gives me her sign off.

I submit my MR today. And then she says why I didn’t do it another way. A more generalized way. And “the way we talked about.”

And I ask her if she can explain her way bc there is obviously some misunderstanding. And she proceeds to zero in on some functions I wrote and say how they are not generalized enough and how it’s basically the same as what we had before (but it’s actually a much different design). I patiently listen and at some point she abruptly says she’s out of time and needs to go to a meeting. I say I still don’t understand what she wants. Then she says that she will implement it bc I still don’t understand and she has no more time to explain. I feel pretty bad.

I suggest next time she can show me on zoom whiteboard, just anything visual and not auditory to make sure things are clear and we are on the same page.

She concludes that management has directed us to come to the office more so I need to come in so we can do in person white-boarding.

This whole thing feels unnecessary. We’ve never had this issue before. It seems like either some intentional plot to get me to come into the office more often or terrible communication skills and a lack of priority on my managers part. Like can you just white board your ideas for 5 minutes?!?! There are many tools to do this digitally!

The thing is I still don’t know where the communication gap is bc I still don’t know what she wants. Keep in mind all this fuss is over three cards of text on a webpage.

This is my first job in industry. How do managers normally communicate engineering ideas? And what are the best ways over zoom? And in person?

I noticed here there is not a culture of whiteboarding or pair programming.

It’s on the days like these I question what I’m doing here…

[Conference Call on Project Launch]
🤡: we just came up with an extra list of features to add to the system
🙊: but we just finished the system and it is ready on UAT server to sign off
🤡: we want these features, they are essential for a better backend admin experience
🤡: and we have been working on this project for almost a year!! we need these features and launch now!
🙊: (well, it took you guys six months to sign off on the initial graphics designs...) can we first launch what we have on UAT site first as they have been sitting here waiting for your approval
🤡: ok. i will test them and provide feedback. if it’s all good, then you can launch it.
🙊: ok. we will do another set of UAT after launch for your new features.
🤡: ok. i will let you know when we can launch the current UAT.

[Two weeks later]
🤡: #%^#*+!! why are the new features not on the UAT site yet!! why are there no changes after two week!! we cannot accept more delays! really need to launch asap!
🙈: 🖕🏽

"Oh I knew they'd say that it's why I didn't get them to test it "

Did these words really just come out of your mouth? Who the fuck left you in charge of planning this shit?

Some team manager requested dev work it got approved and done standard. However they knew from the get go their team would rip it apart so when it came to the testing phase did he get his team to use it?

No he pulled fucking random people from other teams who don't use this feature at all in their day to day to test and sign it off.

Sod your vision mate. Our team just lost two months of work your team's productivity has dropped because you had a picture of how things should be but didn't want to be told no. And for a fucking valid reason your method is shit.

Don't think he'll be left in charge of a project anytime soon.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

First post and of course it's a rant.

I work for a mid sized development agency with approx 50 developers heading up the main development backend team.

So, on this one project the head of design goes through the client agreed spec but starts adding loads off additional UI elements and data that isn't in the spec, isn't collected anywhere and isn't needed

When reviewing the mock ups I raise this and push back saying it all needs to be taken out as we dont have that data and that the additional elements are not recoverable in the sprint time.

Designer sends the mockups to the client anyway and gets sign off from the client, who now expects all this additional work in the same sprint and at no extra cost to what we agreed for the sprint.

After an aggravating day trying to figure wtf we are going to do, I end up working until 3am (having started at 8am the previous day) implementing the addition shit, which needed to be collected and surfaced throughout the entire back end.

Owner of the business walks in this morning and gets told by the management team about how late I was working and what had gone on.

His response........

Pay for all employees in the business to have a takeout lunch on the company.

Best of it all, I was so busy catching up on the shit I should have been doing, that I didnt even get my free food!!!!

Why do designers think everything is so simple and just takes a few key presses?!?

So here's what I'm putting up with for the last 6 months, clients..

A client proposed to me a project he had in mind. Project is pretty solid, could have a bright future. Since they didn't have the money to spend, we agreed on a % of the income they will earn from the project. So, let's say I get 20% of the income in exchange for building the application. I didn't receive any down payment or payment of any kind.

Just for info, project is a Web application/portal and it is ~80% done at the moment. Client provided a logo and a wireframe/ideas/pictures how he sees the project. I built everything, from DB to Frontend. Also, project is completely custom made, no CMS or anything. Project will make profit by subscription base, every user of the project pays.

For various reasons, we did not yet sign a contract. So, what is my issue...

Client sent me his proposal of the contract, said it's solid stuff, just sign it. In the contract, it stated that he owns the application in full, can sell it, etc. and I get % of the price. There were also other sneaky parts about me having all the responsibility but owning nothing. I naturally declined and took a lawyer to construct a normal contract.

My proposal was/is, I own the application(source code) in full. They are obligated to pay the monthly percentage and can use the application normally and make profit. At any time, application can be bought by the client if they pay for the development. So, basically, they are getting the application to use "for free" with no initial payment/investment. And this is a long term deal, they can use is as this as long as they want. Also, if they go bankrupt at any time, no penalty or payment is needed, the risk is mine.

The client refused and what he claims is the following...

His share in the project is 80%, mine is 20%. If project is to be sold, I get 20% of the price. So, meaning, if we go to production tomorrow, if I want to buy his share, I have to buy 80% of the application I built entirely. Also he is convinced that by "telling me" what to built he's owning everything. In his words, he dictated me the notes and I'm just playing the violin.

I am having trouble explaining to him that he is getting the application to use and make profit basically for free and cannot and does not own the source code unless he buys it off. We are going in circles, I send him the contract to review, he changes it and returns it back. Also, he removes the parts where it is clearly states what he provided and what was done by me.

So, we kind off agreed on the authorship but in the case we break the contract he wants to be able to use the application for 3 more years.

Was anyone here in a similar situation? How do you handle this kind of situations?

Figure I can simplify the code if I have the compiler handle *some* of the register allocation.

Eh? What do you mean "NP-hard"? Dafuq's an ENN-PEE?

**frantically reads wiki**

I can proudly say that I understood absolutely nothing; CS stands for cocksucker or rather abysmal failure at the most basic forms of communication, I don't just sit here all day expecting you to flawlessly prove my point with every swallow of breath you draw, yet here we are.

Perhaps one factor involved in producing the generalized cluelessness of my colleagues, I mean their "imposter s*ndrome", has a bit to do with how fucking thick you've formulated this glorified bollocks you call theory. Were not for your incompetence, arcane crackheads like me would simply __not__ be capable of rising to the top of this field entirely via determination and a big salami, therefore I owe you both a debt of gratitude as well as every last word and sign of total disrespect.

As interesting as the study of computational complexity can be, if done correctly that is, you idiots are stuck in a mathematician's abstract mindset in a field entirely devoted to application of ideas rather than *just* the ideas themselves.

To answer my own question, it means there's no known efficient solution. That's it. The part about nondeterministic polynomial convolution of an irreductible rectosigmoid junction can apparently be skipped altogether. Anyway, I solved the problem with the computational equivalent of pizza sticks while you were out in the field mentally jacking off to λ.

Lecture is over, now go clean up the ethereal masturbatory residue if you will, I have mystical el Khwarizmi type-shit to solve via further clubbing of abstraction through liverwurst bologna of immense proportions. ^D

Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?

A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."

Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".

me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".

How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.

Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".

Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.

Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small.

This week is no different from the previous one. Blood is boiling because I need to automate some email sending and I'm waiting for someone to sign off the copy since last week.

My last post entails how my company moved me to a freelancing role upon completion of my task (VoIP micro service: incoming and outgoing calls, voice mail drop, voice mail greeting, call forwarding, sms, and a couple more features) — app is now live and used by company’s agents to contact leads on our other products (designing), so boss tells HR to tell me (I realized this from HR’s slack screen when on huddle with me) to add WhatsApp integration. I responded that since I’m a freelancer I would charge $30/hour for it. HR said he’d get back to me and it’s been 3 working days now.

They are also trying to have the app on Apps*mo so they cash out for other companies to use the app.

It’s been 2 weeks and a day since the end of my probation (I’ve been with them for 3 months) and no one has acknowledged this — I also wrote to my boss asking why management won’t acknowledge this but three days after probation they changed my role. Same company that held off my offer later to two months later in the job to offer a Senior Python Developer role as “HR has Covid and could not send it until now”.

He has not responded to my message. Pretty much no salary for me these past few days.

I’m now looking for other jobs. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch AGAIN a VoIP micro service and I plan on making it public and free upon completion.

BUT I feel the company might take action against me. Do note that I did not sign the offer letter as the link had 3 days expiration and HR said he would send a new one but never did, even after I reminded him at least 2 days in a week.

____
While typing this, I got the urge to proceed regardless any circumstance.

So for the current project, they want to start testing the application from Monday next week and the development part section still has a few bugs that need to be handled. But that isn't the worst part. The worst part I just heard is that the designs themselves haven't even been signed off. How the fuck did we get to the point where the designs haven't been signed off where the development has been going underway for the past 2.5 months? I swear I'm working with the fucking worst project manager!