I'm trying out a new rendering engine, it's pretty slow but I'm getting somewhere.

My (6 years old) client is sitting next to me and is kind of picky and tells me exactly what to do.

No payout though 🤔

My employer bought some new 40" 4k displays to the office. The want us to evaluate if they are any good, and if so replace all monitors... No real developers has one, only HR people sitting there with one huge window with office or word open!! It makes me cry! And they will most likely say they are too big!

When everyone left the office I tried one... OMG, i need this in my life! 😍

Toilets and race conditions!

A co-worker asked me what issues multi-threading and shared memory can have. So I explained him that stuff with the lock. He wasn't quite sure whether he got it.

Me: imagine you go to the toilet. You check whether there's enough toilet paper in the stall, and it is. BUT now someone else comes in, does business and uses up all paper. CPUs can do shit very fast, can't they? Yeah and now you're sitting on the bowl, and BAMM out of paper. This wouldn't have happened if you had locked the stall, right?

Him: yeah. And with a single thread?

Me: well if you're alone at home in your appartment, there's no reason to lock the door because there's nobody to interfere.

Him: ah, I see. And if I have two threads, but no shared memory, then it is as if my wife and me are at home with each a toilet of our own, then we don't need to lock either.

Me: exactly!

Today,
First day of new dev class...
Teacher, "As you know Tablets, Smartphones, Smartwatches etc... Are not allowed in class, except Laptops."
Me,
"Is a Surface allowed?"
Teacher,
"Is it a Laptop?"
Me,
"Yes, but also a Tablet.."
Teacher,
*Furious*
"NO TABLETS"
Me,
"Bu.."
Teacher
*Still furious*
"YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN HOW TO BE A GOOD RELIABLE DEV, SO LISTEN"
Me,
*Proceeds to Lift up surface from Keyboard*
Teacher,
*Rips surface out of hand and goes to secretary*
"You can have it after school"
Me,
*Sitting there speechless with nothing to develop with*
10 Minutes later
*rector comes in and gives me surface back*
Me,
Thank you
*Proceeds to use surface*
...

The Teacher hates me...

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap. When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, "It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I'm glad she slapped him." The Project manager is sitting there thinking, "I didn't know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn't missed him when she slapped me!" The young woman was sitting and thinking, "I'm glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!" The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, "Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!"

TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

so i just got fired 🔥 🔥 🔥 because i wanted a 200 fucking dollars raise after 1 year of work and sacrifices and feeling like shit.
200$ because i live in the 3rd fucking world, working with a stupid motherfucking boss (you know the fat old tone deaf cunt), he's american, and he brings projects from the US from clients paying thousands of dollars, and he pays us 300$, and by the fucking way he used to pay us 100$ (we are 3 developers, a dick who does nothing but report our behavior, and a shit who does shit. we are a development company and we are the only developers and we got fired because he thought we didn't deserve the raise and that he sees no reason in giving us more money because we're already wasting the company's money and time).
So now the only people left there are the dick, the shit and the fatass boss who's in the states rn.
the funny thing is after we left by an hour or so we got calls from many other companies that we refused to work with because of our loyal-fucking-ty.
the motherfucker thinks we're conspiring against him, that we don't trust him, well of fucking course we don't, he lies about having a company in the US, well it's there but it's suspended (we looked it up), he says he's a microsoft, intel, adobe, dell, lenovo partner, and he's not.
well fuck i'm kind of happy that i left, i'm sitting with my friends in a cafe right now thinking about finishing our personal projects.
forgot something: the projects we were working on are unfinished, and there's not a single fucker to finish them, so he's ball deep in shit. hope this rant is relatable

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

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

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

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

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

Funny story about the first time two of my servers got hacked. The fun part is how I noticed it.
So I purchased two new vps's for proxy server goals and thought like 'I can setup fail2ban tomorrow, I'll be fine.'

Next day I wanted to install NginX so I ran the command and it said that port 80 was already in use!

I was sitting there like no that's not possible I didn't install any server software yet. So I thought 'this can't be possible' but I ran 'pidof apache2' just to confirm. It actually returned a PID! It was a barebones Debian install so I was sure it was not installed yet by ME. Checked the auth logs and noticed that an IP address had done a huge brute force attack and managed to gain root access. Simply reinstalled debian and I put fail2ban on it RIGHT AWAY.

Checked about two seconds later if anyone tried to login again (iptables -L and keep in mind that fail2ban's default config needs six failed attempts within I think five minutes to ban an ip) and I already saw that around 8-10 addresses were banned.

Was pretty shaken up but damn I learned my lesson!

Manager: I just think you are being too negative. Like sometimes other people have opinions too and we should hear them out before saying no.

Me: Well your opinion is the devs shouldn't be able to estimate their own tasks and you should decide on our behalf how long something should take.

You also want to decide what tech stack we use, because you followed a "Hello World" tutorial last night and it worked out for you.

Just because you got a simple webpage up and running in 2 hours doesn't mean all websites take 2 hours with the tech. Were not sitting in the corner laughing that you think its taking us 3 weeks to build this.

I'm not being negative simply because I don't agree with you. I'm not being unreasonable if I say I can do 6 weeks work in 2 weeks. And although it sounds offensive, i'm actually doing you a favour by telling you to get your head out of your ass

A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

Sitting in a dorm, chilling..

My new roommate: So You study Computer Science?

Me: *Here it goes again*

Roommate: Can you fix my HDD? Something is wrong with it..

Me: No...

Roommate: But..

Me: No I study computer SCIENCE! Go ask yout physics professor to fix your fucking trebuchet, because he knows how that stuff works..

Roommate: *Silence*

God... That was my best reply in whole life... Someone should make a shirt of that...

I've had this twice in a very short period of time now and it really pisses me the fuck off.

Sitting in the train (I think the grammatically correct version is on the train but no that would be a little too dangerous for me I think), on my phone devRanting/Signalling/Rioting around when an an elderly person says (aiming towards me):

"Oh, youngsters and their technology, where has socializing gone? Why are you people always on your phones? Go socialize sometimes!"

Excuse me but fuck right off.

Because you know what, I am currently socializing.

Just not in the way you are used to or maybe even 'okay with'.

I'm talking with friends from all around the world (Signal + Riot), participating in interesting discussions (on here) and what not.

I do have very strict rules for myself though. When in company with people I am actually going to socialize with or when hanging out with friends, the phone goes the fuck away unless I NEED to be reachable.

But I'm on a fucking train with people I don't know and frankly I'm done with socializing for the day as I've had to hear (often stupid) people asking for help all day long.

Next to that, I don't know you, you don't know me, who am I to judge you? I'm not going to socialize with anyone here anyways and even if they'd like to, I'm fucking done with people for to-fucking-day.

Sincerely fuck off please.

So after I spent around 1 hour 35 minutes debugging a client's problem to end up with finding out he had no actual internet without him saying so I think I can finally catch a break and relax..

NOPE

I get an urgent call that a computer that needed tending to was down and needed to be up by tonight

I rush to the office of the said computer only to find the one of the worst things imaginable.

I can see the computer clearly shorted and lo and behold, the CD tray is out with a MUG.. yes you heard that right.. A MUG FULL OF TEA sitting on it..

I literally scream at the employee asking him what a mug was doing there and instead he calls ME DUMB saying that if it wasn't intended as a cup holder what was its use?

SERIOUSLY?! ITS 2017 HOW CAN PEOPLE NOT GRASP SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS THIS

Gahaa!!! Finally back home, after 7 fucking hours of sitting in busses and trains!

BUT I GOT MY NEXUS 6P!! Yoo-hoo!!! :D

And I've got a nice story about it.

So when I bought it, the guy selling it to me was a nontechnical type (I think?) whose wife was the previous owner. So I thought to myself, cool a nontechnical user used it.. probably no hardware mods or anything to worry about. Apparently they even factory reset it for me :)

Now, when I left to go back home, I of course immediately booted up the thing and did the whole doodad of logging into it, setting up the device etc.

Then it struck me. When I booted up the device and wanted to log in, there was a lock from Google that required me to first authenticate as either a previous account of the device, or their unlock pattern. So I figured, eh fuck it, I'll just flash some AOSP without GApps or send the owner an email asking what the previous pattern is.

But I still had to wait 30 minutes at the bus stop so I thought to myself.. previous owner was a nontechnical woman.. maybe I could crack it. No way to know if I don't try. So I started putting in random unlock patterns.

3 attempts later - I shit you not! - pattern accepted.
Do you want to add this account?

Oh boy Google, of course I do! Thanks for letting me in pal!

3 fucking attempts. That's all it took to crack the unlock pattern of an unknown person. 😎

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mainly a story with some ranting sprinkled on top :)

My grandma used to refuse to turn her PC off because ONE SINGLE WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE like 2 years ago made it so that Windows would turn the PC on by itself, nevermind it was fixed in the next update, she would simply refuse to try to turn the PC off from that point on... I never looked at the uptime but the PC was sitting on a carpet and all the fans were struggling to keep spinning, so much dust! When I asked her why it's so dusty all around the PC (the table that the PC was under was covered in a really thick layer of dust) she replied that the chambermaid comes every Wednesday to clean up the whole flat so she has no idea. I set up a camera that was recording the whole room so I could see what was going on... sure enough the chambermaid avoided anything that looked like it could have some ICs in it with a distance of at least 2 meters... When I showed the video to my grandma she was like: Yes, she is scared of electronics...
Seriously fuck me... Allright, I cleaned the whole table, carpet and the inside of PC, everything ran so quietly that I wasn't sure if I plugged the fans in.
Anyway after this I had to record the PC one whole night so I could prove to my grandma that it would not turn on by itself and she can in fact turn it off.
Fuck me... what a bad week that was...

PS: Yes, my stories do not have a point :)

Fuck those useless calls!

PM: customer X wants a call in an hour.
Me: they didn't send emails before. No questions, no prep, no call.
PM: yeah but they want to talk.
Me: these unprepared calls are pointless. I'll be sitting there, noting down the questions and telling them I'll have to look up the details.
PM: shall I tell them that you don't want to talk to them?
Me: I don't care, it's your call, do whatever you want.
PM: that's not professional.
Me: oh you're calling it professional to sit there with a pencil, writing down crap or what?
PM: what's the problem?!
Me: I've had this shit for the last two fucking calls, and they were so unprepared that they wasted half of the call just reading up, and I'm fed up with this shit!
PM: but they are the customers, and they aren't that happy.
Me: yeah, and do you know why? Because our schedule is completely fucked up and our management has been ignoring ANY warning from engineering for WEEKS! That's why they are unhappy and not because I'm not holding their fucking hands!
PM: hey, but you can't tell me what I have to do!
Me: and you can't tell me either! [he's my PM, but technically not my superior.]
PM: so no call or what?
Me: you're free to have your call. I'll sort out the shit that they're concerned about, putting that down in a proper email, and then we have at least some basis for discussion!
PM: (left for his call)

Btw., my cursing was the same in the live conversation with him.

Employer: so why do you want to join this organization?

Engineer: well like i said in the first 4 interviews, I love desks. Sitting behind them. Standing behind them.

Employer: are you a standing or sitting man?

Engineer: i like to sit in the morning and then switch up to stand at lunch.

Employer: a man with a plan. Very good. Do you remember anything from school?

Engineer: not a goddamn thing.

Employer: perfect. You don't need math. Just emails. You like emails?

Engineer: love emails.

Employer: there's gonna be a lot of emails.

Engineer: can't get enough emails.

Employer: perfect. Do you like a clear separation between life and work?

Engineer: oh not at all. I like it to muddy together in a never ending hell.

Employer: alright and you're familiar with work culture?

Engineer: oh those hours i work for free?

Employer: yes.

Engineer: I love that bullshit.

Employer: alright terrific. And are you familiar with the hate hierarchy?

Engineer: yeah the tech's hate the engineers, the engineers hate the tech's and the managers hate everyb-

Employer: everybody. Perfect. Alright I- honestly I think we'd like to make an offer.

Engineer: well, first I gotta leverage that with my current employer for a raise. And if they don't budge, I'll jump shut.

Employer: no loyalty at all?

Engineer: not at all.

Employer: you're hired.

"Do you like your job? I mean, all those collored lines in that funny font... sitting at the desk with this adorable rubber duck... Do you guys jus".....
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Me: "SHUT UP YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!!! I MADE 26 COMMITS DURING THIS FUCKING DAY, THE DAY THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE LAST WORKING DAY OF THIS SHITTY YEAR! I HAVE NOT SLEPT AS I SHOULD AT ALL CAUSE THIS FUCKING MIGRATION OF NEW YEAR'S UPDATE AND NOW... AHH NOW YOU STUPID FYCKING PSYCHO... NOW I HAVE TO CONTROLL MYSELF DURING NEXT DINNER WITH FRIENDS, HAVE NO MUCH ALCOHOL CAUSE DURING SUNDAY, EVEN ITS A FUCKING HOLIDAY AND EVEN IF I AM IN A LOOONNGG HANGOVER, I DO STILL NEED TO COMPLETE THIS FUCKING NEW YEAR MIGRATION YOU ASS PUNK! GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU LITLE USELESS TINY LITLE SHIT!!!"

And this is how I see my new years resolution: the time is priceles doing this questions to me...

Happy new year, fellazz! 💃🎆🎉

In the school we were using slow PCs for learning MS Office things. Every single step we did took ages. There were one guy who was an informatics antitalent: he never were able to work fluently with any electric machine from a microwave to anything smarter. In addition he was a semi-pro athlete and he had some kind of anger management issues, sometimes yelled to the teacher after a bad mark or with us when we lost a in-school soccer match. You know, he was that competitive guy.
One time on computer science class he was very focused. He tried to follow every steps precisly and his machine seemed faster than as usual. He felt like he broke some kind of wall which was between he and the machine.
When we had a break and he went out we tought that we should make a prank. We made a fullscreen screenshot from the desktop and set it as the wallpaper, then killed explorer.exe. As a result the icons and the start menu was only on the screen by the wallpaper.
When he came back he said that there were some bad news from some of the sport event he wanted to go, so he was angry. But then... You know the gif when the guy first hit the side of the screen multiple times then throws out the machine? Yeah, we saw that in real life, but not in that office. First he was just clicking everywhere, we just watched how his face just transforming. Then he started to talk just in himself as the machine could understand. After two minutes he just yelled to the machine why did it freeze, but the last drop was when the teacher said: You'll have to send me your work and it will be marked. In this moment he was just roard a huge and droped the CRT out of the window from the second floor. Luckily the window was facing to a brushy part of the garden so no one was there. He just standed there, looked out to the CRT sitting in a brush for a while, then he turned to the teacher as "Mr, I think something is wrong with my machine"

So the first hackathon I attended my team and I came stone last. So while we wait for the awards I have 3 beers to drown my sorrows (I am a 2 beer guy so I was already feeling it)

We go into the ceremony and there were not enough chairs at a table for my team, so I end up sitting at the winning teams table. Let's just say I adopted a bottle of wine.

A wine bottle down I am feeling super drunk. I told myself "no more booze" ... Then the tequila's started rolling. I must have been quite visibly drunk because the other people at the table were giving me more to drink. Eventually I was like "I am ok, I am ok"

I wake up 2 days later on the floor of my bedroom at my parents house. Apparently this is what happened after the tequila's:

I decided to have an awards ceremony of my own and hug EVERYONE, apparently one judge did not enjoy his drunken hug very much (lol). Then I threw up in the hotels courtesy car, and also ran backwards into their bushes.

A buddy of mine took me home, but was to scared to face my parents, so he dumped me (now asleep) on the my parents driveway, rang the bell and buggered off, leaving my parents to drag me inside.

Everything was going fine in the Interview, then:

Company X's HR: "So if you are selected in both X and Y, which one would you choose 😊?"

Me: 🤔🤔🤔 Long deep thoughts...

HR: "😒 I know your answer is X, But why X 😑?"

Me: Oh.. X! Hmm.. 🤔🤔

Result:
Successfully Rejected
#BeingHonest

Moral:
If you are sitting for X's interview, you have to always choose X with no lag, even if Y= Google.

All well; Ends Well: Placed in Y👍

PS: Here, X, Y and Me are real-life entities.

I'm not angry, mostly sad.

At my workplace we don't use git.
There are constant overwriting, sending code via email or USB stick and forgetting passwords to zip-files shenanigans going on.

I already use git for all my local projects (literally git init in the directory) but my coworker and I thought that it would be a great idea to have a local server with a Gitlab running on it.
So I started looking into running a self-hosted Gitlab (for about 15 minutes) and then our boss who was sitting right next to me almost shouted at us: "Such stuff should be coordinated with the boss! We don't just do something and burn my money because it's _cool_!"

No, git is not cool, it's necessary for crying out loud! Gitlab is cool but at the end of the day also just another tool too.

I guess I have some persuasion to do.

I don't know what version control has done to our boss that he has such a deep dislike for it.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

Linux is great they said
Linux works well they said
Linux is totally awesome they said

- - -
4 live cds
(Ubuntu, mint, Debian, Antergos)
3 wouldn’t boot beyond splash screens or even into setup.

no fucking keyboard
No fucking wifi
No fucking trackpad

Now I’m sitting here with Antergos, with a USB keyboard, USB mouse and an ethernet cable plugged into my laptop 🤷‍♂️

Good news... I think I might be getting through the hard parts

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

Fucking finally! No more sitting!

Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).

I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.

Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!

I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.

The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.

I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.

I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.

**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.

If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.

My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.

Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.

Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?

Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.

Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?

Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.

What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!

Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.

I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.

Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.

Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.

Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".

Oooh, got one. Not a question, but a mind-blowing moment:

For some reason, my parents put my email address on one of their accounts, and it was an old one that I had stopped using years ago. Then, this conversation with my parents happens, at their home with the laptop I gave them sitting open on the table:

me: "you guys should probably give them your email address."
mom: "we don't have one."
me: "what about dad's?"
dad: "no, I don't have an email address."
me: "you used to have one. what happened to it?"
dad: "that one was at the library. I don't have one here."
me: 😑

My father apparently doesn't know the basic concept of the internet and its global nature.

Office prank time! It was some years ago when the horror movie "The Grudge" came out, with that creepy Japanese dead girl who made that horrible "aaahhhhhh" sound. A coworker, who was just as shocked by the movie as I was, would occasionally send me emails with sceenshots from that movie.

One day, I upped it. I knew he was the first in the office in the morning, so I arrived even before him. It was still dark. I put a walkie-talkie under his desk, set it to "no beep", switched off the lights again and hid two rooms away.

Sure enough, he arrived. I waited for about 10 minutes to be sure he was sitting at his desk. Then I used my walkie-talkie and "aahhhhh".

WOAH, his scream was loud even two rooms away!

A Geologist and a developer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the developer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Developer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Developer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Developer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Developer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the developer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The developer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the developer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the developer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

Non IT people controling the IT departments and ruining the development culture.

No one (where i am from) anymore considers the software life cycles, initial r&d work, normalized relational db or using proper algorithms. All this stuff is critical for critical systems but people just want the softwares to work on the front end and make money, no matter if its all duct taped underneath. And I strongly believe this is happening because of non IT people and marketers sitting on top of IT departments.

Computer science people have kind of lost all respect. They are constantly yelled at by non IT people and asked to do year's job in months.

This makes me sad

Story time:

Ok so I'm in school and I'm on the computers we have to do a project on them the with rest of the class and I'm sitting beside this guy let's call him Bob (not his real name) anyways so Bob is working away on his computer and I'm trying to move documents and i decided to use cmd for it so opened it and then bob saw the cmd window and yelled "TEACHER HE'S TRYING TO HACK THE SCHOOL" then my teacher came over who has no idea how to operate computer like the rest of the class im surprised they can even turn the computer on anyways my teacher comes over and yells "PRINCIPALS OFFICE RIGHT NOW" and I'm like WTF?! anyways I have to explain to the principal what I was doing but she didn't understand so I go detention that day. Thanks a lot BOB!

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

I'm mad. Really really mad. I've worked so hard and this guy just comes in makes me feel inadequate. I come in every day and there he is sitting in his corner watching me as I work. For him it's so God damn easy! It takes me hours to do what he accomplishes in mere minutes! Oh yeah and he's such a fat ass too. He doesn't even have to do much to get his food. It just comes to him. I don't know how he fucking does it. He's got no fucking phone! What the hell!? I actually have to get up and go places to get my food. He's so fucking entitled, the little shit. He thinks he's a suave motherfucker. Well I fucking hate him. I might actually get around to killing him and then wiping the floor with him. But today's not that day. He's just a little to high for me to handle, honestly.

I should really just keep my head down and continue working and not let him bother me. But I can always feel it, that stare behind my head. I guess...

spiders are just better web developers than i am

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

Was working on a Django thing (server-side, so no dynamicness as far as I'm aware?) under a contractor at my company.

Needed a popup to display results of a subprocess, so I asked "We're going to need to AJAX it, right?" and give brief justification. Guy says no - pretty much "Django 10/10 supports this, let me Google". Proceeds to send me a link to a python package that enables using popups as a way of inputting values for form fields. I see as much on the couple of images for the package demo/introduction, so I'm kind of just like "It doesn't look like it's what we need though..." But the guy says to trust him, and implement it.

A day later, after scrutinizing the demo code, and trying to figure out how to implement the package, I go back to him and say "I really really really don't think this is going to work" and give the same justification from the day before. He opens the demo code himself and follows the long trail of confusing methods and stuff.

After an hour of my sitting there watching him read the code and disappearing for 10 minute periods a few times, he comes to the conclusion "Okay you need to understand the code to implement it. But go ahead and use AJAX"

This is abridged and a few other super annoying things have been cut out, but I TRUSTED HIM.

I. TRUSTED. HIM.

Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"

We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

OMG! I fucking hate it when people who have no idea about technology whatsoever have a conversation about some 'technical stuff' and I've got to listen to trash like:

A: "It's a wonder that all of this stuff actually works!"
B: "Yeah, I heard that it all connects over some kind of WAVES or something like that..."

FFS! I know you can't know everything, but please for the love of god ... just don't!

- Currently sitting on the train and cringing like a madman -

I don't have a ton of friends, but I do have a few. None of them can code (one has tried HTML/CSS and didn't get past the fundamentals). When I make something cool, and show it off to my friends they just don't understand the struggles and triumphs that were involved in that project. As a beginner/intermediate dev, feedback is huge and no one I know in person can give it to me. There are a couple people I chat with online that help me with my projects, but that's nothing like sitting down with someone and listening to their feedback, suggestions, ect.

Why do my friends have to be so non-techy?

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

"LeT's uSe gRaPhQL!" They said.

"It EliMinAtEs cOmpLeX aNd vErBoSe REST coDe!" they said.

Me sitting here for hours waiting for the backend team to fix major regressions every time they push the smallest "updates" to staging... 🤡

Call me a boomer but I can't help but feeling graphQL makes things MORE complex than REST... either that or the backend devs have no idea what they are doing

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. 😟

You know, I am getting really fucking irate posting them rants about how shitty my job is.

I'm more than fucking competant, but this company is turning me into a blithering, raging, frothing maniac.

I am sitting doing my devOps at the moment. On top of that I am the network admin, the sys admin, the sec admin, the fucking fuck admin (you get the point) and now I am being told to go out and work in the field because "The technician is busy with calls, and doesn't have time". These calls are ALL FUCKING PRINTER CALLS. SET UP USERS TO PRINT AND FUCKING SCAN.

I am not being a shithead by saying no. I have spent the last year or so doing favours for these bastards, I don't get any compensation in any form for it, and it is just making my life hell. The reason I went into devOps is so that I don't have to fucking deal with shit like this. I spent years in the field, and I fucking hated it. I was good at what I did, but I fucking hated it.

Now I am back there. They earn more than i do, those printer techs, but I am doing their fucking work for them. I have even made them simple little fucking scripts so that 90% of their work is done in two clicks.

Fucksakes. Now my motherfucking right shift key doesn't want to operate properly. Been using this keyboard for about 6 years now, and now it decides to fuck out. Fuck.

As standing, I am fucking sick and fucking tired. I am drinking energy drinks and mass amounts of coffee just to stay functional (because I sit up until 12AM trying to get through all my work - everyday of the week). Reported to tech director, doesnt give a single fuck. "Stick around, things will get better".

Yeah, fuck you.

Seriously thinking about freelancing.

Don't know if it pays well though.

So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?

The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ

I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.

I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."

Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.

Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.

Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).

Where's the Tylenol?

Dear customer support chaps,

I get that you can't help me with my issue. I get that you're only a subordinate of the sales people with no clue about the internals of whatever you're selling. I really get that.. if you knew, you wouldn't be sitting there, dealing with users.

However if I ask you something that you don't know, and I explicitly mention that you should please escalate this to an engineer or someone who knows the answer to my question, JUST FUCKING DO IT ALREADY!!! Put that fucking underserved pride aside for a moment, how difficult can it be?!!

God I'm fucking done for today.

We just finished a "Climate-conference-simulation" in school.

Basically ~90 students split into 6 groups representing a delegation of a country or a group of countries.

EU,
USA,
India,
China,
Other developing countries,
Other industrial countries

The target of our efforts was the reduction of global warming from ~4 C° by 2100 to around 2 C°.

My group (USA) elected me to speak and represent (I did kind of mimic the American stereotype of being egoistic and self centered, no offence intended)

As all the other nations and groups were planning great schemes, my group simply continued to put, well, basically rocks in their path by not playing along cause aforementioned stereotype.

It's the working phase after the second presentation of results, I'm sitting there with parts of the Chinese and EU delegation and suddenly two of my friends, in different groups, put my hood over my head, drag/carry me out of the assembly hall, toss me out and leave me there.

Was funny and all, but damn, it's fucking exhausting to stand in front of around 100 people (including teachers and stuff) and completely not play along with the other group's opinions and plans.

But hey, I've been congratulated a lot of times cause I've perfectly stayed in my role.

Yes it was weird

Other PM: We must fix the database performance issues now.

Me: We can't. We're still only halfway on the dependency chain to tackle this and honestly, even if the dependency chain would be fulfilled, I'd leave at least 2 weeks monitoring the production after the changes were rolled out before we further poke around.

Other PM: This is taking far too long. And whaddya mean by dependency chain? Why was I not informed about this?

Me: *sigh* like in every meeting in the last weeks: the dependency chain are the current open blockers before we can proceed with the database changes. We've talked about this _at length_... Especially why these blockers exist.

Other PM: No, we need to start now. I've _examined_ at the blockers or "dependency chain" as you call it.

(Examined.... He opened on his currently streaming laptop, which was connected to the active beamer, the mentioned ticket with a detailed blocker ... And quickly scrolled. Yeeah. Warmonger...).

Me: I'm very tired of discussing this. But since you are already presenting us the ticket, read out the referenced meeting notes... We explained it in great detail.

Other PM: Why? This is just a waste of time!!!!!!!

--
Yes. This happened. Other PM was my nemesis.
In this meeting were 2 PMs (Him, Me)… I think 5 - 7 devs... And we were sitting in this meeting since 2 hours at least. Everyone was angry...

After this "manifesto of intelligence"… I simply left the room, followed by a few devs.

And yes. Other PM did this on a regular basis....

I am DONE with this woman.

Background: we're a team of 3 developers and I'm the junior in this team and I've been in this shit for a year now. 2 months ago the team leader left for another project and I had to stand in for him in every responsibility against the PM and other teams.

Now I not only had to endure this insecure woman but I was also supposed to work with her! Fast-forward to today, the team leader is back and I thought I could put my headphones on and work peacefully at last.

But no!

I've found out she's sent a faulty code to production - no big deal - and said that over chat (although she's sitting right behind me):

Me: We need to fix this.
Her: What?

Me: *giving some details about the issue*
Her: Your attitude is important when you ask me to do something. Whenever you're writing to me you're typing on your keyboard like you're going to break it on my head.

*me not knowing what to say at this point because we had something stupid like this before*

Me: So you're offended by the sound my keyboard makes? (I have mx brown switches by the way and they're not even loud)
Her: No you're typing too fast when you're writing to me. The sound echoes in the office.
...

Can you fucking believe this shit? I hate people that think they can educate me but have no idea how to rationally respond to situations and take responsibility! I didn't even say anything!

And she's been saying to me she hadn't had a problem with any other people for gazillion years who knows how long and why would she cause a problem now! And thinks I am the problem, fuck YOU!

Since you don't like receiving orders why hadn't you taken the place when the fucking guy went for another project but I had to take all the responsibility? I know why you fucking entitled bitch.

Because you HAD NO IDEA AND YOU STILL DON'T.

So shut the fuck up and do as I say.

Kind regards

Programming made me fucking fat as fuck.

I went to Holmes Place after a 2 month no gym period to get counseling.

I have a whoppin 25% body fat and it makes me fucking depressed.

Fuck sitting in front of computers and programming for hours. Fuck snacks and fuck stayibg up late. That shit is bad for you.

Everyone is ranting/posting about Stephen Hawking RIP &such...

And I'm just sitting here, waiting for his chair to take over the world & shit to hit the fan.. O.O

P.S. no discrespect meant to the guy, I think he was awesome..

I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are. I don't care if the ads don't track me. I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them. I vote for billboard bans whenever I can. I have zero tolerance for ads of any sort.

Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.

— mcpackieh

Sitting down for an entire weekend with a couple of friends, just to work on a side project.
No deadline, just fun. And beer, lots of beer 😅

I thought of a funnier story about recruiters, one called my desk a few weeks ago and I politely declined the offer before hanging up.

The same recruiter then proceeded to call the person sitting directly opposite me and subsequently told them that I had recommended them for a position (I categorically did no such thing). I hope they were wearing Brown pants that day because I proceeded to phone up their company and spent the next 20 minutes detailing how unprofessional it is to blatantly lie to people and expressly told them that if I ever found out they were using my name in this way again I would Sue them for libel.

Needless to say most of their agents have left my professional network on LinkedIn.

Tl;Dr I won

At lunch, someone asked a question about our Sunday Hack-a-thon. Our PO said it was a "Smack-a-thon." I told her, "No, don't make stupid names. Let's call things what they are. It's Management Failure Sunday." Manager was sitting across the table when I said it.

So I've got this raspberry pi 3 and no inspiration what to use it for.. and it bugs me, just sitting there taunting me: -"you aren't very creative are you?" So.. ideas and suggestions?

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

So this one time me and my teammates had just started working on react (please note that we all were backend developers and no one has the basic understanding of javascript) and things were looking quite exciting..

But towards the end of the deadline we were sitting and refactoring each others code since we had not decided on the coding standards and practises and random code had been written left right and center.. It once happened that the same piece of code was refactored multiple times by only 2 people..

And it is obvious that we couldnt make it to the deadline and that code is sitting there like a mixture of weird things..

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

Today I am going to rant about this guy who I am working with in a group for creating a mobile application as a project for a course.

So let me give you some background info about this guy. He has 5 years of experience as data analyst from some company in India. Now he is here in Canada for his masters. I took him in the group thinking given his experience, he can be an asset. However, as I started talking to him it became clear that he has no experience with programming or software development. I am ok with that as everyone is new to something. However, he started intrupting and started giving negative feedback about each and every thing we discussed regarding the project. Don't get me wrong, I am all about getting feesback. But if someone who is just sitting there and just searching stuff on google just to bull shit with people to show that he knows stuff is irritating. He always provide useless feedback and solutions to any problems.

I was talking to him about his past working experience and his future plans after graduating. He literally said, "I want to learn just enough to fake in front of employer during interview. I was doing the same thing in my previous job." I was legit shocked at this moment.

Now I have to tolerate this for another 3 months. I am just worried about the project.

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.

Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)

OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.

So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔

Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

Me: I want to be a dev..
Mom: But you only sit in front of the computer to play games.
Me: That's not what I always do.
Mom: Then why are you sitting behind the computer all the time.
Me: To make software. Most of the time you clearly see me typing code.
Mom: No, I can't trust you, you play too much games. Study hard and get another job.
Me: *Middle finger behind a back.*

College rant:

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

!Rant

Story, only read this if you feel like wasting your time

Ok so I live in a small village and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the next city by car. I can't drive yet because I am 15 and so I would need my parents to drive me there. There are also no buses anymore which drive to the city after 2pm.

Most of my friends live in that city, none of them code. We always meet on a discord server and then play games or do some other shit. Today I got online at around 3pm and when I joined the discord server they asked me if I wanted to go see the movie 'IT' with them tonight, I said yeah of course (I am a huge fan of horror movies), but only if my parents come home early enough to drive me there.
Time passed and then my last friend left the discord server because he had to walk to the cinema.
I was the last one still on the server and also the one with the farest way to the cinema. I already knew that my parents wouldn't come home in time anymore and so I decided to just start coding something. I usually code while listening to some music and so I switched over to spotify to choose a playlist. I just randomly clicked on the first playlist spotify recommended me and the song started playing: 'Sound of silence'.

Fuck you spotify algorithm.

I know that not being able to go to the cinema with your friends is a fucking stupid reason to be sad but I just feel very sad right now. Sitting alone in my dark room staring at my computer screen.

Sorry for wasting your time

So ive been messing around with my Google Home.. because having a voice activated weather station is cool and all, but as a developer it needs to be useful no?... and Raspberry Pi, cause you know, we cool kids have those sitting around doing nothing useful.

But back on track, getting these two to actually work together, and that almighty moment you can say "Hey Google, Deploy Project -X- to the Pi" and the Rpi just kicks into gear and pulls down the latest master branch from Gitlab for the correct project is mind boggling.

No more ssh + sudo git pull !!!

Disclaimer: i didn't pay for that Google Home, but its in my house, listening to my TV, so i may as well use the damn thing.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

So apparently there was a prod issue all day today because some server app couldn't start up.

The error was caused by missing Params...

And seems everyone that got asked to look at it are pretty clueless.

I looked at the text msgs now cuz my phone wouldn't stop vibrating from notifs (yes it got that bad) and I'm thinking, of all the ppl you guys could've asked, no one reached out to me... Who well knows exactly it works, and how to fix it.

But the issue with the team is everyone works on everything but most people have no idea how the apps actually work...

Jack of all trades, master of none...

Anyways, sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos ain't too bad either....

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

Alright, I'm grown up enough to admit it publicly: I DON'T LIKE GOING OUT TO PUBS OR OTHER DRINKING PLACES. Even if it's to take a company guest out for the night. Or a teambuilding. I don't care. If you're gonna meet up just to sip booze and talk about stuff, I won't be there.

It's boring
it's pointless
it means a shitty next day
it means a shitty rest of the evening [booze messing up sharpness of mind, no driving, etc]
it doesn't bring any value
it's not fun and it sure is not my cup of tea

taking the guest to play golf - sure. Take him to a range - blasts of fun! Horse riding - absolutely. Go-carts - hell yeah! Basicaly doing ANYTHING but sitting, getting dizzy, slowly losing control of my body and thoughts and sharing that experience with someone is a better way to take a guest/client out or have a teambuilding.

DO something. Not just sit and drink and slowly get stupider in front of someone.

Sitting at work listening to music, doing absolutely fuck all right now because I ain't got no tickets! All the mfers need to answer me before I can work on their stuff.

Sounds great, no?

It's not. It's hell being unable to do work for me. I need to busy myself with doing random shit so I don't go insane.

Mhh, coffee...

Oh, by the way, Sir Jav'alot is still around too.

Mom: "so... you do things with the computer, but what do those things do?" or "I have no clue what you just said, but good luck with that"

Father: "couldn't you have gotten a real job? Like machining or warehouse management, where actual work can be seen rather than sitting on your &ss all day, typing on that keyboard"
- he changed his view real quick when I showed him my paycheck. ($3/ hr more than him)

Brother: "cool"

Ex-gf: "I hate you" (more because of my starting pay)

What can we do with a boss who urinates in a cup in his office and then dumps it in the kitchen sink even when we (all women) are sitting there eating lunch?

We are certain of what is in the cup because it smells, is yellow, and it sits right on his credenza in plain view. He’s even left it outside the office, forgetting to empty it.

A few weeks ago I was washing my lunch dishes and he dumped it right on top of my stuff. I was pretty much in shock, I just couldn’t believe it.

Is there something wrong here that I’m not getting? He’s the owner, the boss, in his 70’s, and very respected, but I don’t understand this. No one knows what to say. We feel that if we said something, he would deny it and since he’s the boss, who knows what would happen. Is there any way to approach this? The only other males in the office are related to him. Someone did mention it to one of them, but nothing has changed.

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

Has anyone felt the astonishing effect that is writing a whole bunch of test classes, hitting run for the first time and they all pass.

I'm kinda sitting here staring at my screen in disbelief, either these tests all passed, or I've really missed something and they passed anyway, or it's just a lying piece of shit trying to question my own abilities... all are possible right now.

And no, they are not " assert(1,1) "

Update:

The wasp is still alive.

I walked in today to find the damn buzzy mother-earth-fucker on the window. It doesn't have much energy now, and I didn't let it out because mofo got the chance a million times over to just leave me the fuck alone. So I just let it be. no idea where in the lab it is hidden now, and the robots will watch him all night, every night.

And you know what, I'm not gonna open the damn window for it ever again.

(Sat in my hoodie, wrapped, the whole day and was paranoid about it flying and sitting on me, but the war is on. He won't get out of this lab alive. )

Story time

I really love helping and teaching others about code. Recently I had a friend that wanted to get into web development. Being me, I told him that i would teach him all he wants but that he needs to do some research first to show me that he feels comfortable with as a minimum requirement. I told him to research the minimum technologies required to build a web page and to tell me about the request response cycle and stuff like that. When he came back I was expecting small explanations such as "html stands for bla bla and is used for bla bla".No. this dude comes back all proud to tell me about flipping Laravel. I sit there quietly listening to him go on about the "Laravel programming language". He likes anime, I like kendo (and have trained in it) so while he is talking I slowly move us into the part of my office where I keep my boken (wodden sword). As soon as he sees me sitting down with the sword he asks what am i doing with it.
"Well, remember when in some anime that you like you see teachers beating their studets over stupid shit?"
"What?"
..."WHAT DOES HTTP STANDS FOR?"
"The...the err the web language that.. er"
BOINK
"what is javascript?"
"Like the updates thing?"
HARDER BOINK

:) guarantee he wont forget what http is after that and what js and Laravel are from now on :) needless to say he will continue learning with much more care.

Coding dojo for real mofockas, ya dig?

Rant. (I love and respect all people! Especially developers.)

You frontend imbecils! I just can’t deal with you any more. I’ve had it.

Stop-inventing-new-components-where-there-are-fully-developed-and-working-concepts!

I mean. Just fucking stop! If I see another worthless datetime picker with an ”innovative” design I am going to hunt you down and freaking scream in your face.

And make fucking buttons look like tappable/clickable. It’s not fucking hard! Imbecils.

Oh, ooo, look at me, I am a frontend developer and I am in UX la-la land and what I am doing is sooo hard. Fuck off with your fucking moving gradients and n:th-child childish playground.

”Yeah, I exchanged the spinner…”

Fuck you. Your not contributing. Nobody cares! We’re not doing anything for the business by having a web which can be seen on a fucking telephone. EVERYBODY IS SITTING WITH SEVERAL GIANT MONITORS AND A FUCKING WORKSTATION FOR THIS. NOBODY ASKED FOR IT. AND YOU SPEND COUNTLESS HOURS ON IT.

”Yeah, I made the site work on ipad”

Please. Why? It’s not worth anything. Zero value.

”Yeah, the toggle component is now changed since we started to use the biddle-flipflup lib and it works almost the same”

No! NO! It does not work ”almost” the same. The psychology of the toggle is now wastly different. What was On before now looks like Off and it is fucking worse!!!

Imbecils. I hate you.

And no, I can’t do your fucking work! And I know that you do other non-ui stuff as well sometimes… but anyway… I have no interest to be in that clusterfuck that modern frontend is today. It was really fucking bad twenty years ago and it is just as bad today and you are not helping.

”I’ve improved the button so now it aaaaalmost does not look like a button. But I am getting there!”

Fuck you.

WHY???
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO FUCKING SURPRISED SHIT HITS THE FAN EVERY GOD DAMN TIME A CHANGE IS MADE IN YOUR LIMPING SYSTEM?
YOU GAVE NO FUCKING SPECIFICATIONS NOR ANY CARE TO DECIDE ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT IN IT.
EVERY TIME I SEE THE CODE I GET EYE CANCER, DEBUGGING THIS SHIT IS AS HARD AS FINDING THE FATHER IN A HOBO STREET ORGY
AND YOU FUCKING THINK ADDING FEATURES INTO THE SYSTEM UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES IS SO GOD DAMN EASY.

I hope life's god damn dandy for you, get fucked with a pipe bomb.

Oh, hello DevRant, sorry for sitting on the fence for the past months.

Sitting in Office on a Saturday learning how to Code :) There is nothing like a quiet peaceful office with no other keyboards clickety clacking than your own.

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

This begs for a rant... [too bad I can't post actual screenshots :/ ]

Me: He k8s team! We're having trouble with our k8s cluster. After scaling up and running h/c and Sanity tests environment was confirmed as Healthy and Stable. But once we'd started our load tests k8s cluster went out for a walk: most of the replicas got stoped and restarted and I cannot find in events' log WHY that happened. Could you please have a look?

k8s team [india]: Hello, thank you for reaching out to k8s support. We will check and let you know.

Me: Oh, you're welcome! I'll be just sitting here quietly and eagerly waiting for your reply. TIA! :slightly_smiling_face:

<5 minutes later>

k8s team India: Hi. Could you give me a list of replicas that were failing?

Me: I gave you a Grafana link with a timeframe filter. Look there -- almost all apps show instability at k8s layer. For instance APP_1 and APP_2 were OK. But APP_3, APP_4 and APP_5 were crashing all over the place

k8s team India: ok I will check.

<My shift has ended. k8s team works in different timezone. I've opened up Slack this morning>

k8s team India: HI. APP_1 and APP_2 are fine. I don't even see any errors from logs, no restarts. All response codes are 200.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ .... Man, isn't that what I've said? ... 🤦‍♂️

!dev && rant

There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.

Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.

Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"

OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!

It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"

Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!

Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"

Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?

Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?

No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!

Worst recruiter experience:
Recruiter sets up interview with a company. I get to their office - the most packed place I have ever seen - devs practically sitting on each other, and the QA guys are being used as chairs....

So I wait for 15 minutes near the doot till the interviewer gets to me through the incredibley noisy openspace, and shakes hands. We go into a mess of a meeting room - and he explains that they will be moving to a bigger office soon. I say - looks like you should have moved by now....

Anyways - he askes me to tell him about myself - and I explain my background, Focusing on Android dev experience - The recruiter told me this was a senior Android dev position. The interviewer has a huge question mark above his head, but waits for me to finish. Then he tells me: so... no backend experience? so Now I have a huge question mark above my head...

turns out he is looking for BackEnd devs - Not android devs.

This was about 3 years ago. I’m on vacation and just getting off the plane, when my boss calls me on his cellphone. Apparently the crontab on our main file upload server had gotten nuked, and he was asking if there were any backups.

A word about this server. I work with video, so this thing is doing about a few gigabits of traffic incoming at any moment. The cron jobs are necessary to move and organize these massive files into a sane scheme for processing. Hundreds of drop folders receiving thousands of files resulting in terabytes of data every single day. Our storage vendor tells us we have the third largest deployment they know about.

No cron jobs mean all of this content is just sitting around piling up. I tell him sorry, try contacting $otherAdmin since he’s more familiar with that system.

A few days later, after the vacation, I come back in. $boss and $otherAdmin have reconstructed the crontab from scratch after an all nighter.

I ask how it got deleted.

$boss was training some people how to set up new customers on this file server, and he told the trainees to open the crontab in read-only mode. One of them ran:

crontab -r

Yes, we back up our crontabs now.

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

So I'm sitting down coding at home, trying to work out some problems when I hear the Doorbell ring. Obviously I shouldn't ignore it so I go to answer it.
Its the fucking FedEx delivery guy, he ALWAYS rings the doorbell, waits a solid 2 seconds after ringing then leaves. By the time I am about to answer the door he is already walking away.
HE ALWAYS FUCKING DOES THIS, in the end I'm thrown off my rhythm for nothing to go answer a door where the person ringing doesn't even have the decency to wait a few extra seconds to see if anyone comes.
This has happened to me several times now, he rings the door for no damn reason, i come running over and he is already gone.
So bloody frustrating.

I think there is such a thing as "getting too comfortable with the people you work with".

My boss came over and wanted to show me how to do a new process. We start going through the steps and a question arises. I then IM my team lead, because he's the one who would know the answer, and all I get back from him is sarcastic comments and profanity (he doesn't know my boss is sitting at my comp with me). So I keep trying to get him to be serious, and he just keeps his mouth (well, fingers) going. (He is remote - not in our bldg). I want so badly to shut him up because what if he says something about my boss while she is sitting there? Not that he does that, but at the pace he's going, it no longer would surprise me.

There should be some sort of code to hint to your team to STFU and give a fucking answer when one is needed. Sort of like what kids do to hint that a parent is in the room, but for work?

A fight story (separation of concern) : work vs life

IT Director (IT'D) forwarded a client message (false detection) to my whatsapp (personal number). I am sitting next to his cabin.

After an hour,

ITD : what was the issue with the client x?
Me : (proved false detection),
ITD : did you emailed client?

Me : no, don't send me these in WhatsApp, if any issues, email me since I won't check whatsapp and there is no guarantee that I will reply you back.

ITD : why, don't be negative. Either you have to or me have to do it.

Me : Tell them to email.
ITD : That is not right.

Me : I don't care if you provide support via WhatsApp. But I don't. Unless you provide a separate mobile and connection.

End of story.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Ok here's the story,
There is this girl older than me by 5-7years and I worked with her for 2 years in the past...
She's fun to be around, and lights the mood in the workplace...
However one day I found her CV in my machine so I went through it. (It's no crime and it was there in my machine idk y)
And as I went through the list of projects, I was surprised and taken back to see she listed one of my solo project which I managed and developed from scratch as if she contributed to it. 🤯
The management specifically handed me the whole project and I singlehandedly carried it out and finished it and that was one of the projects I was super proud of and elaborated in my interviews.😎
But since she was sitting beside me and she knew basic requirement and the solutions I developed she had the knowledge on the project.
I was bewildered to see she has mentioned that project in her CV which she had zero contribution. I didn't feel like confronting her thinking when someone asks full details on the projects she would have to lie in the interviews cz she wouldn't know much details on it. And hey not everyone has my ethics and lets see how far she goes with hers.(may be this was stupid but I just thought hey we go our own ways lets see how far you go with lies and I forgot about it completly)

But now she's trying to apply to my current workplace where I dreamed of joining and finally succeeded and happy, here they value trustworthyness and quality work ethics above anything else... and without even telling me she has added me as a reference person to get more points to get an internal recommendation.
I certainly don't want to put a good word on her work ethics. Her team spirit and everything is fine but I just CANNOT with correct conscience ignore her bad ethics and recommend her.
What should I do? I don't want to loose her as a friend but I will not and do not want to recommend her to any place knowing she cannot be trusted with work related stuff. I know if I just tell the truth to the company when they ask she will definitely will not be chosen and I might feel guilty knowing I stopped it from happening.... but I don't want to recommend her truly knowing her bad qualities which in my openion cannot be overlooked also.
Should I just overlook it and help, or should I just tell the truth to the company... errgggh

I've became a better dev/sysadm since I've got a girlfriend. She has no freaking clue what I am doing when I'm working or sitting in front of my laptop. But she's often interested in the things i'm talking or ranting about when somthing doesn't work out like i've planned or some stupid problem occurs that I'm not able to fix. I am so glad i've got her. :)

My employer has no work for me, so i'm sitting here, watching anime and scrolling devrant. For gods sake give me work.

Twice a year, my work throws a party to celebrate our successes. Think of this as a post-Christmas and post-tax season party. Usually it’s a simple affair – they hire out a room in a bar, we have a theme to dress up to (last year for tax it was green, the colour of money), and it’s a social gathering. No pressure to participate, theme was broad enough that everyone could participate, and everyone came along for as long as they wanted.

This year, they’ve decided to make our post-tax party at a karaoke bar. I am usually a fan of karaoke…with my friends, after a drink or five, on my own terms. But singing in front of work colleagues?

To make things worse, they’ve created a committee to hyper-organise the games and teams. I know the usual AAM stance on organised/forced fun, and I attempted to get on the committee in an effort to steer them towards voluntary participation, but I was told the committee was full.

The party is next week and I’m already feeling panicky. We have been allocated into teams. We’ve been assured that these weren’t random, but were purposefully chosen to ensure a mix of outgoing and introverted people. Lovely. On top of being forced to participate, I have to sing with team members I normally wouldn’t spend time with. I’d be happy to do karaoke in front of my colleagues if it was a relaxed, opt-in thing where anyone who wanted to just jumped up there, but the forced, organised activity with judging and prizing is just making me dread it.

And there will be awards, which means there will be judging. I’ve alreasdy spoken up once after hearing a committee member excitedly tell a friend “there will even be an award for worst singer!” I straight up told her that there was no way they could have that as an award after forcing people to participate. I told I was being a party pooper and that it was all in good fun.

The official teams and rules were sent out yesterday and I noticed the award is actually for “best strangling of cat sound-a-like.” Which is infinitely worse.

How do I get through this party without ruffling any feathers, but also not putting myself and my singing abilities up for scrutiny in front of everyone I work with? Short of throwing a tantrum or sitting at the party in a corner and sulking, I’m not sure how to handle this diplomatically. The only people who aren’t going are those who have leave planned. They’ve even scheduled it so that it is running from 3 pm-6.30 pm (so, as my boss explained, those with childcare can still come for a few hours and not have to get a babysitter).

I was so annoyed by my acne over the past few years that today I went and got the entire area of my facial skin blasted with laser. Now, a several microns thin veneer, containing all that ugly pore openings, is removed.

Isotretinoin, benzoylperoxid, all failed. But I'm not afraid of trying newer methods. Now, serums will be used to grow new skin differently than it might have grown back on its own.

When it grows back, another laser will be used to destroy sebaceous glands. Blackheads and bumps will be physically impossible. A new skin. Even. Glowing. Artificial. Absolutely flawless, absolutely perfect. What a nice reflection of my vision on every thing I make.

When god was sitting in its room, chewing on a donut and designing the world we live in, he never thought much of humans. He got bored and went for a smoke with other gods of other worlds. Little did he know, there was a knock on his door, and a consequential rush of anxiety in realization that it was no fellow god friend, but a human. A human of the generation that figured out Theory of Everything, CRISPR and immortality. Desperate, dirty apes dared to trick silicon sand into thinking, and now they're there, not to talk, but to kill him, a privileged astral plane kid who fell short of those apes who figured everything out on their own.

Disease is natural. Death is natural.

Eternal things are artificial.

!dev rant, but dev company rant (if that makes sense)

<sarcasm>
I love my company's HR, she is such a wonderful and caring woman.
</sarcasm>

<rant>
'Breng' (a public transit company in the Netherlands) was on strike today, so I couldn't go to work. No problem I thought, I'll just work from home. So I send a screenshot to the HR where you could see that every train was canceled.

A few moments later I get a message back saying that I should wait for the next train (although you could see on the screenshot that said train was also canceled)

Now I finally have a train to go to work... After sitting an hour in the cold... And I already see the smile on her face when I arrive at work...
</rant>

<prayer>
Please trains keep driving so I can go home tonight...
</prayer>

Recently found a weirdest job in IT company.
The job description said you just don't need to know anything, but sometimes say some phrases like: "Who made this code, and I hate when it isn't made with framework" sitting in front of a laptop.
Someone is looking for fake programmer. I was astonished.
They said they have about four devs sitting in office and nobody believed then it is no problem, so they posted this to find couple of fake devs. Glasses and ugly sweaters is a must...

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

I was 7 and the night before Christmas my grandparents asked my mother if she could give me a computer for Christmas, my mom said no. I woke up Christmas morning to a computer sitting on my dining table :p. My mom was pissed

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

Making an ssh connection:

No....

No this one.

Not that one.

Not that one, either.

*starts typing*

*Typo 1*

*Typo 2*

Yay. Connected to server.

... Okay. Wrong environment.

*Exiting*

*trying again*

*Typo 1*

*Typo 2*

*finally connected*

Okay. I'm here...

Why did I connect to this machine again?!

------

Migrations are fun. Your bash history is an obsessive lier, your brain completely fried and when you finally managed to achieve something... You either forget what it was - or even worse - you get reminded of all the stuff you still have to do.

I'm literally amazed that I currently manage to go to the toilet, don't forget to make coffee and eat stuff at least once a day.

Before anyone thinks... Haha joke.

Nope I'm dead serious.

I am amazed that I didn't forget to go to the toilet, aka sitting in my own piss and wonder why it's so warm and wet down there.

I'm glad that the migration is going to end soon, otherwise I might opt in out of paranoia for adult diapers.

*My brain is really fried*

!rant

This morning, I thought I'd give devRantron a try, and man, I'm not disappointed.
Since I'm always at my computer, I rarely check my phone and now that we have a proper desktop client, I can finally shitpost while sitting at my desk. :v
No seriously though, this app is awesome.

Props to Tahnik and the other guys who worked on it.

Today’s DevOps public service announcement... don’t test your server provisioning scripts locally. Especially when this gem is in there:

rm -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
echo ‘vault secret/ssh_key’ > ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Well, I no longer have my key, but the script works! I’m sitting with a very locked down server key

That's it. A year just passed, and here i am sitting in my dorm, watching from my window all those fireworks blazing, exploding, dazzling the sky.

I got no one to party. No one accompanying me.

That's all. Happy new year all!

In today's episode, I did all programming tasks before 10 AM roles around while sitting on the toilet. The rest of the day, I shall just sit in my bed and try to edit this stupid video.

I should also look for more jobs, but hell, I studied so much to do what I like but there's literally no market for it... I kinda feel the liberal arts students now. Lol.

!dev

I’ve been ranting & posting a lot about my career, relocation, work life balance etc. in the last year.

Just wanna say, relocating was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Professionally and personally..
Although it was a bit scary and I didn’t have any money left after relocating..

It’s 6PM, I’m sitting in the garden, listen to some classical music and don’t spend a single thought on work.
Tomorrow I will arrive in the office around 7:45, I will do my work. My boss recognizes my teams effort and thanks all of us for the work on the end of each sprint.

There are no personal fights in the team, everyone is getting along with the others.

I do some good work, get a good salary and don’t have to mix up work and personal life.

The people here are awesome, everyone is welcoming and supportive.

If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to buy my dream car by the end of summer because the government doesn’t take all of my money. They take their taxes before I get my salary and the money I get is the money I HAVE..

Ireland is awesome.
At this point: thanks for the Irish guys here who provided information about work and life over here! And also to the other devs who supported me here👍

So we're seating in our small dev room where nothing else and no one else can fit in. I'm sitting next to the door so whenever anyone want to get in or out I need to do it first.
It's middle of the day and one of our dev friends. You don't believe what he did.
He fixed bug. So I pushed the red button to signalise that the bug was fixed and at the same time the alarm siren has launched and red lights starts to blink. Next minute couple of strippers wants to enter. Since the room is small they started dancing on our desks. Waitress opens champagne that's pouring on my leg and then I woke up and my dog is pissing on me.

Just sitting here, crying I have no money... And system76 has so many good deals...

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

Automation always fascinated me. Not only it looks and behaves like a life form, it also can perform billions of calculations without making a single mistake while I can’t even multiply double-digit numbers with my double-digit IQ.

If you pick the right components, you can make an immortal, perfect machine that can do its job for centuries, even millennia without a single mistake. There is nothing else on earth that can do this.

There is a robot surgeon and its hands never shake. It’s just flawless. If it fucks up, there is only you to blame, the flawed, pathetic operator.

And now it’s time to remember that it was just a 40s technology all along. And now it’s time to remember that now there is machine learning. A whole new perspective isn’t it. All the mistakes that machines make are sitting in front of the monitors.

No wonder I decided to be an engineer.

Just sitting here in class, when all the sudden my profs code shows up in the schools hall for no apparent reason....

When your new build is compiling and just scooting right along so you think... sure, I could go for some food. No. Nope. Not even. It chooses the exact moment you leave to nope the fuck out completely with the most random compiler errors that you would have never seen had you just been sitting there in the chair. It's like it knows. Maybe next time I leave I'll promise to bring it back a taco.

I am sitting at Starbucks trying to focus and finish some posts for my side project. The lady at the next table has been loudly 😁talking about her Disney trip in excruciating detail. Do we really have to know she will store her bagel and tuna fish in the hotel room fridge - really!

30 minutes in and she is just getting to the hotel - yikes 😫

No other seats open. I am trapped. Project deliverable delay - reason loud lady.

I was going to do this as a speech to text post but too nice to do that. HELP!

Microservices is a buzzword and everyone is using it to modernize their company and themselves.

Add a cloud in the context and boom, you are equivalent of some Tech gaint.

Well then, if you say so why don't you implement or try to implement in proper way. Use the right tools, "opensource" if you have heard of it has a ton of stuff right for the job.

But no, all you do is write the same old services in Java, put a label of "cloud native" and stick it out so proudly that clients think "oh a new shiny thing".

Putting out poster of "Immediate job requiment for Microservices" and staring blank when the candidate tries to explain how the Microservices work, but you know only about EJBs and you are sitting in interview room wondering what he is really talking about. I dint hear a single word of Java because that is all I know. Then finally rejecting the candidate because he dint say EJB in the interview.

The point is, some shit people don't want to improve themselves nor let anyone improve. Fear of being replaced by a younger generation of developers has plauged the seniors in ways no one can think of.

At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).

At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.

I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.

A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.

First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.

Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.

So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.

Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care.

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap.

When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, “It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I’m glad she slapped him.”

The Project manager is sitting there thinking, “I didn’t know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn’t missed him when she slapped me!”

The young woman was sitting and thinking, “I’m glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!”

The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, “Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!”

I remember I was a child trying to tinker around the only computer that we had. No one knew how to install the Windows OS from scratch with the drivers and everything else (they were installed on floppy disks) so when no one was around I managed to do it everything. I remember such joy, felt like a hacker 😂

Now I'm a web developer and I feel like a moron each time I'm sitting on a defect I can't solve so I'd say these were good times 😜

I have a dev job and I earn good. More than enough at this age when I'm single.

My brother lost his business and has been sitting idle for more than 3 months now. Family gets cash but brother has nothing to do. He's into business and I don't even know what's going on in his life. I can help him with money and all but no idea how to ask, I'm younger and it will require a lot amount of guts for me to him, even when I ask I don't think he will tell me straight.

So despite being able to do my entire job much more effectively from home, it's been demanded that I go in 2 days a week that "show my face".

Upon getting to the office there's no parking spaces, I go round the carpark again and woohoo there's a space!! Awesome..

I come back a few hours later to work the afternoon from home and find 2 cars double parked behind me..

Both owners seem to be off site currently.......... I guess this is my life now sitting in the car park waiting for people to move their cars 😂

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

!rant
Warning : This rant is long and is a rant asking for help and suggestions. If you will read and dont leave any comments, please go search other rants. Thanks.
-----------------------------------
Hi, fellow ranters. In our community, we have a tech class where teens (teens here mean 14yo -15yo) come to learn computer stuffs. Teens here are selected by a test and an interview. There are some teens who are f***ing awesome. One of them are proficient in scratch. (yeah, the orange cat) Another is awesome at PhotoShop, and the other loves windows xp. The teacher uses Microsoft Visual C++ IDE made in the 1990s. The kid sitting to my left made flappy bird with gamemaker. About 10 to 11 teens doesnt know what ctrl+alt+del does in windows and never did programming before... 3 among them always brings coke and oreos and eats super loudly. CRACK! And I bet no one knows about git.
Ok. Enough for the awesome teens. Now what we learn.
We learn C! Yes, C. We learned for, if else, switch and all those stuffs, then learned variables, which made other students who never did programming before be (―,.―).
Next class we will learn about functions in 3 hours. Then array and pointer in 3 hours. Thats it for c programming. Then we do some unnecessary stuffs and time for the finals.
We need to make a project with up to 4 teens as one team. Now I am asking you awesome ranters to suggest some projects for about 4 pros and 16 noobs can do. 10 hours are given in class and we can do in other times by ourselves in home. What should we do? I bet many of them will say to make ascii art in c which is dull and I have no thoughts of doing that.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
To see my skills, go to my profile page.
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v

Sitting here with my headphones + cap + hoodie on, and guess what... it’s working. No one disturbing me. I ... I feel like I’m a stone.

TLDR; I was editing the wrong file, let's go to bed.

We have this huge system that receives data from an API endpoint, does a whole bunch of stuff, going through three other servers, and then via some calculation based on the data received from the UI, and data received from the endpoint, it finally sends the calculated fields to the UI via websocket.

Poor me sitting for over 4 hours debugging and changing values in the logic file trying to understand why one of the fields ends up being null.

Of course every change needs a reboot to all the 4 servers involved, and a hard refresh of the UI.

I even tried to search for the word null in that file, but to no avail.

After scattering hundreds of console logs, and pulling my hair out, I found out that I am editing the wrong file.

I guess it's time for some sleep.

Hey Code-tards,

We're announcing a new update to our software `FUCK YOU` to include a new 'feature' no one asked and would give a FLYING FUCK about, but we were sitting on our MOTHERFUCKING ASSES and had to justify our salaries somehow.

So this new feature really just makes your life horrible by taking away or breaking all useful features you were PERFECTLY HAPPY with before, but FUCK YOU if you aren't happy with it and don't throw half of your salary our way every month.

Remember our library you were perfectly OK with, that u integrated in your codebase? DEPRECATED from this second onwards. WHY? BECAUSE FUCK YOU ! That's WHY.

Oh yeah, and one last thing before we make your life a living hellhole, give us your SSN, credit card(s) and mortgage payments to us, you money-hungry CUNT. Haven't you heard the phrase already? YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.

Don't feed the pigeons.
A cautionary tale.
When you feed the pigeons they keep coming back. They don't stop pestering you for help, and they don't ever listen to you.
I gave my father-in-law my old laptop, and installed the latest version of Office 2016 because I'm a nice guy.
Now, every week at family dinner there's something he needs me to help him with.
Mind you, his previous computer had Windows XP and the one I gave him had Windows 7. So it was quite the texh upgrade for him.
Except one of his octagenarian siblings wrote a family recipe book, and wrote it in Word Processor. (because Old People!) Well fuck of course it has pictures, clip art, special formatting, vertical and horizontal lines. It worked fine on XP because Word Processor was supported by XP.
The following is me explaining to him over the phone why his recipe book wouldn't load into Word. I was in his house picking up 2000 rounds of ammo for my and my wife's pistols (target practice) while he was out and about.
FIL: "It's the link on the desktop. It comes up in Word on the old computer but when I tried to put it on the new computer it wouldn't work. I used a thumb drive."
Me: "Okay well I tried to..."
FIL: "I don't know why it would work in Word on one computer and not the next."
Me: "Okay, well I clicked on the link to the file on your old desktop and it opened in Word Processor, not Word."
FIL: "No it opens in Word on the old computer, but it won't open on the new one."
Me: "It opens in Word Processor on the old computer, it won't open in Word on..."
FIL: "Which computer are you sitting at? The old one is on the left." (as if I wouldn't recognize the computer I had for three years and just gave him a month ago!)
Me: "The old one."
FIL: "Okay so it should open in Word on the old computer."
Me: "It won't. It will open in..."
FIL: "I was thinking maybe it had something to do with a screen that popped up when I logged in to the new computer. Something about antivirus software?"
Me: "It will open in Word Processor on your old computer, but it isn't formatted..."
FIL: "Yeah, it's a '.-w-p-s' file so it should work in Word."
Me: "Word Processor is a different program from Word. This opens in Word Processor."
(long silence)
FIL: "So which one do I have?"
Me: "You have Word Processor on the old computer."
FIL: "So how do I get Word Processor on the new computer?"
Me: "You don't. It is defunct software, it was discontinued ten years ago. You can try to get a converter online, but there's no guarantee it'll work."
FIL: "Alright, I'll be home in a few minutes. I'll take a look then."
This was at 10pm last night, and I'd been out all day since 7:30am. He still didn't believe me that the book was written in Word Processor until I showed him the different startup screen for Word Processor, where it says "Word Processor" plain as day.
I fed the pigeon. And it looks like there's more of this to come.