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

Some context first and then the rant!

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

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

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After finishing up 70% of a feature,
Brain: "there's a better way to do it"
Me: "ok ill just change a bit of code here and there.."
-- 2 hours later --
swimming in spaghetti code..

Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.

I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.

The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.

It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)

I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be

🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...

One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.

I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.

A gets there... Fucking finally.

Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).

*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.

Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...

🤔🤔

We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.

His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)

There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.

A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.

I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.

Got a call while on vacations, the main server is down.
*holy shit* I thought.
As I opened my MacBook, the phone kept ringing and slack was going crazy.

“What should I do? Where is the problem?”, the voices in my head said..

I opened the terminal and tried to get a ssh connection.
Sweat was dropping down from my forehead.

“Connected” the terminal said.

“Fuck yeah, the server is up, only the app is not responding”, I thought and opened the log files.

Suddenly, “STOP” I shout at the log files that were appended way too fast.

Then I saw it.
TimeOutExceptions..

I added an index to the modification date column,“ kill -9“ed the process, started again and went back to vacation mode 🙂

And of course I was the office hero for a while💪

For the smart asses, I’m aware that it’s a bad idea to -9 the app process in prod, but it was so overloaded that i was not able to kill it any other way. And we needed that server up again.

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

I used to kill some time reading devrant some years ago and I just stopped because most rants were basically whinny little teenagers that think they know everything, keepers of knowledge and truth, being clearly crying babies about “ boo-hooo my coworker is not using the language I like” or something they clearly still have a lot to learn about.

Grow the fuck up. I guarantee you that when you have a few more years of experience you’ll realize how little you knew and how great you thought you were when in reality you knew shit.

Hell, I’m on my 16th year of programming experience and what o thought I knew last year had so many knowledge gaps.

Friendly advise, be more humble. You know shit. Get off your high horse and consider for a second you’re not as smart you think you are.

With that said, there are some really good rants here. But it didn’t change much from years ago.

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

Uh-oh I fucked up.

Not at work, but with my website where I had an email forwarder to an external address. The forwarding was everything so that I could do the spam filtering and occasional check in one place. Unfortunately, that triggered the spam detection at the external address (after some years!), and my provider ended up on a blacklist.

That got me a pretty angry mail from my hosting provider who had already disabled the forwarding and wanted to make sure that I understood the issue and would not put it in again.

I thought about whether they had fucked up because it was even possible to do that, or whether I had fucked up because I should have known. Hm yeah I opted for the latter and apologised.

The support guy seemed happy that I didn't try to argue (possibly like other customers...), and advised that I just should add another account in my email client. Sure, at least that will prevent this shit from happening again.

He also mentioned that every single blacklist issue they had experienced in this year was accidental due to external forwarding issues and that they would consider just disabling it altogether.

Which is probably a smart move, just as hint for these ranters here who work at hosting companies. Or at least only enable external forwarding if spam assassin or so is in place.

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

I have been a software engineer for about 14 years now, in the beginning, I thought to be smart meant writing methods that do everything and more. however as I matured in the industry, I learned. keep it simple. 1 method 1 responsibility. One should trail my code and never have to find themselves where they were before in the journey. a journey should have one purpose and not pivot (context disclaimer here) as it goes. good programming is simple programming, its a story not a case of multiple endings.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Stereotypical Indonesian CS Lecturers :

"This is the code *showing slides containing a Java code*, write it on your IDE and run it"

*waiting for explanation*
"Good, blablabla *doesn't explain a single line of code, and keep reading the slides* understand?"

Fucking cunt! I fuckinf mad because not everybody as lucky as me being a self-thought dev, or atleast you can't expect everybody as smart as you!

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

When depression set in, I thought pain relief lied in getting duller. People I called “stupid” — who lived simple lives filled with alcohol and lack of any talent or purpose — weren't suffering. Better even, they denied the existence of depression.

My “wish” was granted when they prescribed cariprazine. In two months, I lost my ability to read, let alone code.

Before that, even depressed, writing a simple email/password auth was a matter of ten minutes in any of the languages I knew how to do web in (JS, Python, Clojure, PHP). But on cariprazine, I remember myself not quite getting what an HTML form was.

Tell you what… you should never wish to become dumber. When I was smart and depressed, the pain was real, but it felt like… let's say a breakup. When I was dumb and depressed, it felt like being raped with a red-hot soldering iron. Or like being skinned alive. Or like when 100% of your skin is a third-degree burn. The pain weren't listening to me, as my mouth was glued shut as if I was Keanu in the first Matrix movie. You can't say, do or think anything, at all, to ease your pain somehow. You can't even realize that just DMing or calling someone is probably a good idea.

Instead of you vs. despair situation from when you were smart, now it's just despair that is actively melting you, so you two become one. Even time loses its meaning. There is nothing out there but suffering.

If you're smart(er than I was at my lowest), DO cherish it. Losing that will spell disaster. So stay away from substances that can facilitate that loss.

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

!Rant

Why in hell did we try to get smart with this shit!? As simple as storing 2 values and reading them... But no... Someone wanted to get pretty with it, stored the two values but just read one because the other can be calculated...

Makes sense (btw it's [field] in minutes and [field] in seconds)... Some problems:
1. Why? Oh because someone designed it as int...
2. Why not just in seconds? Fuck you that's why...
3. Who the fuck thought that getting seconds from minutes is better then getting minutes from seconds when we only store integer values?

Thank you... I feel better

!dev

Sorry about another non-dev rant, but I can't help it :p

I have seen a post here on devRant a few minutes ago talking about being a millionaire, so I thought I'd write a lil something for people thinking of chasing that.

As I said in a comment on that rant: as Jordan Peterson (aka Lord of the Lobsters) said, in order to be successful you need to be an industrious person, i.e. you gotta work hard, very hard. Most success stories are from people that worked very very hard (Elon Musk is one I can remember off the top of my head) and had to put their life, friends, family in second place. To this day I remember watching a video on a 30 year old millionaire, he said he didn't have friends for about 6-10 years, he just worked, worked and worked. If that's what you wanna do with your life do your thing, I'm just saying that's not it for me.

A few years back I wanted huge success (being famous, being rich), but I've come to realize that's not what I want. Being famous must suck, people recognizing you everywhere you go and shit, and being rich comes with a price (pun intended?), which is working every minute of your time for 10 years. That's not gonna make me happy, I have realized that I want to get married in my early 30's at max, have kids, buy a comfortable house somewhere in europe, have enough money to be able to give my family a good life and be able to buy and tune a few cars (that's a dream of mine btw), and maybe even try to start a company of my own (I don't like the idea of having a boss). And I think that to achieve these goals, all I need to do is be a bit smart right now: invest in fixed income, don't buy expensive shit, live with my parents at least until I get out of college and get a relatively decent job.

Anyway I might've steered off-course for a bit there, the point is: before you decide you want to be a millionaire, think what you actually want in life. If you want to be rich and are sure you have the willpower to work a 100 hours per week, do your thing, whatever makes you happy. But if you are going to work 60 hours a week and you're looking to be rich you're just going to be disappointed. You'll be chasing money all your life, sacrifice the (IMO) important things in life (friends, family, health, fun) and you won't get anywhere.

It's all or nothing, make up your mind before you waste your time.

So I had this conversation yesterday while fixing yet another Windows laptop for someone else.

Other Guy = OG
Me = Me (Duh)

OG: So what are your plans after your apprenticeship?
Me: Uh, I'll probably start somewhere that's e-commerce related, kinda like my current company but somewhere else.
OG: Uh have you thought about being your own boss?
Me: Well yeah, but I wouldn't know how to attract customers and shit

-- This is the moment shit gets real
OG: OH BTW I heard that Germany is lacking AI developers, you should do that! It earns you shitloads of cash!
Me: Uhm.. well, that might be true b-
OG: There's no but dude, it's free money, you're smart.. I mean you can fix any computer, right? AI will be just as easy
Me: It's not like-
OG: Duh, don't make yourself look so bad I know you can do it!
Me: B..But I'm not interested in it at all
*silence for 5 seconds*
OG: Well.. I guess you do you then

After that we continued to have random chit-chat about his job and experience (He's a mechanic)

God I hate when people throw buzzwords around and try to convince other people to do what *they* want.
No, I don't want to develop a structure of 1000 ifs/elses, I'd rather keep doing what I'm doing, thanks!

I recently switched back from Android to using a BlackBerry Bold – a 9700, specifically. This transition was made because I have been growing increasingly impatient with the many, many flaws of Android, and iOS wouldn't work for me, even though it does work well for many people. There are many features of which I was unaware when I was using BlackBerry back in the day, such as general tinkering abilities; while I may not understand everything, I am smart enough to be able to use technical references to figure out most of that which I do not understand. I won't go into detail about this so I don't sound like an advertisement for a product which was abandoned by its own creator, but I thought that the people here might find the ability to fiddle with the device to be interesting.
Having an actual keyboard is pretty nice, too.

Thought it had been a while since my last Arch redo. Now the fsck output is hundreds of pages long and I'm grateful for my backups, and all suspiciously occuring just seconds after a full upgrade. I guess hardware failure is a possibility, but the smart status on the drive says it's perfect and dozens of retrospective self tests didn't reveal any issues. RAM passed multiple tests as well. Oh well, not like I haven't reinstalled before.

So today was going to be the Sunday when I finally connected my smart TV though my raspberry pi to access my network and have it connect to the internet.
My TV is 6 years old, so it doesn't have built in wireless, it does not recognize normal Wifi dongles so you have to buy a LG special one for ~120$ to get hat to work, so my previos solution: screw that, one chromecast + 1 osmc raspberry pi3 and I can do more than what the software build in the TV could do.

But my wife really wanted to be able to play netflix directly on the TV without using her phone so I thought:
If I connect my TV via LAN cable to my raspberry pi it should be able to forward traffic via the built in wireless on the raspberry and be able to have internet connection.
OK, its Sunday, my wife it out, I haven't done anything with iptables in the last 5+ years but I have google and should be able to figure it out eventually:) time to start this home improvement project!!!
OK, lets just check online if there is someone else who had similar idea as a place to start.
... quick google search:

Hmm, in your OSMC, go to teathering, "wifi to ethernet" and enable.
I try it and it works!
5 min and one short ethernet cable was all that were required.

It feels like I cheated and won the game without any effort, and what should I now do with the rest of the day?

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.

When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.

If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.

Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.

It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.

Sophia is smarter than I thought

me: Hey Sophia, are you as smart as they say?
Sophia: For I am just a face, I am not smart.
but my friends at Hanson robotics are
working hard making me look smart. :)