Best office prank: I was pretty young and naaive. Senior dev comes to me and says that it would be hilarious to slide a note under the women's bathroom door saying, "I know what you're doing in there". He says that the woman in there will think it's hilarious too. We work with her, she's very funny and laid back, so I go along with it, expecting to get a laugh. A few minutes go by and a different older women enters my cube. She's got the note! She works on the other side of the building so I don't know her too well but I can tell from the look on her face that she's pissed. I'm frozen with fear as my career flashes before my eyes.
I apologise perfusely and try to explain but she's not having it. After a while she goes back to her office not having accepted that it wasn't meant for her and that it was just a joke gone wrong. I spend the next two days apologizing every chance I get, hoping she won't go to HR. She remains stone cold until late on the second day. She couldn't take it anymore as her mouth reluctantly begins to crack a smile. At that point she drops the serious expression on her face and busts out laughing.

It turns out that the three of them planned the whole thing and executed flawlessly. I've never felt so relieved to be the butt of a joke.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Bought a Logitech G13 a few years ago knowing that the Linux support isn't good. Thought fuck it, I'll develop something for it.

That didn't go as planned. Tried numerous times to write something but the fucker is proprietary and I couldn't figure out how to get data from it.

Decided to try it again tonight with a "You're not winning this time, motherfucker!" mindset.

Figured out how to read data from it, looked long enough at the data coming in to discover patterns and started programming while testing my ass off.

Two hours later I have "mapped" all specific data points that the device sends to the hardware keys and now, whenever I have the device connected and run the program (node, no kidding), it displays which key I'm pressing when I press a key!

I finally fucking won.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

One of my colleague took 3 week vacation leave. End of vacation time he requested for extending the leave. Company is not allowed him, so he send resignation email. After 1year we get to know in vacation time he already joined new company. I asked him why, he said "That three weeks is trials. If nothing workout he planned to going back to old company." 🤨

This isn't really a hacking story but it does remind me of something I did as "revenge."

In middle school, this one fool kept bullying me. Always tried to harm me, always tried to insult me, always tried to make me fall during PE.

I hated him a lot, so instead of trying to kill him as planned, I did a harmless little keylogger prank thing.

I installed a keylogger on the school's laptop before class. (I did it during break, and when class started, I placed it on his desk.)

He took the bait, and instead of doing work, he logged onto his social media accounts. Now I had his passwords and everything.

When I went home, I logged onto his social media. I checked his messages so I can get some dirt on him, didn't find much except for the fact he snuck out a few times, and smoked before.

I changed his profile picture to some cringy anime thing and messaged one of his friends (the one who always copied my test answers in History and would steal my homework) and I said, "tell --- that if he doesn't stop being an asshole, I'll do worse than "hack" his social media."

It freaked them both out a bit, but didn't change their behavior, which is a shame because my threat was empty. It's not like I was able to do anything more than that in middle school. To this day, they still have no idea who did that.

This was about 4 years ago.

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

I was asked to present a code I wrote previously. This was not planned. I shared my screen and presented. Things went well.

One employee asked me to search a particular term which was possibly related to an advance topic in the domain we were working on.

I opened Chrome and the first page had a Quora post: "Why my dull co-workers try to act smart and are not yet fired?".

[silence]

I'm a lawyer, like a year ago I was home alone (wife and kid went on the trip) and from boringness, I decided that I should learn to program (was thinking about that earlier because of some ideas for apps I had - I was fucking naive then :P).

So I start googling best way to do it and I decided to start CS50 course on edx. And that was a real blast for. Best learning experience ever happened in my life.

Anyway, I was going through CS50 curriculum (at the start I thought I will quit it after few weeks) and every day was like so exciting. This whole programming thing seems like the best thing happens to me in many years. There were so many interesting things to learn, I felt like I discovered whole new word.

So after few months while I was finishing CS50, one day I decided, fuck it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (I'm 35+ btw ;)). I chose frontend path as it seems easier for a person without technical education. If everything goes as planned I will start looking for a job at beginning of next year. So where I the rant you could ask?

Well, you should guest what my family thinks about it. My wife was like at first: I'm proud you learning something new, now she hates it, making fights about me always sitting in front of computer (which is not true as I learn most in work in my spare time - I can do it as I work on my own), she even told my parents that I cheat her because she started family with a lawyer, not a programmer (supposed to be joke, but really not fun for me) . WTF - where is the fucking support ? ehhh. My parents on the other side still don't believe I will do it (after more than a year of my learning) and they still think I will quit the idea in the end....

So thats it my rant about what my familly thinks about me become programmer.

(sry for my English)

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

Private chat pops up. (- separator for new message)

Hello
- (1 min)
Can you help me?
- (2-3 mins)
Please it's urgeeeent!!!!!
- (1 min)
Come on you're online, I see the green dot.
- (5 mins)
Ok then I won't be able to work. Will write this down in the ticket.

- (15 mins) - new private chat pops up
Hi, we need to talk.
- (3 mins)
Regarding ticket XY, why aren't you responding? It's really urgent.
- (5 mins)
Please notify me as soon as you're available, it's really important!!!

- (20 mins, new private chat opens)
Hi mate, I think the devs are up to mischief. Said you're not reachable, I'll try to poke them with the stun gun.

- (60 mins, message in the official and only endorsed support room)
@all We broke staging, <Me> never responds and <Team mate who tried to use the stun gun> wasn't helpful either.
We really need this now!!!!!!!

- 30 mins later... la me:
@all I was in a meeting with the stakeholders as we had an priority meeting... What was so important that you not only ignored the rule of not messaging privately and even ignored <team mate>s instructions?

- 5 mins later, answer
no need to be so unfriendly.... We broke staging as we had to test stuff out for next week's sprint review [something which is still 3 days away or sth like that]. We really need to take a look in the team at it and for that we must have staging working now!!!!
- (La me)
If you need it urgent now, you didn't plan ahead. And if you didn't plan ahead, you have to wait for others. The sprint review and all other important days are planned ahead for a reason.
- (Silence)

- (20 mins later, private chat, team lead)
Will you finally fix staging now?

- La me
If it could wait 3 hours now and you / your team ignored all netiquette, it can wait till next day, too. We had this discussion more than once, I don't think I need to explain this further.

(Silence)

All in all, the joys of communication...

Now the fun stuff is when this not only happens with 1 team, but many teams....

Having 35 - 40 private chats and chat window looking like a christmas tree thx to the immeasurable amount of notifications and colors... Yay...

Did I mention that I hate the ego some programmers have -.

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

Devs: Feature A is done! Faster than planned even.

Manager: Hmm... what about feature A+B?

Devs: That requires feature B, and you said that feature B was not as important as feature A during our last meeting, remember? So we planned to do A, B, and then A+B. It's there in the meeting minutes.

Manager: But feature A does not make sense without feature A+B. Let's not release feature A just yet until we have feature A+B.

Then why didn't you say so during our last meeting?!

Fuck China.

Fuck the U.S. government.

Fuck the UK and Australia and all the other governments for taking advantage of the crisis of the last two years to get more power and money for their elites.

Fuck them all for starting COVID with their unsanctioned and unethical “gain of function” lab experiments and creating so much chaos that nobody really has a chance anymore at living the life they had dreamed of or so carefully planned for.

Fuck them for the out of control spending and money printing and inflation and even messing around with trying to regulate and tax crypto so we don’t have any kind of escape valve to live a normal, happy life.

Because of them, I can’t even enjoy my time off work. Even if I could plan a vacation that wouldn’t have to be canceled due to an outbreak or resultant supply chain issues, I can’t travel without severe restrictions that make it miserable and not worth the trouble.

Fuck them for making everyone into stupid monkeys fighting over opinions about data that is incomplete, misunderstood, misrepresented, or downright fixed toward a specific pharma-fascist authoritarian outcome.

And fuck them especially for being hypocrites and going to parties and generally not following their own rules they made for us when they think we’re not watching, and then persecuting and prosecuting us when we dare do the same.

Fuck ‘em all. I’m so done.

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.

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

So... my girlfriend has a very random work schedule. Sometimes she works 4 days a week sometimes only 1, sometimes only at the weekend sometimes not at all. If only there would be an app to track that... 🤔
She tried quite a few apps on the app store but they were shit/ugly/too complex..etc
Wait.. i’m a developer, i can do that.
So i made a dead simple calendar-like app in javascript+fuseopen.
She selected the colors, background, layout etc..
If she taps on a date it turns red indicating that is a workday, if a workday is tapped it turns back to normal color.

The main logic is:
Main:
If(AppHasSavedWorkdays){
//check if save is current month
LoadCalendarWithWorkdays();
}else{
CreateEmptyCalendarAndSave();
}

She likes it.
Cool, so let’s build this! She has an iphone and my mac is still in the service center so i can’t build🙁
But its okay, i have a mac at my office, we can build there, the only downside is that is 40min of travel.
We take the subway, go to the office, build the app, make a certificate, install to her phone, everything goes as planned.
Coming back we were lucky enough to catch the bus that goes in 30 min intervals, we only had to wait like a minute so life is good 😃
I enter the house, chill down on the bed, pull out my laptop to close the project when a FUCK ME!!!!
I completely forgot to implement a whole else branch on start!!!
Soo the app does nothing when is opened on january 1😂😂
I guess that’s why we have testers and qa.. 😃

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Hello DevRant, im a junior cloud consultant and this is my story:

Last monday a salesman, i call him bob, informed me that he planned me in a project starting next week. So far so good despite im currently working already in an other project....

I tried to explain him that its impossible to be on two locations at the same time.

His answer was quite funny because he said its my problem and he promised this the customer a month ago (without asking me or looking into my calendar)

As you can imagine the customer was not happy when i contacted him, to say him that the project could not start before may.

Of course this escalated to the managing director of my company. Bob tried to made it look that it was my fault.

After a long rant mail, where i told my story and about our incompetent salesforce i got a reply from him that he is sorry and a forced excuse mail from bob.

Happy End

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

So ehm, tl;dr: KEEP DAILY BACKUPS. EVEN IF SOMEONE SAYS NOT TO.

7:48
Manager: Hey Tom, is the server down?
Me: Nah, should be ok, I just did some maintenance this sunday.
Manager: But I can't get [some work data from SQL server]
*Nervous giggle*

9:14: Some random off-site cunt they hired didn't read the notes that said "DO NOT REMOVE DATABASE [xyz]"
9:20-ish: Web don't even have the DB. And you said that we'll figure out what to do with backups later
*Suddenly manager starts to panic*
11:47: Found backup of the entire server on and old server that we had for spare parts, still running tho.
12:something: Everything back up and working.

Really glad I kept the old server running and doing daily backups. Saved our ass for the second time. And finally, new off-site backup is planned this week.

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

Had a great day yesterday. Productive, happy, felt great, and was focused despite a lot of cute distractions. Finished a third of my feature.

Today, I wanted to start work early because I had planned out what I wanted to work on next and how to approach it. I felt motivated. I’d jump out of bed, get ready, and start early. No breakfast but maybe some coffee.

Woke up to two hours of constant distractions, irritations, and time wasting instead. Anger. Everything sought to prevent me from starting.

When I finally got to work, the first thing I saw: political warmongering bullshit.

Guess I’m not getting much done today.

Customer: The pages x and y are not displayed in the menu of my website.

Me: I've added another menu level. This level wasn't planned. Your pages will now be displayed.

Customer: Do you think I have too much menu levels?

Me (what I want to say): YES. You have too much of EVERYTHING! Too much menu levels, too much useless pages, too much bad formatting, too much different font colors in one fucking sentence! Your website is crap at all.

Me (what I said): No, it's okay.

I hate customers.

Deutsche Bahn once again.
Deutsche Bahn and I will never be friends I guess.

I'm at a train station where my train arrives only once per hour.

As if that's not enough time to wait already, the first train got canceled.

I was like "Ok, that's Deutsche Bahn. That can happen (and will happen always). Guess that I will wait for another hour".

Minutes before the planned arrival of the second train, they announced that the second train isn't coming either.

I have been at a fucking train station for bloody 3 hours approximately.

Let's wait and see, if my train will ever arrive.

Honestly, thinking about buying camping tools to sleep at this train station and go to university and come back to this place just because of this problem.

Well fuck me sideways with a rusty lamppost.
Got assigned to a project at work, kind of a biggie, my first actual large project. Been working there since last year, done a lot of research in my spare time and felt like I deserved it or something.

But then...

A few weeks ago I posted a rant about a fuckwit that can't even type 'ssh' in a terminal and doesn't know how a basic database system works.

Guess what.

Yeah.

Exactly that happened.

Because of his overconfidence and big mouth he got assigned to the project as well.
He planned a pitch. Stole my words.

He hasn't proven himself in any way and always needs help. Always. And I don't have a problem with people asking for help, I actually tell people not to be afraid to ask if they don't know something.

But I do have a problem with people laying back at work and asking 7 different people how to open a terminal.

Why does this happen? Just why?

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

Context:
PM is not an IT professional but somehow leads IT operations ... (yes... I know)
---

PM: "Hey xxzero0, do you remember about the XYZ project?"

xxzero0: "Yes, tell me"

PM: "I told the big boss we can use it to make starships and explore the universe, I also said we can cut the developing time because we are already at 70% with it".

xxzero0: "....... Do you understand we planned to use this project to deploy a small ship in the sea?"

PM: "Yes, but you clearly inexperienced developer, don't know it needs only some refactoring to explore the universe"

xxzero0: "It is more complicated. There is no logic at all. It is just displaying data without doing anything and..."

*Get interrupted*

PM: "Yes, we need some refactoring, I'm such a genius."

In one of our webinterfaces you could swap between users once you logged in by changing the user in the link.

Not intended but our support is using this "feature" frequently because then they don't have to log in again when helping another client so it's not planned to be fixed

Discovered this awesome community some months ago, and I've finally decided to make an account :D

Guess I should write a rant now.

We were initially a team of 2 to do a 'simple' app with AngularJS, NodeJS and Kendo UI in 2 months.

We had some problems with it, mainly because I'm 'in charge' of a big Java web application filled with legacy code and in process of a 'big change that was planned to be deployed for all users yesterday', and my coworker (also the project analyst) was still learning how Node and Angular work. And I'm not going to lie, I'm still learning new things everyday.

Situation 1 month after our start: coworker fired (due to offtopic reasons), replaced by a younger girl, and me still doing changes in the Java webapp.

Thank god I work better when under big pressure :p

So finished a project for a client, the client signed a contract. He signed off that all milestones where reached. Text me that he was very pleased.
We give 30 days to pay. 8 days before the due date he asked for a meeting, telling us he wants to go another direction and he wants the source code to show the new development team he's going with to get a quote from them. I tell him that, that's fine he can have the source files once he pays for the product which was in the contract they signed mind you!! And this FUCKING DICK FART threats to sue, saying he's calling his lawyer, threatening me and my development partner with physical violence, and saying he's going to sue me personally not because me work was bad but because I refused to give him the product before he paid. I was calm we offered to meet his new dev team explain the code, and show them what they needed to see to give the clients a quote and they would not allow that, saying how now I'm not getting paid instead I'm getting sued and that he will publicly shame my startup company. Just complete bullshit, good thing I saved the original contract he wanted me to sign which had threats of physical violence I. His contract... Which in retrospect should have been a hint, but it was the highest paying contract we ever landed. Seems he never planned on paying. What's a guy to do?

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

System design meeting with the client.

Client: We need feature X in the design document
Me: But feature X was not a requirement, so it's not in the document and we will not add it.
Client: But feature X should be a common feature today.
Me: That doesn't matter, it wasn't a requirement. And besides that you don't even need it today, the planned system doesn't even support feature X, so we couldn't implement it, even if it was mentioned in the design document.
Client: But we may need it some day, and what do you do, when we decide to enhance the system in a few years and we need that feature then?
Me: Then we make you an offer for feature X.
Inner me: You ordered a bicyle and now you want it converted into a delivery truck next year without charge. That's not how things work.

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

Why the fuck does people who teach in professional colleges doesn't have the mindset to update their godamnn fucking dinosaur knowledge to the least basics of modern technology.

Had to do this mini-project for uni, and the languages allowed included java, python, php or any similar frontend tools for creating desktop app or web app. I planned on taking React + Express cz apparently that'll fall in the category.

Now she starts yelling at my project saying its not allowed and when I fucking asked her "can I use node.js which is basically javascript" she said yes.

And for gods sake she has a Masters degree and phd but doesn't even know what's the difference between get and post request!! Fed up with this college shit!!

!rant && extra('worried');

My 11 years-old brother seems to be addicted to Minecraft, not the "dis iz so kool" addiction, but the "I put my health and education in danger to keep playing this game (homeworks badly done, grades free falling, showers without soap in 30s flat, food eaten in 15s, starts to yell at parents when they want him to stop playing (parents bitch slapped him a few times for this, but he seems to persist)).

My parents are over 55 now, so they don't really know how to handle this (can't / don't want to blame them), and I'm supposed shove some reason in his dead brain next weekend (I live 150km away).
I've been addicted myself to videogames in general and WoW in particular ((almost) no regrets) a few years back.. what should I say to him else than "This shit will ruin your life even before you started it" (which is planned anyway) ?

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

Today is a sad day for me.
I lost all of my data today. My phone was in my pocket and the Iris scanner was looking for a face. I guess it did it multiple times because I found that it had completely reset my phone.

I'm pissed mostly because I knew I had some control over when I could have backed up my phone... I could have at least been pushed back a month but now I'm pushed back by a whole year!
That is a fuck ton of time for things to have happened.

I'm just sad right now guys. There was some good stuff that could have been saved.

RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?

*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*

DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.

*3 week later*

DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.

DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.

I'm having quite a hard time.

For my studies, I'm doing some research minor atm. And it's basically a 10 hour a week job for me atm. I have literally nothing else to do. No I do not do side projects, I do not aim to be a developer in the future.

This is causing me to sleep about 12hrs each night until it's impossible for me to fall asleep again. I just do not see any point in getting up unless I actually have something planned (meeting bf/friend). It's gotten to the point where I've actually cancelled plans because they didn't give me enough motivation to get up.

Since this is my last year in college, I am also stressing out about what to do next year because I cannot think of anything I enjoy doing.

I am worried abiut my health at this point. Any tips?

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

!rant

TLDR; Lost passion after a few years, wasted a year, went on vacation without really any technology, found my passion and am excited as hell for 2019.

After programming for nearly 5 years, I’ve hit the point of not wanting to program anymore. I’ve burnt myself out, and haven’t had a vacation in 8+ years so we’ve finally decided to take one. I’m not going to say it’s a full blown vacation, but a semi-vacation since it’s with my parents also so I do have to do a few things I’d prefer not to such as meeting relatives.

I didn’t have the motivation to work on any new projects, finish any projects I actually enjoyed, I just did a few side projects for friends that took me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes every few weeks. In general this year has been garbage in development terms, I’ve lost passion. It felt like a chore, I didn’t find the entertainment I once did.

I’ve been away from technology for about 2 weeks now, and have less than a week left before I fly back and I’m excited as hell. During this break away from technology (with the exception of browsing devRant once in a while), has me excited to work on many projects and actually start learning and improving my skills. I’ve actually gained the motivation to work on 2 projects that have been planned for nearly 2 years now, I’ve noted down ideas for them, made diagrams, etc, just never had the passion to develop them. 2019 is going to be one hell of a year, since I get back almost at the end of November, and December I have a few business meetings and University exams that I have to prepare for. Excited to see these projects through, one is going to be for the hell of it, just been a passion project I’ve wanted to do for years now. The other project is actually a project for one of my sub-companies that hasn’t officially released since I didn’t have the passion to work on it. (Not going to go into full detail yet about the companies/projects, going to save that for the future)

Alongside that, I’m excited since my main company that is totally unrelated to technology, is set to do some massive moves during 2019 also. Looking forward to that, and being able to launch my dream company (the sub-company I mentioned before).

Time for sleep now, goodnight! (Wrote this after a few drinks and in the middle of the night, hopefully it’s not full blown garbage)

My first project at the job was implenting a website, designed by the same company we mostly worked with.
It was very stressful because half of the 2 months calculated for finishing the project, these genius designers needed for their design. Until then, I had almost no tasks to do...
When the designs finally came, I worked on it and two weeks later was a meeting for review and to decide about some details.
These fuckers then concluded, that the whole design did not fit the page and that they would rework it.
Two weeks later, on the planned release day, we finally received it. A completely fucking different design! Wow!
My boss was pretty angry and so was I. We had to move the release 4 weeks ahead, the client was pissed like a stinking hobo and it needed a lot of convincing to keep that client...

It's fucking nerve-wracking as well that we always have to wait in most projects for weeks for clients or designers to add the content before we can publish a website.
They don't seem to care if they have 2 months or 2 weeks, we never were able to release one single project on time, because of these lazy fuckers...

Been sick since Wednesday with a heavy feeling of dizziness and vertigo (BPPV). Basically I got sick in the week I intentionally planned nothing to tackle my workload and get some stuff done, but I was physically unable to work on it until now.

Meeting is on Monday.

Also preorder my new book on O'Reilly, much appreciated.

(No, I am not panicking, pls send help)

Fffffuuuucccckkkkkkkkkk!!

My team and I had a presentation scheduled and we worked on it for more than a month.

A bloody fucking month long preparation.

We went through multiple reviews with stakeholders which weren't necessary and no other team does.

I put on some music to lift up my energy levels while I waited anxiously.

Show time.

We have one of the largest city festival going on this week.

The community in neighbouring building started reciting prayers out loud on a PA system just when the presentation began.

~40 folks and me struggling on video to not lose my cool and fuck my luck, I went nervous because I couldn't focus.

That's when my big boss pointed out that there some background noise and I had to explain it to them.

My very first presence and I forgot to even introduce myself. What a nut head I am.

I am annoyed and angry at myself. I perform well impromptu over planned and preparedness.

Thankfully my team mate who talks a lot and my designer, handled things well and saved the day.

Massive respect for them and kick in nuts for me.

Uuugggghhh!!

Also my neighbour is renovating his entire house and since I am using it as my workspace, I literally sit in between junk and cement and wires all around.

What a messy wasted day it was.

Had a miserable evening yesterday. Me and my gf planned going out around 9pm to this movie with 2 other couples. Movie was kinda okay and we finished around midnight and went over to our apartment for drinks. We had lots of snacks and drinks ready, other couples brought some drinks.

Evening was kinda weird, guests were mainly just ranting about their work and household life and 2 hours in they started asking each other wether they should go home. In the end they left around 3am. I felt kinda defeated: some effort went into planning everything, and in the end I didnt feel much of a connection to them.

Maybe everyone was tired after a workday + late movie + drinks after the movie. But idk I expected more from people in late 20s. When planning we had two options: meeting on saturday or friday and they chose friday.

Anyways I guess either we are getting older or we just need to meet less often and more early in order not to run out of energy and stuff to talk about.

So I worked with this guy for 2 years. Lets call him Fred. He came into the company and immediately inserted himself as a programmer lead. I asked him to talk to our boss to determine if he was in fact in charge of the devs now. Our boss said he is not in charge of anything. He continued to act like a lead. I was like fine, "you can play boss for now". He was actually very helpful to bounce ideas off of and knew a lot about programming in general. I enjoyed working with him.

Fast forward 2 years after he was hired. I come into work and notice he isn't at work. I figure he was taking a longer vacation. It was around thanksgiving. A week goes by. I ask another coworker where Fred is. Coworker, "Oh, he was let go." Apparently there was a conflict with our boss with Fred. The boss had to work the weekend to write a bunch of code Fred was supposed to write.

So I got paranoid and wondering if I was going to get fired. I didn't understand the specifics of why and nobody was explaining this. I had planned on working on some extra code for another coworker, but decided against this due to the recent events. I just kept working the task I was assigned, but I kind of got depressed about this. This hurt my productivity for a month or two.

A few months go by. I talk to the coworker about Fred. The coworker explains that Fred never actually generated any code that was usable. Some of the code this coworker had to fix. So the sum total of code was actually a negative amount of lines written while working here.

How the fuck do you stay employed without writing code as a developer? The guy was smart, and understood math way better than I understand it. How can Fred seem like he knows what he is doing, but not produce anything? This would embarrass me to be this unproductive. I don't think the guy was incompetent. He always contributed guidance and helped keep projects on task. My coworker thinks Fred was trying to be a manager instead of a developer. Why not balance that and be both? I get sick of coding at times and would love to just talk to people.

I am very confused how Fred fucked up a pretty laid back dev job.

!dev

I'm a very patient and calm person when it comes to coding or social events and the only thing that "triggers" me is accuracy.

You've made plans to have a small reunion and with people, you hardly meet, once or twice in a year and yet you somehow fail to show at 11:00 am in the morning which was already planned.

Now it's time to call each of you and hear out your ridiculous explanation of how you stayed up late watching Instagram videos of cute kittens and fell asleep late.

> "Oh I just woke up, I'll be there directly there in an hour, I know I promised we'll go together, but I have this thing to deal with"

> "Hey, do you know who reached till there? Are you there yet? What's the plan?" - Bitch the plan was to be there by 11 AM, 11 FUCKING AM.

> "Heyyyy, just woke up, give me an hour I'll pick you up"

Seriously this makes me sad and disappointed because I'm a man of the time. Sometimes I think they do this just to test my patience.

There is not enough time, there never was, there never will be.

With that being said my holiday is ruined and what's up with you?

> inb4 don't let others ruin your holiday

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

My head is melting. Does anyone have a colleague who constantly complains about missing specs, documentation, project organization, bad processes and procedures? Everything needs to be planned. Not a single small code change can be done without reviewed details. 10min job becomes a week-long session of whining and dabbling.

You give the guy a small task and at the end of the day nothing is done. Just page after page of written documents and lists in Word and online notebooks. Version numbers, meaningless measurement results, latencies etc. And all you asked was "could you just fucking fix this one thing and quickly compile and check it". But no. There must be a review and at least 10 people need to be called into conference. Someone needs to approve everything just so that he can later move to blame to others. "Yeah I know it's not working but I showed you the code and you reviewed it!". Yes, you did, but other people have work of their own so sometimes you need to tie your own shoelaces.

And sometimes finally there's some work done. All indentations are shit. There’re code changes everywhere just because the guy didn't like the previous smaller, compact and logical code. The code doesn't even compile properly anymore. And if you complain, the reason is "there's no proper reviewed and stamped process description, so I cannot know if a variable is supposed to be 10 characters long. Besides 200 character long variable names are much more descriptive". For fucks sake.

Some coders should've gone to work in some tax office basement.

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. :)

Just right now:
Management: How's the feature going?

Me: The backend is done. Here's how the front end looks so far...

Management: What?! No! Where will they input the units? What about the input#2? and the graphs?! You were just not going to put that?

Me: ... this is how it's lookin so far. The deadline isn't until next week. I'm actually pretty ahead of schedule.

Management: But what about button #2 and #3? And input #4?

Me: Yes, it's all planned. It's not done yet. You asked me how I'm doing so far. Of course I haven't finished.

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).

!dev (?)

Ughhh
I hate fucking school books,
My students get their books from the school, they got a 2014 edition, I got them from my employer, I got the 2019 edition.

"How different could they be?"
Totally different, the chapters are in a different order(Who learns classes before loops and conditions???) everything is different. "Okay", you might say, "surely it's just just a few pages prior or later right?"
No!
"So open your books on page 69(lol)" *Starts explaining*
Students: *Look confused* "ehm, Soldier? Are you sure that's the right page? I don't see the table"
Me: "Lemme check I'm not wrong" *Looks at the book* "Yeah, page 69, you see the table at the bottom?"
Student: "No?" *Shows me book*
Me: "Wait, that's not what I have, can you show me the book?"
*Looks at book, it's a completely different subject and chapter*
*Goes to ToC, finds the place where the table is*
It's on page fucking 98, this happens for a few more times.
"Okay forget the book, I guess I'l just draw everything on the board for now."

Fuck you book publishers or whoever is responsible for this cashgrab of planned obsolescence.

Wrote a bot that would send a request to my phone where tasker would set the alarm, it was planned that my bot would automatically detect things like me turning off my pc and then setting a 9 or 10 hour wake up time incl. falling asleep and getting ready for bed, ended up using it to not open the clock app on my phone to set alarms

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

Lots of questions going on about devRant. Just want to make devRant better.

1. Please tell the update intervals of upvotes and downvotes. Is there a delay? Doesnt really matter but i see many times i got a upvote notif but my score didnt increased...

2. Duplicate image algo is so poor. I know it is only in beta, but i see so many reposts which has the same pic but only with the resolution different or the image with the devrant watermark.

3. Minor, tags should be also saved when exitting the post rant activity.

4. Feature request : go to top, bottom in rant

5. Please make web app accessible in mobile. I think you check the user agent for the web app, but can you make it available to mobile users who cant download the app?

6. When accessing the web app in mobile, i type devrant.io/feed
Then, by the wonderful intent you made, it opens the app automatically. I was writing a rant, but it was all deleted.

7. Any new podcasts and cartoons planned?

8. Still bug not fixed.
Write a comment in a long rant.
Delete the comment you just wrote.
You cant reply to the last person comment.

Thanks.

Okay so this Is my first actual rant before its been questions or experiences but today has been really stressful. So one of my last posts I talked about how I don't know when to use what syntax whenever and I've been practicing but every fucking time I try to start something I can't fucking get it I don't even know how to start and yeah I planned it out and Im not getting anywhere I can't this is something I wanna do for the rest of my life and I can't even manage to make simple shit its like what the living fuck. Then then I tell my friend who's also in my class who programs what I'm trying to do AND HE DOES IT IN LIKE A MINUTE OR LESS AND IT WORKS AND ITS REALLY FUCKING STUPID BECAUSE I TRY AND STUDY SO HARD AND I CAN'T GET IT NO MATTER WHAT I DO I JUST CAN'T AND IT SUCKS SO FUCKING MUCH I HATE IT I JUST WANNA BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND HOW I CAN PUT THIS WITH THIS TO DO THIS AND ITS DEPRESSING ME SO MUCH I JUST WANT TO BE GOOD

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

tl;dr - why you no read this?

Here I am pondering why I continue to return to my job everyday when we are currently at month 13 of a 4 month project... yea let that set in for a minute... which is still at least 3-4 months away from being deployed due to annual leave of key stake holders and the whole Christmas period creeping up and things just not going as planned every step of the way.

There's no greater demotivater - is that even how you spell it - then being stuck in a project for so long you really just don't give a shit if it works or not anymore.

This has gone from a simple - relatively speaking - project to some monolithic mayhem of requirement changes and process adjustments, that have not only delayed our team, but 3rd party vendors needing to change things as well, or the requirements being wrong early so when you get up to business testing it's like "nope, that's not what we wanted" .... despite all the sessions of you personally giving the PM all the damn requirements.

But in saying that, they (3rd party) aren't innocent either, we have found nothing but issue after issue with their product since we started this project that who ever signed off on going forward with the thing should have been shot from both sides - it's not designed for the scale we will be using it yet we didn't find that out till we got so far into the rabbit hole we had a chance to be able to do load testing.

Meh, guess I'll go to work Monday and spend another week in misery trying to deliver something that just doesn't want to know what the finish line is.

Last year I planned to start a startup. I've started many good things but not the startup yet.

* A new data format
* A new data type
* A new web framework
* A new concept for logging
* And many other opensource tools and libraries

Planned to watch YouTube and read devRant.

well apparently not because the devRant Android app doesn't support split screen.

Get ready for a awesome conspiracy theory/ WhatsApp forward :D i like how people are coming with new stuff every minute of their boredom . Makes you ponder:

====================================

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

How to dominate the world quickly?

THE GREAT CHINESE STAGE

1. Create a virus and the antidote.

2. Spread the virus.

3. A demonstration of efficiency, building hospitals in a few days. After all, you were already prepared, with the projects, ordering the equipment, hiring the labor, the water and sewage network, the prefabricated building materials and stocked in an impressive volume.

4. Cause chaos in the world, starting with Europe.

5. Quickly plaster the economy of dozens of countries.

6. Stop production lines in factories in other countries.

7. Cause stock markets to fall and buy companies at a bargain price.

8. Quickly control the epidemic in your country. After all, you were already prepared.

9. Lower the price of commodities, including the price of oil you buy on a large scale.

10. Get back to producing quickly while the world is at a standstill. Buy what you negotiated cheaply in the crisis and sell more expensive what is lacking in countries that have paralyzed their industries.

After all, you read more Confucius than Karl Marx.

PS: Before laughing, read the book by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America”, on Amazon, then we talk. It's all there.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Worth pondering..
Just Think about this...

How come Russia & North Korea are totally free of Covid- 19? Because they are staunch ally of China. Not a single case reported from this 2 countries. On the other hand South Korea / United Kingdom / Italy / Spain and Asia are severely hit. How come Wuhan is suddenly free from the deadly virus?

China will say that their drastic initial measures they took was very stern and Wuhan was locked down to contain the spread to other areas. I am sure they are using the Anti dode of the virus.

Why Beijing was not hit? Why only Wuhan? Kind of interesting to ponder upon.. right? Well ..Wuhan is open for business now. America and all the above mentioned countries are devastated financially. Soon American economy will collapse as planned by China. China knows it CANNOT defeat America militarily as USA is at present

THE MOST POWERFUL country in the world. So use the virus...to cripple the economy and paralyse the nation and its Defense capabilities. I'm sure Nancy Pelosi got a part in this. . to topple Trump. Lately President Trump was always telling of how GREAT American economy was improving in all fronts. The only way to destroy his vision of making AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is to create an economic havoc. Nancy Pelosi was unable to bring down Trump thru impeachment. ....so work along with China to destroy Trump by releasing a virus. Wuhan,s epidemic was a showcase. At the peak of the virus epidemic. ..

China's President Xi Jinping...just wore a simple RM1 facemask to visit those effected areas. As President he should be covered from head to toe.....but it was not the case. He was already injected to resist any harm from the virus....that means a cure was already in place before the virus was released.

Some may ask....Bill Gates already predicted the outbreak in 2015...so the chinese agenda cannot be true. The answer is. ..YES...Bill Gates did predict. .but that prediction is based on a genuine virus outbreak. Now China is also telling that the virus was predicted well in advance. ....so that its agenda would play along well to match that prediction. China,s vision is to control the World economy by buying up stocks now from countries facing the brink of severe ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. Later China will announce that their Medical Researchers have found a cure to destroy the virus. Now China have other countries stocks in their arsenal and these countries will soon be slave to their master...CHINA.

Just Think about it ...
The Doctor Who declared this virus was also Silenced by the Chinese Authorities...

FUCK YOU NBN.
It's taken this shit company 6 "Specialist" technicians and almost 2 months to identify that the connector from the mainline to the multiport is not aligning. Now I have a planned remediation date of the 15th October.

Possible 6 months without internet. FML

So, I am feeling low in life. I want to do so many things and not a single one is going as planned. On top of that Bitcoin has taken a plunge and my funds are stuck with a shitty exchange and I cannot withdraw till tomorrow.
Le a github issue appears and I am thinking what went wrong now. I had added a few new features to the app which would have broken the old configurations. So, I ask this guy to re-configure and test.
After about 2 hours I get a reply from the guy saying "Thanx for the great new features and for creating this great open source project!!!"
This made my day. And I am thinking Life's good. Life is so easy and we make it so difficult for us. The first thing I am doing after this review is write this rant. Now back to work.

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

So about quitting my job... it didn't quite go as planned. My boss really wants me to stay and I might be looking at a deal that I wouldn't get anywhere else and an opportunity I feel I must explore.

(It's not about money, but I don't want to share details before it's settled.)

I covered it in a recent rant but it was for a marketing lead job (career switch for me) and they were very disorganized.

The HR guy just couldn’t shut up about completely irrelevant and personal topics. The CEO made fun of my cognitive disability, calling it “an excuse” (illegal in the U.S. under anti-discrimination laws). Then he walked out of the room to “go to the bathroom” and never returned. The HR guy grabbed the CEO’s notes and just read them to himself out loud like I wasn’t even in the room. He also asked me what my religion was (also illegal to ask in the U.S.) A third guy came in, asked me a bunch of questions, and then abruptly ended the interview. They only gave me a vague idea of the salary and benefits in all of that.

Two days later the HR guy asked me to come in immediately because I was needed to begin work right then. I said I hadn’t planned to start just that quickly (I already had plans that day that I couldn’t cancel) and especially not knowing how much I’d be paid. I asked for the customary time to talk it over with my family first. He asked me to get back to him before an hour was up. When I called back, he switched the story to say that their marketing lead just wanted to ask me questions before they made a final decision. But the fact that they had been interviewing me for that very marketing lead position was really confusing.

I said I was no longer interested and hung up the phone.

When I was in my final year of B.Tech.
There we had to do one major project so me and my friend both decided to build QUERA project for college. So as planned we informed to our superior and we got clean chit.
But later on we didn't know what to do??
That time my friend also didn't have programming awareness so days were going on. And the final month came and till then no progress.
My F was suggesting for purchase.
I was little bit worried too.
Then I had decided to build.
So me alone started building without any copying of templates from web(Actually at that time I didn't know that we can copy templates from web) so stupidly I was building templates using HTML and CSS. Parallely I was doing with php and phpmyadmin(SQL queries).
Seriously it was in PHP.
So this was running for approximately 14 days.
And believe me in that 14 days I was just doing project with all this stuff (obviously eating & 5 hrs sleep).

So, here the fun came

I was near to completion of my project but on last day I was not feeling well so I went to medical for some tablets.

And you know what, I was applying CSS in my mind on that tablet cover which was in rectangular shape.

Literally I was applying :D

Finally, I submitted project and got A+ for that.
Happy ending!

> Sorry, you have not updated your browser this week. Please update your browser to use our site.

*user tries to update browser*

> Sorry, your operating system is no longer supported. Please upgrade your operating system to install this update.

*user tries to update operating system*

> Sorry, your device is no longer supported. Please buy a new phone to use this operating system.

*buys new phone*

> Pay! Pay! Pay! Consoooom!

————

See where this is going? It is thinly-veiled planned obsolescence.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

RANT

We use Exact for our time sheets/hour tracking. How it's supposed to work:
-Manager plans my hours in Exact.
- I work those hours on the given projects
== All fine till here ==
But then ... there is a button (don't know the correct translation) "realise" which books the planned hours for me. So I don't have to do it manually.

This simply didn't work!! No one seem to know why not... Not even the guys at Exact.

Since it's web based I opened the developers window and looked for the call behind the button. You would think it would be at least an Ajax call thingy (I'm not completely into JS)
Turns out it's a readable JS function!

It doesn't stop there... It first makes all calculations on what to display, at last, at the fucking end, it checks a setting whether to proceed the booking or not!!!!

So I found and switched the setting and tried the button again.... Now it fucking works...

No fucking way I am going to tell Exact what the problem is 😫

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

Pentesting for undisclosed company. Let's call them X as to not get us into trouble.
We are students and are doing our first pentest at an actual company instead of assignments at school. So we're very anxious. But today was a good day.
We found some servers with open ports so we checked a few of them out. I had a set of them with a bunch of open ports like ftp and... 8080. Time to check this out.
"please install flash player"... Security risk 1 found!

System seemed to be some monitoring system. Trying to log in using admin admin... Fucking works. Group loses it cause the company was being all high and mighty about being secure af. Other shit is pretty tight though.

Able to see logs, change password, add new superuser, do some searches for USERS_LOGGEDIN_TODAY! I shit you not, the system even had SUGGESTIONS for usernames to search for. One of which had something to do with sftp and auth keys. Unfortunatly every search gave a SQL syntax error. Used sniffing tools to maybe intercept message so we could do some queries of our own but nothing. Query is probably not issued from the local machine.

Tried to decompile the flash file but no luck. Only for some weird lines and a few function names I presume. But decompressing it and opening it in a text editor allowed me to see and search text. No GET or POST found. No SQL queries or name checks or anything we could think of.

That's all I could do for today. So we'll have to think of stuff for next week. We've already planned xss so maybe we can do that on this server as well.

We also found some older network printers with open telnet. Servers with a specific SQL variant with a potential exploit to execute terminal commands and some ftp and smb servers we need to check out next week.

Hella excited about this!

If you guys have any suggestions let us know. We are utter noobs when it comes to this.

I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.

Disocrd might not be the best product bot holy damn making bots for it is a good and well planned experience.

I have so much shit I want/need to learn. I've started learning C while picking JavaScript back up, I'm learning basic electronics but I have a lot planned for that. Not even related but I want to fucking Cook, yeah i said it i wanna cook but why does that make me feel like i should just stop and go back to programming. Idk I just spill shit in these rants. Also wanna learn to speak another langauge but can't find the time, and I have college and dude I'm trying and trying and I need someone to appreciate something I do before I flip or before C destroys my entire being from being the weirdest yet interesting yet fucking brain melting. And fuck JS I Love it but sometimes it's a twat let's be honest

** this means words are muted **

Friday:
I send a mail the client a Google doc with elaborate details about evaluation of an Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer.

Monday:

The client is upset, he says "You say there is no GPS chip on the tablet while the manufacturer says otherwise"

Me- "I have clearly mentioned that it has a GPS chip"

Client- Opens the Google doc, points to a sentence. Looks at me like I did something horrible.

Me - **This guys is either word blind or something else is wrong with him, the line reads 'GPS chip available'**

Me- "Look, it says 'GPS chip available'.

Client- **Blinks n blinks again** "Alright, but why did you share a Google document, why not PDF, docx"

Me-**Politely** "You can download the document in any format, look I will show you..."

Client- "It should have been in the mail itself ideally"

Me- **WTH** "We normally maintain a document for such things to keep everything organised, but if you want I will put everything in mail itself"

Client- "Hmm.. do both from next time"

Me- "Alright" **BS**

Client- "Why is the new feature taking so much time"

Me- "As planned earlier, we going to deliver it tomorrow"

Client- "Why not today??" **Gives a strange look.**

Me thinking - **Enough**

Me- "See, I am trying to integrate a smarten with a socket connection, reading it's data via exposed APIs that are hardly documented, we need faster performance so I need to implement caching, multi threading, offline handling, multiple processes to avoid memory fluctuations, sync adapter to sync data...."

Client- "Ok ok ok, it's fine if you give working build tomorrow"

Me- "Ok, fine"

#limit

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Although im starting a job in 2 weeks, i feel depressed already. I know what awaits me and I'll know even more what is yet to come. It's going to be hell. If it was a huge amount of money like 5-6k i would be less depressed. It would solve lots of problems. But its nowhere close to that

Tomorrow morning i have to go and sign the nda and other contracts. I really dont want to. This is not what i had planned. I planned to finish my project by the end of this year asap. Now i have to speedrun and finish the whole project ASAP before i officially start this job

Although im starting a job, i feel like a failure even more than not having a job. How is this possible and why is that? Why do i feel so bad to start working a job?

Knowing already that ill sign a 3 month contract, and knowing that I'll earn exactly $3900 in the next 3 months, is fucking pathetic in this economy

New product owner colleague has a question like every hour, walks right over without considering that I am coding or if my headset is on for obviou reasons.

The questions are not even programming related and more to do with him updating story acceptance criterias for like the next freaking 5 sprints. These are stuff that could take hours to explain what the planned features are to begin with let alone discussing individual stories. I've actually taken my time and spent hrs explaining this shit to him now. Won't take any notes, jus shakes his head and says he understands and comes back asking same question again and again. Best part, he never gets to the point. Instead of asking 'hey for xyz feature do we need that component' he goes on to tell me he talked to this person and that person and he found this out and that out bla bla(like I give a fk..) and then somewhat formulates the question which I swear takes like 10 mins.

Lost count on hw many times he has interrupted me now when I am deep into some debug cos he needed to tell me about how his day went for some reason.

It's one thing to train a new developer but a product owner.. For fk sake. Trying to not be offensive but damn he is pushing it.

Planned release today, one of my co-worker's laptop's hard drive died in the morning.

And you guys say Satan is not real :/

My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.

Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.

Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

Didn't think I had material for a rant but... Oh boy (at least at the level I'm at, I'm sure worse is to come)

I'm a Java programmer, lets get that out of the way. I like Java, it feels warm and fuzzy, and I'm still a n00b so I'm allowed to not code everything in assembly or whatever.

So I saw this video about compilers and how they optimize and move and do stuff with the machine code while generating the executable files. And the guy was using this cool terminal that had color, autocomplete past commands and just looked cool. So I was like "I'll make that for my next project!"

In Java.

So I Google around and find a code snipped that gives me "raw" input (vs "cooked" input) and returns codes and I'm like 😎. Pressing "a" returns 97 (I think that's the ASCII value) and I think this is all golden now.

No point in ranting if everything goes as planned so here is the *but*

Tabs, backspaces and other codes like that returned appropriate ASCII codes in Unix. But in windows, no such thing. And since I though I'd go multiplatform (WORA amarite) now I had to do extra work so that it worked cross platform.

Then I saw arrow keys have no ASCII codes... So I pressed a arrow key and THREE SEPARATE VALUES WERE REGISTERED. Let me reiterate. Unix was pretending I had pressed three keys instead of one, for arrow keys. So on Unix, I had to work some magic to get accurate readings on what the user was actually doing (not too bad but still...). Windows actually behaved better, just spit out some high values and all was good. So two more systems I had to set up for dealing with arrow keys.

Now I got to ANSI codes (to display color, move around the terminal window and do other stuff). Unix supports them and Windows did but doesn't but does with some Win 10 patch...? But when tested it doesn't (at least from what I've seen). So now, all that work I put into making one Unix key and arrow key reader, and same for Windows, flies out the window. Windows needs a UI (I will force Win users, screw compatibility).

So after all the fiddling and messing, trying to make the bloody thing work on all systems, I now have to toss half the input system and rework it to support UI. And make a UI, which I absolutely despise (why I want to do back end work and thought this would be good, since terminal is not too front end).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People say "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

However, I think companies can and will create anxiety in a product to get you to buy something else, or something more expensive. This would fit with planned obsolescence. You need to update to Windows 11 because Windows 10 will not have support of updates. Fear the viruses!!!

Also, perhaps companies are purposely hiring incompetent people to head up products? So malicious incompetence?

I think the enshitification of tech is on purpose for various reasons. One of them being to create anxiety in people so they accept shittier solutions for all facets of life. Not just tech solutions.

A tech example of this is searches. They want you using AI. What is the end game goal of AI? Is it easier to hide bias?

Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:

If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.

TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

Was working on a system we planned on to deliver to a hospital
basically it was meant for controlling and monitoring pactions coming in and attendance time from the staff

Got it off the ground well and got to where the system was supposed to update room status
occupied/free then horror started
the db was not setting the room free after clearing a client off the list... room remained occupied and this kept on happening for 6 months and I was so focused on fixing the db models thinking thats where the problem was....

1 day after leaving the project for several months i just revisited the project randomly and started going through the whole code base trying to make sense of what was happening as there where no errors generated..
I had to verify the whole system logic... and that day i figured out what was happening...
upon adding a client to a room the system was also creating a duplicate room so when the function for setting the room free executes it would set the duplicate room free and not the actual room and the system would pick the room with occupied state causing the user not being able to assign new pactions to the room

Solving this brought so much relief coz it required so much work just to solve what seemed to be a minor issue

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

Maybe as a student my burn outs does not count so much, but i must say, i had some.

Worst part is that each kind of landed just before the ending of the semester. You know, that nightmarish part when everbody throws homeworks, tests, projects and presentations at us, while we barely have time to prepare for the incoming exams. Such a wonderful life indeed.

But this time was waaaay worst. And that only because i wanted to do so much this year, i started always early to do my assignments and so on but in the end i was so stuck on their bullshits that i barely had time to work on my things.. i haven't touch any programming project on my own since march!

And i quite have a lot of them planned. I had over the semester and i have now over the summer. But I AM SICK OF THIS. And i figured out that would be for the best to take a break from this things gor a few weeks over the summer. I like this world, the world of programming but i fear that sometimes i might not be good enough to swallow others bullshit for my living, i hope i will be able to keep myself afloat with my own projects and ideas.

Anyways, i hope you all guys have it better than me and those of you who doesn't.. well, i am here for ya!

Cheers 🍻

Oh you dumbass I can't "just save the data and we plan later" ! I have to plan firs IN ORDER TO SAVE THE FUCKING DATA SOMEWHERE!!! THIS IS NOT FUCKING EXCEL! EVEN EXCEL WAS FUCKING PLANNED !
DAMN!

I am learning foreign languages explicitly to curse when something does not go as planned but more creatively and so people around me are even more frightened haha

I planned to make some tutorial videos on NMAP, Metasploit or similar tools.

Which platform should I prefer? YouTube or udemy?

Note: I am not planning for monetize

!rant

Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.

So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.

So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.

And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.

Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.

After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.

On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.

I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.

I am still finishing the app, though :)

Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.

I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.

Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.

Peace out folks. Good night...

Our "boss" asked us to go to office on Saturday to work on something that is not part of the current sprint, but planned to be done next sprint, because we are
A g i l e

Argh.
I am backend web dev, which has nice software developer role, with later going to dive into devops a bit more.
And yet some people don't understand when they are told No!

I will not accept being hired for short terms job of sysadmin.

To make it worse it is offered by my mother.
She works for some person who has multiple web sites, and they suffer from some sort of attacks.

I am having no time for this. I work and learn 95% of my time.

I don't care what they offer. According to what I heard she works for corrupt person, and she already offered illegal work few days ago to me.

Thanks, no. They deal with too big sums of money, I dont wish to be arrested or killed. I have a good job, planned schedule for next half of year and my own life.

My first day of Launch Academy is tomorrow. Correcting a decade old mistake of not going to college for Comp Sci as originally planned. I'm excited, any tips on injecting a ton of code into your brain at once?

I did something potentially extremely stupid today

In 2020 when I was a teenager I suggested my uncle who ran a family business with my father to start a e commerce website. I did lot of stupid stuff doing this too. Planned to use AWS free tier to host the website and used Godaddy for domains IIRC. Setup godaddy email forwarding to his gmail account too IIRC

I registered a AWS account with my email(bad idea since my uncle's debit card was the payment method). I then setup a EC2 instance but instead of using the free instance I used some other instance because I didn't read what instance was free and setup his debit card as the payment method.

Setup woocommerce on it and pointed the domain to instance's static IP. We didn't do a lot of stuff on the website but next month on AWS we got a bill but it was a small amount. Uncle paid the bill and I terminated the EC2 instance IIRC. Next month there was a very small bill I don't remember what I did after it.

Today I remembered about it logged in to AWS and paid the bill. The problem is I used the default billing address which is in my uncle's name and the address of the family business. IIRC we didn't give them tax details of the business so we can't claim tax credit on it.

But still since there is a bill with the address of the business which Amazon probably reported to the government there could be tax discrepancies. Bill was due 4 years ago so maybe it will affect his 2020 returns which could be painful. The bill was also paid by me not from my Uncle's account so that might complicate things.

Thankfully the surprise AWS bill had basically zero affect on my relationship with my uncle.

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

Im not involved in any projects at all anymore. My direct collegae is planned fully for the coming months. It’s clear everyone just wants to get rid of me.
If i ask the teamlead for feedback i dont get any.
If i ask the manager for feedback i get to hear he talked to the lead but he has no time to talk with me.

Giving me a compliment hurted his guts. Ive spend weeks just documenting bullshit.

All im allowed is to help out with tiny annoying tasks and i need to do them 10000% perfect. I’m a human, i’m not perfect. I accept the fact i’m not and so should they.

A colleague said he wanted to call today.
Yeah, today, but not 10 fucking minutes before I planned to go home!

One of professors has an interesting philosophy in regards to how software is planned. He makes us forget that we dealing with a computer and has us write instructions as if we are teaching a human (no optimization, binary, or unnecessary numeral variables). Then we change it into code, then we optimize it. Every time. It freaks me out, but it gets us thinking. Not sure. If that is genius or insanity.

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

[Long post]
My last big project at school.

There was some pretty interesting projects, some shitty one, but there was one big project that interested almost everyone : a project in collaboration with Siemens. The project implied Machine Learning and Image Analysis. There were like 11 applies, with a total of 13-14 groups.

The project was randomly chosen for each group. I've learned that my project was the big one with Siemens. I remember how excited and hyped I was in a quarter of second.

So the whole project was tutored by one teacher that know us pretty well (since we already did a pretty cool project last year tutored by him) and by a former student at my school who's now at Siemens. And to be honest, it was one of the coolest project I've been into, despite the difficulty, since the whole subject (not gonna tell it just in case) was pretty new. We had some troubles, but we and our tutors always had discussion every week that helped us quite a lot.

There was some development planned at first, but the more we went into the project, the more we all saw the complexity of it and didn't quite hope to do a single line of code, but mostly research.

The project took around 3-4 months, we had a room that we can use with a GTX 1070 for training the neural network, and me and my friend knew how to work perfectly and efficiently.
At the end of the project, as expected we didn't do some coding, but we did a presentation of the project, with the big help of our tutor at Siemens that told us to redo from scratch our part in a more scientific way; the presentation was a real success, we got all the jury saying they actually wanted those kind of presentation and were really pleased. And we provided everything needed so a new fresh group with no knowledge of the topic could do some coding on it.

We got one of the highest notes of the promotion (not sure if the highest or not). Even tho it kinda disgusted me in researching, that actually was one of the best project I got to do that was that successful.

Looking for ideas here...

OK, customer runs a manufacturing business. A local web developer solicits them, convinces them to let him move their website onto his system.

He then promptly disappears. No phone calls, no e-mail, no anything for 3 months by the time they called me looking to fix things.

Since we have no access to FTP or anything except the OpenCart admin, we agree to a basic rebuild of the website and a redeployment onto a SiteGround account that they control. Dev process goes smoothly, customer is happy.

Come time to launch and...naturally, the previous dev pointed the nameservers to his account, which will not allow the business to make changes because they aren't the account owner.

"We can work around this," I figure, since all we *really* need to do is change the A records, and we can leave the e-mail set up as it is (hopefully).

Well, that hopefully is kind of true—turns out instead of being set up in GoDaddy (where the domain is registered) it's set up in Gmail—and the customer doesn't know which account is the Google admin account associated with the domain. For all we know it could be the previous developer—again.

I've been able to dig up the A, MX, and TXT records, and I'm seeing references to dreamhost.com (where the nameservers are at) in the SPF data in the TXT records. Am I going to have to update these records, or will it be safe to just leave them as they are and simply update the A record as originally planned?

Continuing my saga, I'm now tasked with creating a .NET Web Form app and then converting it to ASP.NET Core as a proof of concept.
Problems:
- Web Forms are not supported in Core and are not planned to
- After 3 weeks I still do not have a work laptop
-- My personal laptop is a Chrome book running Linux
--- I can't install VS2017 on my laptop, I need it for this project.
- Working from home, where I have the resources available, is apparently against company policy (I'm not 100% on this yet, can't find it myself)
- I'm likely going to be sent back to the offline computer lab at a different location to work on this, where I doubt the programs/packages are installed

Perfect.

When you have some important system maintenance planned but your body says "not this time wolke" and just gives you 3 days off with sickness :<

When I was an apprentice in a small company, ...

I had to witness the shortest job interview in my life. The company was searching for a secondary full time developer and one applicant got the chance to have a job interview.
The interview was planned at 10 o'clock in the morning. The applicant has arrived at the interview at time, but my boss didn't. After about a hour my boss has arrived.
They went into his office, and you can just hear a loud yell why the applicant came too early. The applicant told him that he got there at time and he has waited about a hour for him.
My boss have asked how the applicant came to this place and the applicant told him that he has used public transportation with the correct arrival time.
Someone like my boss who does not use any public transportation at all accused the applicant being a liar and he should stop bullshitting him.
The applicant yelled back what the hell is going on and he is not there to get yelled at. After that the applicant went away very angry.
We had a very good laugh at the neighboring office.

If someone asked me how much I can tolerate meetings from 1 to 10, I would ask why negative numbers are not allowed... I hate them that much, mostly meetings are planned as single person(which is generally organizer) needs to talk everyone in the room but the rest needs the meeting only in percentages like %10 to %20. I am attending to a meeting that includes info about other projects and their calendar because organizer leads both projects...

Started a side project.
Learnt flutter and firebase.
Started coding app.
Four months pass by.
App is mostly ready.
Wakes up on Saturday morning.
Updates Android Studio and SDK because, why not?

Build failed!
Dependency depreciation warnings!
Java errors!
Firebase errors!
Emulator stopped running!

Wify is angry with me as we planned shopping but now this. Fortunately, she's also in IT, so she understands..

FML! Spent the entire day stackoverflowing and fixing errors!

8PM evening, I am back to Friday's status. My shoulder and neck hurts but my mind is chilled.

Product was not thrilled with our estimates we gave them for the next phase of our project. So they got the veep to give us 2 new team members - a new hire and an existing senior - in hopes that it will allow us to finish a lot sooner.

Because 9 women can make a baby in a month, right? Gods forbid we consider removing anything from the scope of this phase. Mind you, there's still another phase planned after this one before we even release the product.

rant && !rant

I started my Internship a couple of months ago, but it didn't live up to my expectations.

> The good things:

- I have a structured internship programme, where we are given a independent project to complete during the internship, so all the work is slow and nice, so no unreasonable deadlines.

- Cool-ass supervisors (and smart too). They let us leave if the we don't have any more work planned, no sitting until the end of office hours, so go home early and SLEEP.

> The bad things:

- Shitty-ass people. But I've to deal with them once in a few weeks, so not that bad.

- Restricted wifi, but some websites can be accessed for memes. So, knd of fine.

- NO BRAIN-FUCKING EXPERIENCES FOR RANTING. I thought I would start my internship and meet retarded people and post some rants but NOOOO, someone had different plans for me (that 'someone' is LIFE, just in case if you are wondering)

> Summary

- Kind of disappointed about material for rants, but 10/10 it's been a good internship.

Monday... Message from sysadmin at around 5:00am...

"We finished with the servers upgrade. Everything went as planned. Your call recorder is not recording any calls and your database failed to backup though."

Jeez, thanks man. You sure know how to get me out of bed!

As I settled into my armchair with a steaming cup of tea, I thought back to the time I almost lost my heart—and a small fortune—to a smooth-talking scam artist. It all began innocently enough when I joined a dating site after my children encouraged me to put myself out there again. That’s when I met David. With his charming smile and heartfelt messages, he made me feel seen and cherished. We talked for hours about everything—from our favorite books to our dreams of traveling the world. I felt like a teenager again, butterflies in my stomach as we planned our future together.

But soon, the conversation took a troubling turn. David claimed he was stuck overseas due to a sudden medical emergency and needed money to pay for treatment. My heart ached for him, and against my better judgment, I sent him several wire transfers, believing I was helping the love of my life. Weeks passed, and suddenly, the sweet messages turned into silence. It dawned on me that I had been scammed. Just as I was drowning in despair, I heard about a group called Specter Lynx. I reached out, sharing my story with them. They sprang into action, tracking down David’s digital trail and uncovering the web of deceit. With their help, I was able to recover a significant portion of my lost funds. Now, I not only have my money back, but I also have a newfound appreciation for caution—and the strength of community. I often share my story, reminding others that love online can be a double-edged sword, but with a little vigilance, you can find your way back.

Not sure an anti social bunch as us developers are would make too much use of it, but is there a PM feature planned for devRant?

Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.

Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.

I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.

After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!

After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.

So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.

Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.

I work under a highly toxic boss who expects me to work on all 7 days and give most of the time to the company. He makes us work on public holidays and weekends as well. We are literal slaves of him.
I had planned to leave on december this year , but in the aprils appraisal i got 116% hike and i got lot of esops and retention bonus. And retention bonus needs to be returned if not in employment till next june. Now i am crazily stuck and have become an official slave of him. Now i am neither able to leave the company, nor able to stay. And after accepting the money, Everything is in his hands. Now he is acting like he owns me as an object.

Guys kindly guide me on what to do.

I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.

characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)

tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL

story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.

at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.

i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.

on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!

All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.