Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

Client: Our meeting is going to be on March 27th at 9am. Clear your schedules and add it to your calendar.

Me: I'm not sure why this wasn't cleared with me, but I'm 3 hours behind you guys and that will be 6am for me. If you want to have a meeting at that time, I'll be sleeping.

Client: We start our days early, so we need you to make yourself available at that time. We have other stuff on our agenda so this is the time it will be taking place.

Me: I will not, repeat will not be available at that time. I have the 29th and 30th available at that time, but any day before that will have to be scheduled at 1pm or later. Mondays however are a no go. We have standing appointments on Mondays that we cannot reschedule.

Client: Monday, April 2nd at 9am is the new time. Please clear that time.

Our Company owner: we just said Mondays are a no go.

Client: we're getting frustrated that you are not being flexible with your schedule. Here is what you are going to do. Give us a calendar with every day and time you have available and we'll tell you what works.

Owner: We just gave you a bunch of dates. We're the ones trying to be flexible while you've been dictating what time's we've been available. That's not how this works. Mondays aren't happening. The 27th isn't happening because I'm not going to expect my developer to get up at 6am because it's convenient for you. This is a not a one way street. Let us know when you're ready to find a date and time that works for all of us.

----

This is the same guy I argue with on a daily basis and tell to fuck off when he's being a douche, but when it matters, he's pretty badass dude.

Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:

- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.

Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?

- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.

What distro to use?

- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.

... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.

HR people working in tech companies, let's talk about them...

*phone rings and I pick up*
HR Lady: Hi, this is [name] from [company]. I'm calling you regarding your application you submitted [some date 2 months ago!].

Me: *realizing that I've applied 2 freaking months ago* Hmmm OK....

HR Lady: Yes, well, we asked for your GitHub account, but you seem to have forgotten to provide it.

Me: *open up the email and see that I've sent them my GitLab account* Well, I have the email right here and I did send you a git account. I mean, it's not GitHub specifically but it's a GitLab account, pretty much the same thing, you should be good with that.

HR Lady: OK, let me put you on hold for a minute.

*2-3 minutes passes*

HR Lady: Hi sir, I've asked my colleague [which I suppose is another HR] and he told me that they're not the same thing, we cannot proceed until you give us the right link, you need to send us a link to your GitHub account.

Me: I mean, they aren't the SAME EXACT thing, but both companies provide essentially the same service, it's like Messenger and WhatsApp. Look, I'm pretty sure that if you give this to another programmer they'll be fine.

HR Lady: No, Messenger and WhatsApp aren't the same thing. Sir, please stay polite. We need a GitHub account not a GitLab account.

Me: *mumbling* Oh boy.... M'am, it's OK, I don't need the job anyway, I've found something. Two months is a long time and I needed something quickly. Thank you, have a good day.

Worst Person you Interviewed?

I interview many developers at my company. Today, I interviewed someone who seemed fairly qualified. Then I spotted a large gap I his resume. When I enquirer about the gap, he disclosed that he had served prison time for pedophilia. He further disclosed that as a condition of his release, he had to be supervised when using a computer.

As we are a gov/medical company, we are not allowed to hire people with a criminal record. He begged me but I told him that it was again company policy. I felt sorry for him not finding any work and being forced to beg, but I also had a knot in my stomach over the details his crime that he elaborated on.

Anyway, he scored 0 out of 10 on my interview scale.

Right after him, I interviewed another developer who seemed great on paper but when I proved further, he didn’t know jack about JavaScript, despite his resume show him to be a “jQuery expert”!

So, I asked him what he does in his spare time and how me keeps his development skill/knowledge up to date. He said:

“...no, I don’t study this shit in my spare time... I’m not a facking need!!!”

I stopped the interview right there. I might sware here on DV, but it my office I keep it civil & professional. So I certainly do not appreciate it when a diaper wearing, snotty nosed, junior wanker swares in my offices to merely protect his willful ignorance and shows pathetic pride instead of humility. That interview comes to an end immediately!

The pedo got a 0 out of 10, but this brat scored a -5 out of 10!!!

I have so many interview stories I could tell you...

#fml

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Worst meeting I’ve been in?

Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”

Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.

I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.

June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”

Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.

That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.

Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.

Dear Indian Companies,

Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!

6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...

A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"

I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...

Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.

So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!

Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?

And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!

When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...

And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Short personal Code Editor Review:

Atom (web-based)
Speed 👎
Packages 👍 (relatively up-to-date)
Features 👍

Visual Studio Code (web-based)
Speed 👉
Packages 👍
Features 👍

Sublime Text (native)
Speed 🚀
Packages 👉 (not as up-to-date)
Features 👍

Verdict:
Having worked with all of those editors for at least three weeks each I have come to the following conclusion:
I liked Sublime Text most primarily for it's performance, but was a little disappointed by the fact that the packages were not updated as frequently, not available or VSCode had some that have better support.

Second would be my current editor, Visual Studio Code, which I only use because I need certain packages that were not present on Sublime Text.

Atom is not bad either, it just happens to be the least recent editor I used, it was quite slow but an overall solid editor.

If I had to choose to use one for the rest of my life, I would probably go with Sublime.

I think there is little margin between features across all of those editors, only exception being performance for Sublime Text. I also quite liked the file organisation design of it (which I can't really say about VSCode).

Those are my subjective opinions on the editors, hope it helps some of you decide which one to give a shot next!

My current one. When I was chosen for my current job as the final candidate, he went for me partly because we've got the same favourite music and that made us click very well.

Now, a year later, it's still going awesome.

We can be serious but most of the time (when we see eachother) it's (savage) jokes, 'rekking' eachother and we keep eachother up to date on new music releases and festivals.

I remember this convo about music:
Boss: Heyy, this is a track I go hard on: Rejecta - Followed 😉
Me: oh yeah that one is awesome! Have you heard his other tracks?
B: HE HAS OTHER TRACKS?! 😍
M: Yaaaaas! He's got 'deserve to die', ''let my tape rock" and 'move my body'
B: OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME 😍
M: enjoy man 😘
B: thankies 😊

He's not that much older than me and actually listens to advice.

Just an awesome boss in general!

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

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.

Had a follow up meeting today to resolve the issue of Product ignoring our comments about possible issues, better ways to do it etc.

New rules:
- We are allowed to suggest to Product that they might be doing something wrong
- We are not allowed to tell product they are doing something wrong
- If Product don’t listen, that’s fine, we will document our comments to protect us later.

Conclusion:
Product are too sensitive to have a conversation with. We are now going to let them fuck everything up, make some notes and say “I told you so” at a later date.

Maturity at its finest ladies and gentlemen.

I very very rarely drink, but when I do I party hard.

I negotiated an entire piece of complex web architecture (really huge, works at 50k transactions per second), with my boss who's a lead architect, from a bar (he thought I was home), while moderately drunk.

It got me a lotta praise and till date it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever written. It saved the company 500+ hours or something #humblebrag.

To this day I have no recollection of what I said (huge hangover after) or how I managed to come up with that shit. I don't think I'd have been able to do it sober. The sheer size of the problem would've made me go "yea it works, I'm not touching that. Nope."

DAE notice any increase in pattern recognition in their code while drunk?

Manual Data Entry: Most boring job
This reminds me of one conversation with one of my faculty..
Faculty: Why not try some Machine Learning Project?
Me: Cool. Any ideas you have already thought
Faculty: Comes up with a really noble idea
Me: Awesome idea. But we need data
Faculty: Don't worry. I will get it. Just help me setup Hadoop (see the irony.. no data yet, and he wants big data setup)
Me: But we don't have data. Let's focus of data collection, Sir
Faculty: I will get it. Don't worry. Trust me.
( I did setup for him twice coz he formatted the system on which I did the setup first time)
After 6 months,
Me: (same question) Sir, Data??
Faculty: I got it.
Me: Great. Give me, I can start looking into it from today.
Faculty: Actually, it's in a register written manually in a different language (which even I can't understand) I will hire data entry guys to convert it into English digital contents.
Me: *facepalm*
Road to Manual data entry to Big Data
Dedicating this pencil to the individuals keeping the register up to date and Sir in hopes of converting it into big data..
Long way to go..

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

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.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

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

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

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

“Connected” the terminal said.

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

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

Then I saw it.
TimeOutExceptions..

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

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

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

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

Lying bastard of a teacher.

Context:
This is year I'll graduate from my high school. But before that we have to pass the final examination. One part of that examination is presenting a project, which we should complete within this year. Each student has to choose a mentor/supervisor to help him on them on their project. I chose a professor who'll leave the school in January because of her pregnancy.

This is the part where the bastard, who asked me whether I use HTML or CSS for a website, barges in.
Given the fact that he incompetence be matched by his arrogance, nobody would ever choose him. He has to watch while other ring the other professors. He asks desperately for students, but everyone already has a mentor.

Yesterday he told me that my mentor will leave this January and that she already WROTE him an email where she asked him to continue mentoring her students. I was kinda confused, so I told him I would talk it over with my mentor and guve him an answer on a later date.

Today the truth comes forth. She didn't write anything. This bastard invented all of it. She even told us that she is aware of this guy is incompetent and that she would have asked a teacher with a good reputation.

But I'm furious. Not only did he waste my precious time with that conversation, which he follow up with the most basic way of time managing you could think of.

HE STRAIGHT UP LIED TO STUDENTS TRYING TO BOOST HIS NONEXISTENT REPUTATION.

I am not comfortable with a person like that being able to give me marks. Just yeet him out already!

Had a tinder "date" last night. Shit was just awkward the entire time. She lives right over a state border, and I live right on the other side, so it was maybe a 10 minute drive. Plus she had a bunny, so that was pretty cool.

She said she wasn't interested in a hookup or anything, which I was fine with, sex isn't everything. We saw the bunny for a bit, then she started talking about her abusive ex boyfriend she was with for like 2 years (she did not shut the fuck up about it).

She lives in a fairly sketchy place too, so that didn't help the situation. At one point, a car drives by and shined a flashlight through the window I was sitting by. The flashlight was turned off right after that. Then she continued talking about her ex boyfriend.

I held through for 3 hours of that shit. It was the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my life. Eventually she said her friend texted her about having boyfriend issues and invited herself over to stay the night there, so she basically said "you might as well go, I don't think you want to deal with a crying 16 year old"

So I went to my car and left. I drove as fast as I could back to my apartment. Then I was telling my roommate about it, and he was like "I think you need some alcohol after that shit", so I took a couple shots of vodka.

Shit was fucking weird guys.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

People in my school launching Internet Explorer, cause Firefox takes to long to open/doesn't work fine - instead of clicking the shiny little chrome icon on their desktops...

Sometimes I wonder how compromised my parents online security would be without my intervention.

My mom logged into her gmail and there was an red bar on top informing about Google preventing an attempted login from an unknown device.

Like typical parents / old people, that red bar didn't caught her attention but I noticed it immediately. I took over and looked into it. It showed an IP address and a location that was quite odd.

I went ahead with the Account security review and I was shocked to find that she had set her work email address as the recovery email!!

I explained her that work email accounts cannot be trusted and IT department of the workplace can easily snoop emails and other info on that email address and should not be related to personal accounts.

After fixing that issue, me being a typical skeptic and curious guy, I decided to find more info about that IP address.

I looked up the IP address on a lookup website and it showed an ISP that was related to the corporate office of her workplace. I noticed the location Google reported also matched with the corporate office location of her work.

Prior to this event, few days ago, I had made her change her gmail account password to a more secure one. ( Her previous password was her name followed by birth date!! ). This must have sent a notification to the recovery mail address.

All these events are connected. It is very obvious that someone at corporate office goes through employees email addresses and maybe even abuse those information.

My initial skeptism of someone snooping throguh work email addresses was right.

You're welcome mom!

Comments should describe the why and not the what and always be up to date ... or this will be the result.

Find super interesting forum thread from 2015 with intelligent discussion about deep technical stuff.

Creating forum account, thinking about contributing to ongoing discussion with code samples, findings, hypotheses, and some open questions.

Browse to last post, is from late 2016, from moderator:

READ FORUM RULES DO NOT POST IN OLD THREADS LOCKING THIS

Me: 😡😤😠 WHO THE FUCK CAME UP WITH THE SHITRULE THAT A DISCUSSION HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE? IF I COULD REACH THROUGH THE SCREEN RIGHT INTO 2016, I'D PUNCH YOU THROUGH THE ROOF OF YOUR MOTHER'S BASEMENT. NO ONE LOVES YOU, YOU USELESS MOTHERFUCKING CUNT OF A MODERATOR.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:

Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.

Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.

Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.

Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director

Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.

Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)

Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.

Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.

Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.

Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.

Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.

Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)

Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.

Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.

They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.

I fucking hate "modern" front end. Just a little "hello world" and you already get a useless bundle of js, which is x times then other assets combined.
Not to mention that no fucking setup I tried works, documentation is as accurate and up-to-date as apple maps and all components are basically part of a civil (cock) war.

So far the most frustration aspect in programming I have to endure

I met a rather talented developer some time ago that is highly proficient in C# as well as React and Angular for the creation of web programs.
Dude knows the ins and outs of C#, has been working on it since the early stages of ASP.NET.

I am always intrigued as to why certain people chose certain languages. When I asked him, he admitted to being very lost during his early days, and somehow settled on C# because of the file extension being cs, which made him think that it was the proper Computer Science programming language, get it? because of CS?

Now a days he does use a wide variety of stacks and languages, and he keeps up to date, not one of those "I don't need to learn anything new!" types of developers, the dude is absolutely l337, but i keep thinking that such a talented developer had such a funny start.

You fucking son of a bitch!

First you make me do a project in two fucking months, and that's a fucking job-load for only one dev to deliver a SPA with payments and whatsoever.

Then you pushed me to accelerate deployment date and there I am, getting tired and using time I don't have.

But oh no, you prick, that wasn't enough, you had to do just one thing. YOU HAD TO DO ONE FUCKING THING!

What's that? Oh, sorry, I thought I overheard that you wanted to accept online payments but YOU'RE NOT FUCKING SIGNED UP, YOUR BUSSINESS IS NOT LEGAL UNTIL YOU REGISTER IT.

Motherfucker, I can't do anything, you better fucking register your bussiness if you want this to work the way it's supposed to do.

not really a rant, but but i am intrigued...

got an email that my rockstar account (gta) email was changed.

changed the email and password and noticed that all the details were changed (nickname, date of birth etc) and the guy even posted on support asking to remove steam link (probably could not login). But rockstar requires a screenshot of user logged in to steam (as if that is hard to fabricate...), so he gave up :D

i'm not even mad, i'm wondering what's the guy's story. Probly bought a stolen account for cheap, hoping to play :(

Maybe i should just let him play the game, since i'm not...

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Well, if your tests fails because it expects 1557525600000 instead of 1557532800000 for a date it tells you exactly: NOTHING.

Unix timestamp have their point, yet in some cases human readability is a feature. So why the fuck don't you display them not in a human readable format?

Now if you'd see:

2019-05-10T22:00:00+00:00

vs the expected

2019-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

you'd know right away that the first date is wrong by an offset of 2 hours because somebody fucked up timezones and wasn't using a UTC calculation.

So even if want your code to rely on timestamps, at least visualize your failures in a human readable way. (In most cases I argue that keeping dates as an iso string would be JUST FUCKING FINE performance-wise.)

Why do have me parse numbers? Show me the meaningful data.

Timestamps are for computers, dates are for humans.

Do you know when you think "Oh that doesn't look too hard. I bet I can do it in no time"?
That is how I felt when I saw the DIY 3D printer kit Anet A8. It's only 150€ on gearbest so that is pretty cheap.
The reviews said it takes about 3 - 4 hours to build and I though "Ok I am a computer specialist and engineer so 3h sounds reasonable".
When I bought it from gearbest the first problems started: 5 days after the estimated shipping date the packet was still not on its way. After I fucked the support up, it finally arrived 3 weeks after the estimated date.
When I took the first look, everything seemed to be fine except for some small scratches but for that price that is not a problem.
So I started to build the printer at about 14:00 and even if some random sites in the manual were in Chinese I felt confident to get it done in a view hours.
And then it started to get really fucked. The first problem was that 2 screws were unusable and I had to use my own screws instead. The next problem was that the manual was just in the wrong fucking order at some points and I had to reverse multiple steps to get it right.
But the most fucked up thing: There should have been 2 threaded rods with a length of 345mm but the rods had a length of 310mm which was nowhere listed in the parts list. So I had to go buy some aluminium rods to fill the gap temporary so that I can at least go on with the build before getting a replacement. And I could go on and on and with the problems but the point is, it is now 19:30 which is about 5.5 hours after I started and I am still not fucking done with this.

So what have I learned?
Cheap Chinese hardware is good, but only as long as you don't have to assemble that shit yourself.

Man how do you skinny devs keep so skinny? I'm not even eating fat things and I'm nearing to light obesity... Is there a patch that I missed? apt update says it's up to date?

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

While working on my one of the first project in java i ended up using deprecated Calendar API for the date. Since deadline was near i thought it would be a good idea to use the JCalendar API for as date picker (which is a third party API).BAD IDEA. It was the night before the submission round about 11pm when i realized that there is no way to convert JCal object into Calendar and it turned out it is not working as expected you have to subtract a particular number from the year to get date right.

To convert JCal into Calendar i used the toString function to get the date in string sliced it using substring into year,month,day then had to assign date to Calendar object via constructor.
Had to write 70 lines of code just to convert JCal into Calendar...

And then there were other complications related to this problem. Had tu pull an all nighter just to solve date related problems
LESSONS LEARNED :
NEVER USE A DEPRECATED API
NEVER USE THIRD PARTY APIs WITHOUT RESEARCH

I found out that not many people know Floating for YouTube extension

I personally use it to watch confs when i am doing easy stuff

Help me stay up to date ( it's distracting so i turn it off when i have to concentrate)

Hope it helps someone!

SuperCell is hiring.. Here is their job description:

Description

We need a new Builder. Are you an independent and passionate maker? Do you love spending 24 hours a day turning wood and gold into walls and defensive buildings? Do you answer the call to build even if that call comes at 4:00 a.m. and you haven’t had a day off in literally five years? If the answer to these questions is “Yes! Yes! A million times yes!” then we have a hammer with your name on it!

The Role

The focus of the Builder is to, uh, build.

You will be responsible for taking instructions from the player and building whenever and wherever they see fit. They say build and you say...well, you don’t say anything, you just build.

The world of Clash of Clans can get intense. Our Builder is expected to build quickly and expertly at all times, even while under great amounts of stress and/or attacks from Barbarians, Archers, Goblins, Giants, Wall Breakers, Wizards, and P.E.K.K.A.s.

Equally as important as building is rebuilding. All of the things you build will inevitably be destroyed, if not immediately, then soon after you just finished building or rebuilding everything. You can’t let it get you down. You must maintain your resolve and rebuild. Fast!

Responsibilities

Must be willing to relocate to the World of Clash
Must build and maintain a wide-range of buildings, statues, and war machines.
Must be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
Must have up-to-date Level 9 Tesla Tower maintenance certification 
Must have proficiency with building materials both common (wood, stone, etc.) and uncommon (lightning, lava, etc.)

Requirements

Must provide own leather helmet
Must possess a passion for building
Must be comfortable working hands-on with molten lava.
Must adhere to strict dress code (orange sleeveless shirt, brown canvas pants, and boots).
Must speak fluent Barbarian

How to Apply

Send us your qualifications via e-mail to bethebuilder@supercell.com or write out your qualifications and send them to us via Baby Dragon. Either format is accepted. 

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

One of the first things I learned while screwing around in Linux for the first time was the calendar in the terminal. I never thought I'd have an actual use for cal, and it just sat in the back of my mind for a year.

Then, two weeks ago, I needed to find the date for a saturday in December, because I thought it was the seventh. My duck was like "Hey, your terminal is right there, why not use that cal function instead of looking for your calendar?" And I was like "Dude, that's genius!"
I have since done it thrice more for various reasons, and it has saved me like four minutes in total. I love all the little things like this in Linux (I'm pretty sure Windows and obviously MacOS do the same thing with practically the same command, but shut up and let me enjoy myself (and it just feels more accessable in Linux because I use the terminal so much more often))

So yeah
Stuff

God I need something to do...
Wait! I have several things to do! The first one will be making a list of all my projects.
Or spending another two hours on devRant.

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

My company con not find any other developer than me.
I could not understand.
We use only up to date libraries in our projects.
Please note the comment private properties...

#3

There are like 50 views. But that's not the bad part about it. Each view is backed up twice or more within the same vie directory by adding a date to the views name.

While interviewing someone for a DevOps position, he admits having only started on this subject a year ago. This is no big deal.
When asked how he keeps up-to-date, he answered "I haven't for the last ten months".
Well, that was not the answer that I expected...

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

So I just lost my job because I wasn't 'working hard enough'.

I'm the hardest working person there, everyone else just stands around and talks, but they don't do anything because they're union members (I'm agency so I'm not) and the union follows up on the smallest things.

That would be bad but not earth shattering if I had savings, was up to date on rent, didn't have the bank and various loan companies hounding me, and I still possessed the will to live, but that's not the case.

I'm sick of this constant barrage of shit that the world is chucking me and I just want to go lie down on the train lines and wait now. Fuck this world and the shit it constantly gives me :'(

Amazing client.

Want to add parallax effect to whole website (yes I also don't understand) after everything is done and final.

After they have moved up the launch date.

After they have asked me to also do the data entry not only the development.

After I specifically asked for ssh access, PHP7+ server and then they asked me to deploy it to their shared hosting through cpanel.

After ...

After ....

After .....

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

Waking up from a dream with a girl in it.
TL;DR: We fell in love and I can finally somehow remember her. Not completely though...

(To the perverts: We did not have sex nor did we kiss.)
The worlds I am becoming a part of are very complex. I won't get into the details of how they look like. I will tell as far as I can remember.

<vaguely remember the beginning>
My sister, my mom and I went into a house which turned out to have weird things inside.
Suddenly I became something like an agent and I had a special mission. I went to the basement of this building. Saw a few guys chilling there. Grabed a walkie talkie which was taped on the right wall. I have listened to it while moving back to the entrance, when I have arrived there, it began to do disortion type of sounds.

<I have been to a lot of different places here. Telling each of them would make me to not come to an end lol>

Then I have decided to go outside. The outside-of-the-house world changed. I was at floor 8 or something like that. It was very high when I looked down. All of the sudden I got into a waterfall type of thing which was about to suck me in to a circle. The waterfall was limited to the area of where this house was. It was basically hovering above the streets, but never reaching the streets.

I somehow met the lovely girl in a cube type of thing that helped us not to fall down through the spiral. We enjoyed the action the waterfall created. It made us move in a circle and we had to hold ourselves at the wall of the cube which luckily had knobs to hold on.

After that whole action I have been in my bed and sleeping. She somehow found me on a social media platform and contacted me with "Meet me on <some strange date>".

<some unlogical world shit happens here. I will just skip them until the date>

The day to meet her comes. She is up on a hill with a "purple?<idk it was purple-ish>" sky.

<can not remember the dialogue>

We had a great time and I felt that she had feelings for me.
She then went away. What about me? And me, too. ;)

The next day I went to see her again. She was gone. I found out that she has a brother. I talked to him about where she might be. Turns out her brother was a demon or satan <idk they all became agressive and god-like powerful lol>.
He told me that she must be there where <random name of enemy> is to fight the enemy to rescue her mom.

Her brother went to help her. I followed him since I did not know where the enemy was. Let alone where I was. The world has changed for the 99999th fucking time lol.

I followed him up another hill with trees and a lot of people. It was autumn.

Then we found her sitting on a hill looking down to the sea beneath us with cherry blossom trees around her.

The dream was about to end. I felt it. So I have asked her a few questions after the happy greeting, but I can not remember them and her answer anymore. But I do remember that she did not say anything after one question. She just stared at me looking through my eyes which immediately did end the dream.
I was able to get into the dream shortly after it a few times, but I was not able to interact with them.

Besides of that: I have had "Battle Symphony-Linkin Park" playing as a background music for the whole dream a long.

The good thing is that I somehow would be able to recreate her. I know how she looks like to about 60%.

I do not even know why the fuck I am telling y'all this.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

I updated a date field on a table with about 4 million records in it.

Only meant to update about 1000 of them.

This field is used to generate QBRs. So the executive level would notice first.

But then.... They didn't. Nobody noticed. Not for almost a year.

Then someone asked about it and I told them what happened, and they never brought it up again.

This is the last part of the series
(3 of 3) Credentials everywhere; like literally.

I worked for a company that made an authentication system. In a way it was ahead of it's time as it was an attempt at single sign on before we had industry standards but it was not something that had not been done before.

This security system targeted 3rd party websites. Here is where it went wrong. There was a "save" implementation where users where redirected to the authentication system and back.

However for fear of being to hard to implement they made a second method that simply required the third party site to put up a login form on their site and push the input on to the endpoint of the authentication system. This method was provided with sample code and the only solution that was ever pushed.

So users where trained to leave their credentials wherever they saw the products logo; awesome candidates for phishing. Most of the sites didn't have TLS/SSL. And the system stored the password as pain text right next to the email and birth date making the incompetence complete.

The reason for plain text password was so people could recover there password. Like just call the company convincingly frustrated and you can get them to send you the password.

My most personal rant to date...

The company I work for operates in an industry that might experience the next Kodak moment. The industry is really feeling the knife against it's throat at the moment. The company I work for is a dinosaur, so to say. And almost everyone within fight to continue staying as a dinosaur.

I am the sole dev of said company, and I am so alone. Not just literally, but also in thought and action.

I've been flagging the possibilities and dangers of the digitizing aspect we're experiencing for the last six or eight years (yep, I've been around for quite some time), but I feel that I'm not heard. I am that grumpy, sour manifestation of everything digital that they hate so much. At least that's what it feels like.

I am so fed up with this situation. But my options are limited. There aren't many dev jobs around, and those who've tried to hire me offered a salary reduction of about $12K, which is quite a lot. I've been offered jobs in other parts of the country, but I have family matters to tend to, so I can't move at the moment. I've looked for companies offering a job where I'm not required to work from the office, but in my country these seem to be far apart. I could go freelance, but I am too scared to do so. A stable income is neccessary to put food on the table for my family.

Sigh,

Fucking hate my job 😡
I joined as nodejs dev at a mnc 3months ago involved in banking software in which i dont have any domain knowledge.. first 10 days I was told to go through fucking udemy nodejs and graphql tutorial (wtf) which i already have experience with before joining.. after that my reporting manager gives me task to resolve fields and gave me shitty jira story link to read.. that shit story link had no explanation about the fields and what the database it is, then she says to use some shitty sdk which is built internally by shiity devloper which had no documentation and have to follow other module which was again written by that sr. Dev... They hav fucked up the graphql and nodejs and entire stack and also till date no one has ever given any explanation about the domain and the fields and database schema.. this manager refuses to share knowledge about the domain now how the fuck i resolve the graphql schema which was again written by non technical b.a.. all they have used is latest technology in a shitty way with no standards to to follow .. no dataloading no caching no batching.. use shitty sdk which does not give access to dbconn and fucking tightly coupling expressjs which when i start consumes crazy 400Mb of memory .. these fucking seniors devs + the fucking b.a having 12+. Yrs exp each have fucked the entire codebase... Each day killing my passion for app development.. fuckkk ... Dunno what to do now

In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.

This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.

Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.

The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.

The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.

Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

Guys what I want to know is how do you secure your code so that they pay you after you deliver the code to them?
So recently I was in this internship that I secured with an over-the-phone interview and the guy who was contacting me was the CEO of the company (I'm going to refer to him as "the fucking cunt" from now on). He asked me to do some OCR and translations and I managed to write a few scripts that automate the entire process. The fucking cunt made me login remotely to his desktop which was connected to the server (who the fuck does that) and I had to operate on the server from his system. I helped him with the installation and taught him how to use the scripts by altering the parameters and stuff, and you know what the fucking cunt did from the next day onward? Dropped contact. Like completely. I kept bombing emails upon emails and tried calling him day after day, the fucking cunt either picked up and cut the call immediately on recognising its me or didn't pick up at all. And the reason he wasn't able to pay me was, and I quote, "I am in US right now, will pay you when I get back to India." I was like "The fuck was PayPal invented for?" Being the naive fool that I was, I believed him (it was my first time) and waited patiently till the date he mentioned and then lodged a complain in the portal itself where he had posted the job initially. They raised a concern with the employer and you know what the fucking cunt replied? "He has not been able to achieve enough accuracy on the translations". Doesn't even know good translation systems don't exist till date ( BTW I used a client for the google translate API). It has been weeks now and still the bitch has not yet resolved the issue.And the worst part of it was I got a signed contract and gave him a copy of my ID for verification purposes.
I'm thinking of making a mail bomb and nagging him every single day for the rest of his life. What do you guys think?

Dam wandows... My system is up to date almost all the time as I install those forced updates before they are actually forced, just so I can be in control of saving things and not losing anything valuable during a forced restart. I've updated literally last evening and made sure the day is done only after all the updates have been made. Today I was working on a personal project and made an hour break for lunch and some rest. My computer went to sleep as it usually does when I leave it for 10 minutes or so... Or so I thought. After my break I sat behind the damn computer to get back to work only to realize that I woke it up to wrong system (windows is secondary as I only use it for this single project that needs to be done in .net and UWP) and there's no work to get back to. It just made an update without even letting me know there is one to be made.
I swear, if the person who made this design choice have paid only 1% of all the lost works' worth, they would smash the thing on day one and went bankrupt in first 2hrs of that 'feature' living it's life. And people wonder I daily drive *NIX based system...

Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.

I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more

Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.

They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.

They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).

I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.

Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.

I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.

Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands

I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.

I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk

Not dev related.

I am fucking tired of the house buying process in the England. Honestly it is such shambles that I don't think I have ever encountered anything like this. Nothing is ever predictable, everything and everone works at random timescale and nobody gives a fuck of you as a buyer even if you are paying crazy money. Apparently we are meant to be moving next Monday but contracts haven't been exchanged, my mortgage broker gave incorrect solicitors details to the bank so they are having to redo some paperwork, the buyer of our current place has not responded for last week to confirm the date, the seller we are buying from has been jumping up and down to exchange and here I am with no certainty.

My anxiety and frustration levels are through the roof for last 10 days. I can't wait for it all to be over. I don't think I am ever buying another house unless the process changes. Just needed to vent my frustration somewhere

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

It is fucking written in rules that SLA would be given post the discussion.

AFTER THE MOTHERFUCKING DISCUSSION.

Bitch can't read a simple English statement.

And in the SLA column, it is clearly mentioned that one must state the DATE. This idiot mentions the entire fucking Quarter.

How fucking dumb you can be to not read the basics mentioned for your own and others ease of functioning.

Indians are illiterate morons. I apologise to the entire world today on behalf of these fragmented cauliflowers.

To whoever this means, I am sorry that you have to deal with these retarded brains.

Also, the task was supposed to be done by others and not the blabbering bitch. She takes up random unwated shit and then cribs to our manager that she is overloaded and Floyd isn't helping.

When I help, she complains that I am overstepping.

Go fuck yourself you mongoose.

Let me tell you why I feel like a shit right now. I work as sw dev in a country worse than Germany and company I interviewed is located in Germany. So this is kinda big deal for me.

I interviewed with the company last year, interview went really well. They told me during interview that they would return in 2 weeks tops. It took 2 months for them tor return. For some reason, I was not hired for that position. Later I learned that the division i was gonna work defunded/separated. After learning that the guy I interviewed really tried hard to give me good news but failed-therefore had to delay bad news, I was not sad for not being able to be accepted for that position or delayed response.

Fast forward to this year, I interviewed with the same company for a position as subcontractor employee on another company. Interview took just before Coronavirus situation started to blow up(mid March), I had to return to my home country when the borders were closed asap, 2 day after interview. Fast forward to May I got the job offer and contract with a good salary, July as starting date. But I have no Visa and you apply for visa with a valid contract. German embassies work at minimum capacity, no new applications for any type of visa including work/residence visa. After my serious research I found a crack, emailed the embassy and they finally agreed to give me a special appointment on the start of July. The company I interviewed sent me new contract(August starting date) automatically.

On mid July, I told the company that visa might not come soon enough, I might not make it to August to start to job. We both agreed to replan starting date once i got the Visa.

On August 6, my visa came. I informed them asap, and they told me the other company will return in 3 weeks with new starting date. I was like WTF we were waiting for this visa for months, why do you need 3 weeks. Anyways, 3 weeks past and the other company still did not give any new starting date. I really feel like shit right now. Last week I asked to the "my" company if there is a problem with my employment(the other company might change plans after all) and they said only starting date is the problem, don't worry. On 3 occasions, they reassured me there was no problem(no, I was not asking them like paranoiac obsessive person, they were preemptively saying it in some cases). They say other company employees were really asking about when I was coming frequently.

What should one do in such situation. Do I even have legal rights? Maybe I will look back at this post and laugh at my paranoia, but I would you random internet citizens' ideas on this situation. They say lightning does not strike twice to same point but living same disappointment with the same company would really hurt. rant over, mamba out.

We were forced to do a Friday deploy of a new project. I, smartly, decided to bring my laptop with me on a "couples date". I spent the entire evening trying to fix a screwed up deploy from a restaurant.

Wife was NOT happy.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

Just a little poll for you guys :)

Do you comment your code during the development or when it's done?

Do you keep track of the documentation during the development or after?

Do you use Git only for source control or also to work from multiple places and keep the code up to date?

Do you sh*tcode on purpose (or don't make any effort to clean it) when it's not for yourself, or not for something you value much?

If you have any other strange habit, feel free to mention it :)

I have a lead developer who is obsessed with over-engineering everything to the point where we are adding features that he thinks the clients will ask for, but 50% of the time they don’t want it and we just end up maintaining useless code. To top it off, he doesn’t touch the code anymore and is a glorified business analyst, plus he’s slated to retire soon but keeps pushing the date back a year at a time. Just move on with it! I want to be spending my time on cleaning up technical debt, not making more.

Impossible deadline experience?
A few, but this one is more recent (and not mine, yet)

Company has plans to build a x hundred thousand square feet facility (x = 300, 500, 800 depending on the day and the VP telling the story)

1. Land is purchased, but no infrastructure exists (its in a somewhat rural area, no water or sewage capable of supporting such a large facility)
2. No direct architectural plans (just a few random ideas about layout, floor plans, parking etc)
3. Already having software dev meetings in attempt to 'fix' all the current logistical software issues we have in the current warehouse and not knowing any of the details of the new facility.

One morning in our stand-up, the mgr says

Mgr: "Plans for the new warehouse are moving along. We hope to be in the new building by September."
Me: "September of 2022?"
<very puzzled look>
Mgr: "Um, no. Next year, 2021"
Me: "That's not going to happen."
Mgr: "I was just in a meeting with VP-Jack yesterday. He said everything is on schedule."
Me: "On schedule for what?"
<I lay out some of the known roadblocks from above, and new ones like the political mess we will very likely get into when the local zoning big shots get involved>
Mgr: "Oh, yea, those could be problems."
Me: "Swiiiiishhhhh"
Mgr: "What's that?"
Me: "That's the sound of a September 2021 date flying by."
Mgr: "Funny. Guess what? We've been tasked with designing the security system. Overhead RFID readers, tracking, badge scans, etc. Normally Dan's team takes care of facility security, but they are going to be busy for a few weeks for an audit. Better start reaching out to RFID vendors for quotes. Have a proposal ready in a couple of weeks."
Me: "Sure, why not."

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

I'm trying really hard not to be sensitive, but my manager is making it difficult with their "constructive criticisms" ...

Just finished up a call with them. And I'm so tired. I'm not even angry or upset, I just feel so tired of their bullshit.

I set up a meeting as a courtesy to get them up to date on all the code changes I made. Last night I stayed up late to try and get things in before the deadline and this morning just killed me when they say.

"I don't think I should have given you this."

"I was right, you weren't ready to start doing this."
(Then don't even bother giving me anymore tasks then, I don't fucking care.)

"you clearly don't understand how branches work"
(Absolutely fucking false, I fixed that shit and am very familiar with how to understand the structure of the fucking repo)

"you are rushing and I don't need you messing up the website"
(I'm being proactive you twat, not rushing, making it very difficult for me to do the work and being productive)

Like seriously bro! Don't fucking patronize me for the work I was trying to get out. And trust me this fucking meeting is done in order to get ahead of potential issues, not a time to be condescending of my skills or lack there-of as you seem to so keenly think.

If you had this much doubt about my abilities then why give me the fucking Sr. title? Fucking trust that I'm being honest, and I'm trying to get us to a good spot, not fucking sabotage the company. God fucking damn.

I'm not up to date so much in here but we do have spambots in devRant now?

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

A day can hardly pass now before I get numerous unsolicited messages on LinkedIn from recruiters that want to know if I'm miserable at my current job and want to jump ship.

It used to be very fascinating back in the days but kinda annoying these days. My inbox is now full of such messages and it's beginning to get to me. I even got one a few days after I started a new job. Like what the actual fuck. My profile clearly says I recently moved to a new company.

I also have numerous pending friend requests from a lot of recuiters like i want my network to be filled with only recuiters. That's not why i joined LinkedIn and have an up to date profile.

I just want to be left alone and not be bothered and mentally harassed by recuiters on LinkedIn. Is that too much to ask???

I'm quitting my current job. I don't like my lead, and he doesn't like me either. Our team consists of two people. Me as a Junior Developer, and a dude as my senior.

Our company used 3 different organization chat in Lark.
1 for global developer team, 1 for local developer team, and the other for the operational team.

Countdown 3 weeks before my resignation, I got removed from the global chat room. 1 week later suspended from the operational chat room. The interesting thing is that, my senior teammate who resigned the same date as me does not receive the same treatment.

I still have tasks to do and it is hard to work with teammates who are not in the same organization chat. I also need to work on my benefits which require chats with the operational team.

I already asked HR and they took their sweet time to respond. Approximately 2 weeks after I privately messaged them. How responsive 😧 Even then their answer was vague and I didn't get the what I questioned for.

I'm kinda annoyed by this. No communication, no announcement. This company is just straight up shitty.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...

Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.

Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.

So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...

Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.

Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)

One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.

They still use the old shit for billing.

Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"

No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...

Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.

tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity

Fuck you thesaurus.com!

Those fools, dorks, weirdos and dweebs pioneered, crafted and shared the very architecture that not only holds up your companies your limp dick of backbone but is also the very reason for your pitiful fucking existence.

The brightest minds and best engineers of the 20th century handed your thick headed underachieving ass their creation on a royalty free platter and single handedly gave you - a fucking moron the power to compete with and dominate oxfords gigantic print empire.

We gave you a means to distribute and centralise up to date information globally in seconds only to find you now, back in your cave, living in the dark ages.

Hope you enjoy playing with your rock, you guys really do have an unbelievable amount in common.👌

The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.

Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.

Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.

3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.

Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.

Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.

Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.

Could go on, but rant over.

So my IT teacher wrote his own web server framework for NodeJS and he forces us to use it for assignments. Would be fine if:
1. It worked properly.
2. It had any kind of documentation.
3. He knew how it worked.

But no, we have to debug his shit and edit the js files in node_modules to get shit working.

Is he open to suggestions? Not really. If you have a fix, you have to create a gitlab account and send a pr. Even if you tell him what exactly is wrong. He won't do anything about it.

Why use express when we can learn something we'll never use again?

At this point I think we're using it only so that he gets downloads on npm.

Oh ya, he also copies package.json from project to project instead of creating a new one with up to date dependencies.

🙃

So, I'm heading back down the rabbit hole. I did some web dev (backend) on the side years ago, but I've been out of the game since. I want to change up careers at this late date and I had forgotten how cathartic manipulating raw code could be. So now I'm relearning and learning all kinds of good stuff via the internets and was excited to find this community. Not much of a ranter but this should be fun.

long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

A wild project appears!
The deadline is set in two months.

It's a 3D environment interactive app with some oil drilling models and other stuff, for a stand on a show. It needs to look nice, but The Company we're working for needs to figure out where the fuck their product is located on those machines. Think tiny pipes, O-rings etc.

I prepare a build in the first couple of days for The Company to figure shit out.

Management holds the build back because:
> the ocean waves are going the other way
> the underwater area doesn't look so nice
> the antialiasing could be better
> one pipe is 5cm off center
> the sky is not blue enough
> the drillship propellers are pointed the wrong way
> one icon is too far to the right
> the shadows could use some work
> there are shadows on the seabed
> some flickering on ambient occlusion
> it loads too slow
> one random object is flipped on it's Z axis
> it's too green
> camera locks up if you move about 2km out of the range
> the name of the build should represent the date of the build
> the name of the build SHOULDN'T be anything else than just a simple three-word name, no dates because their environment doesn't allow apps that are not allowed (by name) by admin
> lots more random things that won't prevent them from using the app

I'm only a month late, but it's good progress. In about a week I hope we can get some feedback if we can use those models at all and what to showcase.

Then I can work on the basic functionality. And then it's a simple case of time travel to meet the deadline.

!dev

I went on a date over two weeks ago. It seemed to go well, but the next week she called me and said she wasn't interested, giving reasons why.

I was disappointed but responded as friendly and responsibly as possible. It was the first time a girl had said no to me, so it hurt.

While it hurt to be rejected, I also felt relief because her reasons prevented us from continuing down a path of mismatched expectations.

The next day, I told a close friend about the outcome of the date because he knew of my interest in the girl. We talked and laughed about it like a missed train on a rainy day.

Just last night, my friend told me he met with the girl, and I was shocked. He said he didn't know why she had said no and wanted to talk to her to try to change her mind.

I was angry because I felt this was a dumb move. He said he was only trying to help because he thought she was a good match for me.

I had already closed that chapter and moved on, so I told my friend I didn't care what they discussed and that I had seen her missed call on my phone. If she calls me again, I won't pretend everything is okay and will let her know that I never sent my friend to convince her further.

He told me to pick up her call and hear her out, but I personally find it disturbing if someone needs to be convinced by a friend to get a positive response.

Yes. I was disappointed by the rejection, but I respected her decision. I was frustrated by my friend's actions, but I will stick to my decision and not pretend everything is okay if she contacts me again.

She just sent a text now! oh my f*cking friend…

Sooooo...

why does everyone use a million and 2 modules when working with node? I understand the speed of development goes up pretty quickly by not having to reinvent the wheel by retyping code that already exists, but...

the worst case tradeoff I've personally seen to date is someone who doens't know the difference between a string and an array but they "coded a web app" and it runs like soupy diarrhea.

maybe there's something I'm missing about node development, but I personally like writting code that does some task or function for myself to learn/understand how to do it and implement it. Usually, that also helps me figure out how and where to speed things up.

I'm just postulating that maybe reinventing the wheel can be a good thing, that's probably why we don't see formula1 cars using pennyfarthing wheels. 🧐

So.. I have raised a PR 2 weeks ago.. it needs approval from 2 of the senior Devs on my team. The first one reviewed it within 3 days, without having to follow up. Then comes the second one, who is senior than the first one. I have been following up with him on a daily basis for the past 1.5 weeks, each time I request him to review my PR he sends me a "sorry" followed by a stupid smiley. I have tried tagging him on Jira, setting up a meeting with him to get it done, nothing's working out. He has already looked at the code and I have explained him the code and the context, but he is just not adding comments/approving/rejecting the PR. I have missed the release date for the feature because of his lack of concern and petty excuses. So done with him.

Debugging your JavaScript Code for 2 hours and trying out every imaginable solution because it works on the demo page but not your site... and then you find out the fking library had a bug and the Readme.md contained a cdn link to an old version and the demo page was up to date... arrgghh

Recently I have updated my lubuntu to 18.04.
I don't use it regularly but I like to have it on the side of my window 10.
Anyway today I boot and decide to use it and get this error.
[0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled du to errata; please update microcode to version 0x22 (or later)
and two MMIO read fault.

At first it sounds really dramatic and I was thinking, "Nice ... I never get a problem with Windows Update and when its Linux it doesn't work ..."

But lubuntu boots normally after so it's not a blocking problem.

So I do what most of us do in case like this, go to Google and search to know what the hell is going on.

And the answer is simple, my CPU microcode isn't up to date to prevent Spectre, one apt get install and a reboot later my 4700HQ is patched in 0x24 version and protected for Spectre where my windows didn't patch anything and worst disable the KB that I have installed manually before the last big update.

So thanks Linux, you scared me with your error but it was a good job to throw it :)

Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

MTP is complete garbage. I want mass storage back.

The media transfer protocol (MTP) occasionally discovers new creative ways of failure. Frequently, directory listings take minutes to load or fail to load at all, and it freezes up infinitely (until disconnected) when renaming an item, and I can not even do two things simultaneously.

While files are being moved, I can not browse pictures or watch videos from the smartphone.

Sometimes, files are listed with the date 1970-01-01 (Unix epoch) instead of their correct date. Sometimes, files do not appear at all, which makes it unsafe to move directories from the device.

MTP lacks random access. If I want to play a two-gigabyte 4K 2160p video and seek in the video, guess what: I need to copy it to my computer's local mass storage first because MTP lacks random access.

When transferring high numbers of files, MTP has to slooooowly enumerate (or "prepare" or "calculate the time of") them all, which might even take longer than mass storage would need for the entire process. This means MTP might start copying or moving the actual files when mass storage is already finished.

Today, the "preparing to move" process was especially slow: five minutes for around 150 files! How am I supposed to find out what caused this random malfunction?

MTP sometimes drives me insane. I want mass storage back, at least for the MicroSD memory card, which uses a widely supported file system.

Imagine a 2010 $100 Android phone is better at file transfer than a 2022 $1000 Android phone (or iPhone, for that matter).

Companies really need to re-evaluate what they ask as security questions.

If I know your name and your approximate date of birth (to the month) then, here in the UK at least, I have a very good chance of being able to find out your parents names, your mother's maiden name, your address, your parents address (i.e. probably where you grew up and what school you went to), your parents ages, when they got married, etc. - and all from publicly available info, not illegal crap you find on Tor or social media stalking.

This isn't hard to find if you know where to look - the problem is that people think that it's all private, and behave as such - and companies encourage it. The typical "internet safety courses" don't even touch on it, and even more tech savvy people I know often don't have a clue this is possible.

I have had it with the new pm for my project. We've had to literally write down rules for him to follow on how we want to run our project.
- we always go over time on standup because he's asking everyone specific questions about each ticket we're working on instead of just letting us give our updates. Wrote a rule for not doing that.
- he gets overly excited to get things done to the point that he's approved a PR himself and merged a production release during off hours.
- we're a team of 3 devs but he has 7 big items he wants us to work on concurrently.
- we use jira to keep track of things but he insists on us updating a spread sheet that he made as well. We just straight up told him no but he'll bring it 3 times every week.
- he wants us to write a report of our daily progress in our jira ticket before we give the same updates on standup
- every time I give him an estimate, he tells the clients it's a promise we'll get it done by x date.
- he never pushes back and says yes to everything
- oh here's a funny one, he's "reviewed" my code several times

Idk what to do here anymore. We've literally talked to him about all of these issues. He'll change for a few days and go back to doing whatever he does.

Demo for client goes bad when we encounter a bug adding a new entry into the back end. Entry shows up in the admin but not the front side.

<thoughtbubble> "I can't believe this, we just tested it! How can this be? How? How?" </thoughtbubble>

Perhaps, the cache? Nope.

<thoughtbubble> "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" </thoughtbubble>

Perhaps the front side is pointing to dev? Nope.

<thoughtbubble> "Oh shit... make something up quick. Make it sound good." </thoughtbubble>

Tells client we'll have to look into it. (real smooth)

Looked into it and it turns out the bug was actually a feature. Apparently when you assign an "end date" to a date in the past... by design, it won't show.

However, was it bad UI? That's a different argument.

Some cheapskate insists on writing a guide to selfhost <software> on Heroku and wants to add it to the official documentation, promising to maintain it (since none of the other devs are using or planning to use Heroku). I volunteer to give them a chance on grounds of it being high quality and maintained by that person in the future which they both promise.
Our docs are written as markdown files on github.

So here we go:
Starts a pull request: uploads their """guide""" as a docx. The content is completely unformatted, basically just an enumerated list.

Tell them to format it as markdown, suggest using github gists.
They go ahead and copy pasta their unformatted list into a gist.txt "allright i made it into gist for ya"

Tell them that they did not format it as markdown.
"sorry updated it in markdown :P"

I look at the file, it is still raw text in a gist.txt. Maybe a bit more spaced out, not that I would care to notice any changes at this point.

Tell them it is still not markdown and link them to a perfect example of another guide that takes advantage of code fragments for commands etc and is properly rendered since it uses .md

"I updated it to the markdown this time XP Can you give me some suggestions on how it looks?"

"How it looks"... "how it LOOKS"... I click the link for the 5th time and IT IS STILL JUST A RAW FUCKING GIST.

Jfc that person has some serious reading/thinking disability. To imagine them to be proactively keeping their guide up to date in the future is absolutely impossible. At that point I pulled out my support for the request since it was already taking more effort to even get a readable version of guide than I estimated for the whole process of adding it.

Oh, and one of the steps originally suggested in the """guide""" was adding the credentials file into the vcs.

For all the hate that Java gets, this *not rant* is to appreciate the Spring Boot/Cloud & Netty for without them I would not be half as productive as I am at my job.

Just to highlight a few of these life savers:
- Spring security: many features but I will just mention robust authorization out of the box
- Netflix Feign & Hystrix: easy circuit breaking & fallback pattern.
- Spring Data: consistent data access patterns & out of the box functionality regardless of the data source: eg relational & document dbs, redis etc with managed offerings integrations as well. The abstraction here is something to marvel at.
- Spring Boot Actuator: Out of the box health checks that check all integrations: Db, Redis, Mail,Disk, RabbitMQ etc which are crucial for Kubernetes readiness/liveness health checks.
- Spring Cloud Stream: Another abstraction for the messaging layer that decouples application logic from the binder ie could be kafka, rabbitmq etc
- SpringFox Swagger - Fantastic swagger documentation integration that allows always up to date API docs via annotations that can be converted to a swagger.yml if need be.
- Last but not least - Netty: Implementing secure non-blocking network applications is not trivial. This framework has made it easier for us to implement a protocol server on top of UDP using Java & all the support that comes with Spring.

For these & many more am grateful for Java & the big big community of devs that love & support it.

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?