WHY THE FUCKIDY FUCK DO PEOPLE THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A DEVELOPER THEN YOU CAN DO EVERY FUCKING THING IN A SNAP?!

THIS ENTIRE SUMMER I WORKED FOR THIS MIDGET OF A FUCK AND THE IDEA WAS TO MAINLY DEVELOP AN IOS APP FOR THEIR PRODUCT. THAT ONE APP TRANSLATED TO THREE SEPARATE APPS AND KEEP IN MIND THAT I AM THE ONLY DEVELOPER THEY HAVE SO I HAVE TO DEVELOP IT, TEST IT AND DOCUMENT IT!! AND WHAT'S EVEN WORSE IS HE KEEPS GIVING ME DESIGNS AT THE LAST MINUTE SO I ALWAYS END UP HAVING TO CREATE NEW PROJECTS ALL THE TIME. WHEN A WEEK PASSES BY WITHOUT ANY UPDATE HE AND HIS FUCKED UP BRAIN CELLS GATHER A MEETING WITH HIS 'DONALD TRUMP HANDS-SIZED' BALLS TO ASK ME, 'WHY ARE YOU TAKING SO LONG? THESE ARE JUST THREE BUTTONS ON THIS VIEW?' MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!! GO GET YOUR MOM TO DO THIS WORK THEN IF IT'S JUST THREE BUTTONS. TO HIM EVERYTHING IN IOS WHICH INCORPORATES A TAP IS A FUCKING BUTTON! BUTTON THIS! BUTTON THAT! AND IT'S NOT LIKE HE HAS SIMPLE DESIGNS..NO.NO.NO.NO. THIS ASSHOLE-SHAPED-HEAD MUGGET DESIGNS SHIT WHICH REQUIRES ME TO HAVE TO DRAW A UIVIEW AS THE SHAPE OF A HUMAN BODY AND HEART. THEN ASIDE FROM THAT, JUST BECAUSE MY RESUME SAYS I MINORED IN MATH AND APPLIED MATH, HE SENDS ME A PAPER THAT EXPLAINS MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS OF DATA ANALYSIS THEN WANTS TO MEET WITH ME TO DISCUSS THE SUGGESTED METHODS THEN IMPLEMENT THEM. AT THIS POINT I HAD ALREADY IMPLEMENTED AN ALGO FOR COUNTING THE NUMBER OF STEPS THAT WAS WAY WAY WAY MORE ACCURATE THAN THE SHIT THEY HAD IN THEIR CONTROLLER..

SO AS I AM ABOUT TO FINISH IMPLEMENTING JUST THE INITIAL 5 VIEWS OF THIS 'FINAL' APP, HE SERIOUSLY WALKS IN AND TELLS ME, SO I'M STARTING TO WORRY THAT WE'LL NOT MEET THE AUGUST DEADLINE SO I'M THINKING MAYBE YOU SHOULD START SWITCHING BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT. WORK ON IOS FOR 4 HOURS THEN SWITCH TO ANDROID FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TIME. OH AND UHH IF YOU FEEL LIKE TAKING THE IMAC WITH YOU TO WORK FROM HOME, THAT'S FINE AS WELL AND I'LL BE AVAILABLE IN THE WEEKENDS AS WELL. IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT THAT I REALLY REALLY HOPED I WERE GAY! LIKE 'NO LUBE' STYLE KINDA GAY!! OH BTW AT SOME POINT HE HAD ME PROGRAM ONE OF THEIR CONTROLLERS, AND WAS ASKING IF I COULD START RESEARCHING MEANS OF WRITING AN SDK FOR THEM.

KEEP IN MIND THAT I'M AN INTERN WITH ONE YEAR IOS DEV EXPERIENCE.. THEN HE WANTS ME TO ENTIRELY START LEARNING ANDROID AND GIVE HIM TWO VERSIONS OF THIS THIRD APP IN TWO WEEKS.

HE CAN GO SUCK HIS OWN DICK WHILE GETTING FINGER FUCKED BY A FORK WITH A BLUE WHALE'S 6FT LONG DICK UP HIS MOUTH.

*** that felt good ****

I was getting bored and my salary had not changed for over a year. Answered a few headhunters' messages. Got an interview. Then - the second one. Got an offer with >2x the salary I was getting back then. I said I'll think about it

Came back to my office after that interview. 5 minutes later I got an outlook invitation for a performance review with my manager, scheduled for tomorrow.

During the review he appologised he had overlooked the fact that my promo and salary had to be bumped up a while ago. We had a nice chat [he is an amasing manager! I've learnt so much from him...] and he offered a 50% salary bump. There I go and reveal that I got an offer yesterday with 100% higher amount of € and asked if we could meet in the middle. He agreed :)

I was offered a lot and I asked for even more. And I got it! :) I've agreed to a 75% bump because I really like working here. It's an amazing employer.

I love listening to music and reading on the train every morning. On my way to the station, I get a text, "DUDE. ***** committed suicide."

He was a good friends of ours from high school. I remember once he got a few of us to go caving on homecoming since none of us had dates. He'd never finish a candy bar; would give half of everything away. He once drove out to California to try to start over; lasted three days and came home, but through a girl he met he was in Hawaii for a year.

He lived a lot of life, and he had a heart of gold.

I didn't get out my ebook on my phone. I didn't even put my headphones in.

I had lost another close friend from University while I was overseas. I remember being in the city art gallery when I got the news. I walked right out to the harbor, fell to my knees and cried. I always thought one day I'd be home and could shoot the shit with my old roommate. Now he was gone, and the only thing I had from him was a text from 10 days before saying, "I haven't been doing too well, but thanks for asking."

I'm back in another software engineering job, on the train to an 8-to-5, shakin it for the money. I couldn't read on the commute. I just looked out that window as the train car descended into the subway, and thought to myself, "What am I even doing anyway?"

I'm in my mid-30s; too young to be losing people like this.

I'm sorry man. I wish we had caught up sooner. I wish you weren't gone, but I know you're at peace.

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

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

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

At my study in the first year we had a Linux course and at the end we would all be graded.

Everyone was nervous as fuck except for me.

We had to go in one by one and everyone came back with this 'well that was damn close' face. Apparently the teacher was quite strict.

Then it was my turn.

It took about half an hour and we did the following:

- talk about Linux and the philosophy behind it
- talk about compiling programs
- talk about Linux servers
- talk about what distro's we'd used
- talk about DE's and which ones we preferred

- actual grading/showing my assignments: 'nah I believe you, you'll get a good mark!'

So I basically got the best mark with hardly showing anything because the teacher knew I could do it and rather just had an interesting convo with me 😁

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

Since past two-three years, Indian Government has been organizing a Hackathon called Smart India Hackathon for college students. And Luckily our team was selected this year.

This team had 5 Electronics Student and 1 Computer Student. Guess who the Computer Student was? Yea, Me.

They Knew nothing about Android Development. And the idea was about an Android Development. I was the only person who could code.

The centre for our hackathon was Varanasi and we live in Hyderabad. So we had to go there. I have not really travelled a lot in the trains (especially not this far from Hyderabad to Varanasi ). During the whole 37 hours journey, I was not able to sleep cause I am not accustomed to sleeping on a train.

The moment we reached Varanasi the hackathon had started which was 36 hours long. Normally team members switch places so that they can sleep but not ours. Cause I was the only one coding and it had to be done in this 36 hours. So add this up 36+36 hours of no sleep, I must have rarely slept for 3-4 hours in that 72 hours.

After the hackathon, I slept like a Snorlax whereas the other went for a trip around Varanasi ('_')

The moment when you're failing the university, you desperately wish to drop out of it and your parents push you to inhuman amounts of things to get you to finish the bloody thing when not even a bachelor's degree will ever help you in anything and it seriously wasted 5 years of "studying" about things in food technology that were there in the USSR. I think you failed to notice that 26 years have gone after that. More years than my age is, basically, and the tech has moved forward so much I will never be able to utilise at least 80% of what I was "taught". Yeah, it's nice pretending you're somehow smarter than everyone else in your room when you have a degree like that, right?

I'm studying at a professional college right now and it's 11 AM to 5 PM five days of the week. How am I supposed to be able to combine a university that never helps one even fucking slightly if you have a job or something similar? And it also insists that it won't take away grades if you don't go there, but simultaneously it actually does that. I'm the type who cannot be made to do something in some cases even if there is no other way perceivable.

I just want to get a goddamn job that pays, but I need something that gives me salary of at least about 1000 USD equivalent to just be able to hopefully rent a small flat and have some money to spare.

Now I have to be going to the college. I might end up getting my PC taken away from me a THIRD time since me and my friends built it. And it's only been a bit more than a year since that :|

Did I tell you my age? 23.

And these people(my parents), think they can bitch, moan, take things away from me(the things that helped me all my life to not go insane from their actions), then scream at and even hit me if I don't act 100% the way they want me to.

AND THEY WILL SAY THEY WANT ME TO SUCCEED AND THAT THEY STAND FOR MY FREEDOM.

If there is some force that can help me out of this, I summon thee!

/endrant.

Sorry for that. I needed to have that out of my system.

Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

I have this one friend who thinks he is a tech guru just because he plays video games a lot and started to study cs for one year. Now he got a job as sysadmin and it is funny to hear him brag about the job in front of non-tech people because he sounds like a CSI Cyber episode, just throwing tech words at the people and I know that he talks bullshit.
But I have to admit, he knows how to sell himself. Probably that's how he got the job in the first place because it cannot be his experience.
Yesterday he called me, to help him edit something on a linux server. I told him "To edit the file type 'vi FILENAME' and then you can edit. I have to go now, I have a meeting." :]

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

One of my ex-girlfriends (who apparently still cares about me after several years 🤔) sent me this chain letter kind of thing wishing me 12 months without sickness, 52 weeks without stress, 365 days of luck, 8760 hours without fights, 525600 minutes of peace, and 31536000 seconds of happiness.

But that's not what I want mate! All I want is a year of <50ms ping!! 😝

I still kind of like her though, especially given that she's still thinking about me.. maybe I should have trying to go out with her again as one of my objectives for 2019?

Get ready for one of the biggest AMAZON rants EVER.
I dislike this company so much I can feel it in my bones.
They have NO, absolutely NO idea how user experience works.

PROBLEM #1.

If you have Amazon Prime / Video (ANOTHER FUCKED UP PROBLEM THAT CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE) and you want to watch a movie on your Xbox using the Amazon App, You have to buy the movie ON YOUR COMPUTER FIRST, YOU CAN’T BUY IT DIRECTLY FROM THE APP.
WHAT THE SHIT AMAZON?

So.. go to your laptop, buy the movie, go back to your other device (Xbox or whatever), click “My movie library” and then you can watch it.

OH AND THERE’S ALSO A “MY WATCHLIST”, WHERE YOUR NEW PURCHASED / RENTED MOVIE DOES NOT SHOW UP.

Yes.. there is a “MY WATCHLIST” and “My movie library” or some shit.

HOW, WHY, WHY FUCKING AMAZON, WHY.

PROBLEM #2.

“WE HAVE A ZILLION ALEXA SKILLS NOW !!!1!!!!!11111! EINZ!!!!!”

Yeah, WELL, NOT THAT HARD WHEN YOU HAVE “Alexa Evangelist” traveling to every DAMN tech convention and having them make USELESS FUCKING SKILLS THAT NOBODY WANTS USING BOILER PLATE CRAP THAT ANYBODY CAN USE.

Oh and Alexa is DUMB AS SHIT.
I asked her "Play the song Starboy by the Weeknd" and she said: "I CAN'T FIND THAT SONG"
Then you go "Play me Starboy" and she goes: "HERE IS A SAMPLE OF STARBOY BY THE WEEKND"

Same with other songs: "YOU DONT HAVE IT IN YOUR PRIME MUSIC LIBRARY".
She doesn't even TRY to go to your fucking Spotify account, you have say: "Play Starboy by The Weeknd on Spotify" AND THEN she still has the FUCKING NERVES to say : "I Can't find that song on Spotify".
BUT YOU JUST FOUND IT ON YOUR OWN DAMN CRAPPY PRIME MUSIC.

"Hey Alexa, how many days till the end of the year?"
GUESS WHAT ,SHE CAN'T TELL YOU. (maybe now but not 2 months ago)

PROBLEM #3.

AUDIBLE.COM and AUDIBLE.CO.UK have DIFFERENT FUCKING DATABASES, THUS, YOU CAN END UP HAVING 2 ACCOUNTS AND HAVING 2 LIBRARIES, and.. THERE IS NO WAY TO FUSE THEM INTO 1 account.
OH MY GOD, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?
I FUCKING HATE that, how can ANYBODY think that is a GOOD IDEA?

PROBLEM #4.

Their website is a TOTAL FUCKING mess, really, who the FUCK designs that piece of SHIT.

Look up a movie, let’s say “SCHOOL OF ROCK”
First result?

“School Of Rock” - “Amazon Video”
So you can click on this and watch the movie.

Then click the second result.

“School of Rock Blu RAY” and next to the price-tag “PRIME”
You click on it, you can buy it, but HEY, LOOK, WHAT DOES IT SAY?

“Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime
Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial”

WHAT, WHAT!!!! CAN I WATCH THIS WITH AMAZON PRIME? OR DO I NEED THE AMAZON VIDEO? I DON’T GET IT.

Put me in a room with all those FUCKWIT project managers and their fucked up company culture and I’ll rip them a new one, I can go on for DAYS about the SHIT they are doing.

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!

Ok, so I have a SAAS website where users pay a daily fee to use my platform as there fundraiser landing page.

A new client comes, asks for a discount, and got a 50% off because his brother was a previous client.

Him: Can you please add a list of the days of the year so a donor can donate a day?

Me: Sure, sounds like a good idea, and will probably take me about a week to implement with testing etc. And so I want $$ (hourly rate * one week) for the work.

Him: Don't bluff me I understand a bit in programming, it shouldn't take you more than an hour, and I am paying you, so you should do it for free.

Me: Ok, here is a fair deal, since you understand in programming, build it for me, I give you two weeks and I will pay you double what I am asking for.

Him: I don't understand enough to do it myself, I just estimated how much work it is.

Me: Forget about it, if you want me to build you this feature, you pay. If not you can go to my competition happily.

Who needs bad clients at all?
Why do they think they know everything?
And why don't they understand that time is money?

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.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

I hate how willing companies are to let someone go over money.

I’ll use a real life example with someone I knew. This person joined a company at the entry-level developer and worked up to a senior level. His pay rises were around 3% per year with around a 5–7% promotion raise (there were two of these).

At this point, 4–5 years after joining, he was making far under what a senior developer salary was in his area. Eventually, he interviewed on the team of a friend at another company and was offered a 40% increase. Four-Zero. CRAZY.

What the company did is baffling to me.

His boss said they may be willing to increase 5%, but there was no way they could even match what the other company offered, let alone beat it. The benefits were better at the new company, but he would’ve stayed with the original for a salary match.

So he left…

But what did the original company do? Hired a new senior level developer for the same dollar amount the dev was offered at the new one, then lost about 6 months ramping up that developer due to a super complex code base, and the new developer turned out to be much less capable than the one they just let go.

So wtf? It’s flat out stupid on the company’s part. Some sort of effed up pride or something.

They’d rather let someone walk out the door, knowing it’ll cost just as much to replace them, plus losing literally tens of thousands of dollars on ramp up time, and they gamble on getting a capable developer instead of a known, proven, loyal developer.

Thankfully, the younger tech companies understand this, and many pay people appropriate to level and talent, regardless of what they were making before they advanced to that level.

Just saw Time magazine's cover
Person of the year 2019: Greta Thunberg

What the fuck did she do to deserve that????

It's time someone acknowledge a developer/techie as a person of the year.

There was automation, spaceX and many more advancement in the field of technology. Why does it feel like technology is always taken for granted.

Not to sound to sexist with that comment. But, living in Sweden (one of the most developed country) and telling the world leaders go fuck themselves is not an achievement.

So there is this girl who joined the company as a trainee.

The company developed a 1 year project to train 25 trainees and she joined saying that she already had some experience making websites. (remember this)

They started in the beginning of January and stayed for about 3 months just studying the platform (Salesforce) and receiving some classes from Senior Devs, on subjects like OOP basics, loops, conditions and features of the platform.

After this time they joined the teams, 2 joined my team, a guy with 32 years that worked 10 years in a bank and wanted to go for a IT job and the girl of 22.

We gave her a really small task, just to make a code to copy info from one field to the other on a list of objects.

After 3 days of saying she was working on it we asked her to show us the code, she had written the "code" directly in the class, VS Code was going crazy with errors. When we asked her "But where is the method?", she answered "What is a method?"

After it we had other experiences trying to teach her some things. The team was formed by me (mid level dev), another mid level dev, a senior and a architect (who was self taught and one of the best teachers I've ever seen).

We tried for about 3 months to teach her how to do basic stuff, like a for loop, and every time we learned that she was missing some "foundations" of this basic stuff, so we would come back and explain the foundation, and a couple times she needed to use this knowledge like a week later and didn't remember shit.

So after this the team talked with our leader that we wanted to let her go and focus on the other guy who was going really well and some other junior devs who had joined the team.

But the HR found out that she had sued her last company, we don't know the reason, but HR guys were afraid of firing her without a careful firing process.

So now we're stuck with her in the team, and everything we ask her to do need to be remade, not because the code is bad, but because it NEVER works

And after all this I still ask myself, how did she finish college? Every person that i know that studied CS or CS like courses had a lot of OOP or at least knew what a class and a method were supposed to be.

Discovered this app and the cute avatars. Found out you need at least 10 points to create one, so here I go! Just finished my third year in computer science, now exploiting the positive discrimination for girls to get summer programming jobs ;).

True Story. Good rant bad pitched.

Just a small information before: In Germany, if you want to be a softdev and want to learn it, you can either go study IT or you can have a apprenticeship, which is 3 years with 75% of work in a company which will pay you (around 1K / month) and 25% in a school.

I work for this city-govermant company nearly 1 year now. Around 6 month into I told them I which to have a intern for 3 years (apprenticeship) at my site. Most likely because I really enjoy to teach.

My boss agreed to this very fast, told me it's a good idea, it would be a new way for our company to evolve. In Feb 2019, when we had interviews with candidates, we decided for one and I made a resource plan for most of 2019 in which I blocked 3 weeks for the start of his apprenticeship in July (2 weeks ago) because I knew he is a kid, 18 years, etc, never coded etc.

7 days into his apprenticeship my boss called me and my boss to her and told me there is a project which should be done by end of june and why it isnt finished.
It was the same project which I had ressources for 4 weeks in June but the department didn't come up with proper feature requests etc. so another department got the time from me. I told my boss exactly this: not my fault that it isn't done, showed her emails, reminders etc.
I also offered her to spend a weekend soon if everything is there now, but she told me: no. It has to be done ASAP. ASAP means, start now, don't stop until its done.

I told here, I have a intern on my site, I blocked the time.

She told me one sentence I will never forget:
"If your intern is blocking this project, he has to go. You decide. Now."

I was so surprised that I didn't even got any word out then "yes, I will start." I was shocked by this words and her decision to quit this young guy.

Just to give a a bit more background: we hired him in Feb 19 for Jul 19. If we would quit him right now, he would most likely not have any chance on the market for another apprenticeship and has to wait for Jul/Aug 20 and 1 year without job, money etc. He even moved to our city for this job...

So I moved back to my desk and today, 2pm, I finished all of the project, nearly 50h+ work done in 5 days, so he can stay.

What the actual fuck...

The problem with my life is acceptance from others. Validation (almost wrote vladiation).

For instance, I finished my course in Advanced Java Programming a few days ago. Supposed to be a year course or some shit, finished it in two months. They told me I don't need to go to the remainder classes and I could write the examination. Got the certifications, passed with flying colours.
Well done me? No, fuck you me. "It's not through Oracle, so it's completely useless. Har har you wasted your measly salary on a course and it means nothing". You know what? Fuck you and fuck validation. I will validate myself from now on.

Anywhom, what a start to a shitty rant. Let's go over some generic points so I can finally make my avatar.

IE can suck a duck ("oooh you made it and it runs fine in every fucking browser except fucking IE - slow clap).

Chrome RAM usage can suck a duck, two times. (just generic post, don't actually give a shit - I use Firefox).

People who can't use one fucking indentation standard ("oooh two spaces, oooh three spaces, oooooh a fucking tab button... " etc) can fuck off.

That fucker who came and converted my buildings in Age of Empires with the "wolololo" priest can fuck off too.

Been reading through devRant and you know what? You guys are pretty cool

FUCK WORDPRESS

FUCKING FUCK THIS GODFORSAKEN CMS

FUCK THE GUY WHO USED PLUGINS WHO BREAK WHEN I TRY TO UPGRADE FROM PHP 5 TO PHP 7

FUCK THE THEME BUILDER WHICH WON'T WORK UNLESS I SWITCH TO PHP 7

FUCK THIS ENTIRE WEBSITE WHICH DEPENDS ON A PHP VERSION THAT HAS REACHED END OF LIFE ONE FUCKING YEAR AGO

FUCK THE OLD PEOPLE THAT ADMINISTER IT, AND DON'T WANT TO LEARN HOW TO USE NEW PLUGINS AND KEEP USING THE OLD, BROKEN AND UN-MAINTAINABLE ONES

special mention: fuck this one fucking plugin who claims to implement paypal when it doesn't actually work, and the 2 fucking thousand of JQuery lines I have to go through to fix it

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress.

Wordpress can take a big shit on itself and crawl into a deep dark hole far away from all that is good.

Who even uses Wordpress? Bloggers? Come on, let’s be honest, they’re using more intuitive sites like weebly, wix, and square space. So WHAT is Wordpress for? I’ll tell you, it’s just to FUCKING TORTURE PEOPLE.

So, being the “techy guy” of the family, a relative contacts me asking for some help with their website because they need to install an SSL certificate but they don’t know how to. I tell them I’d gladly do it because, sure, they’re family and how long can it possibly take to install a certificate? I’ve done it before!

Well, I get to work and log into the sluggish Wordpress dashboard and try to use a plugin that would issue a LetsEncrypt certificate because they are free and just as good as any other SSL. But one plugin after the next I keep getting errors about how my hosting wouldn’t allow it.

So I contact GoDaddy (don’t get me fucking started) and ask them about the issue. The guy tells me it’s “policy” to only be able to use GoDaddy’s certificates. How much do they cost? Oh, how about $100 a year?! Fuck you.

I figured out the only way to escape this hell was to ask them to open an economy Linux hosting account with cPanel on GoDaddy (the site was formerly hosted on a “Managed Wordpress” account which is just bullshit for not wanting to give you any control over your own goddamn content). So now I have to deal with migrating the site.

GoDaddy representative tells me that it should only take 20 minutes for me to do this (I’ve already spent way too much time on this but whatever) so I go forward with the new account. I decide I should migrate the site by exporting a backup and manually placing everything on the new server. Doesn’t it end up taking an entire hour to back up a 200MB site because GoDaddy throttled the processing speed?!

So, it’s another hour later and I’ve installed all the databases and carried over all the files. At this point, I’m really at the end of my rope and can’t wait to install the certificate and be done with this fuckery.

I install the certificate and finally get ready to be on my way, but then I see it. A warning. A warning from my browser telling me the site is only partially secure. It turns out the certificate was properly installed but whoever initially made the site HARDCODED ALL THE LINKS to images, websites, and style sheets to be http instead of https.

I’m gonna explode.

I swear, I’m gonna fucking explode.

After a total of 5 hours of work, I finally get the site secure by using search and replace on every fucking file.

Wordpress can go suck a big one. Actually, Wordpress can go suck the largest fuckin one in existence and choke on it.

TL;DR I agree to install an SSL certificate but end up with much more work than I bargained.

I'm a computer sciences student, so I had to work on a group project at the end of the year. This project had a very big impact on our ratings, and many students were working really hard on it
One evening, a friend of mine knocked at my door to seek for help, she was too depressed to keep working on the project and needed to talk a little bit
After a little talk, we worked on her part of the project together. We managed to finish it just in time and send it to her teammate (they were not using git, our school never ever talked about it so they did not know what it is)

The next day was the d-day, every group had to show the teachers their projects
I arrived in a room where everyone was trying to fix the remaining bugs before their turn
And I saw my friend, almost crying. Her mate changed everything in the code we worked on and everything broke. There was not enough time to merge it again, they were stuck with a non functionnal soft
Obviously, he kept telling everybody it was her fault

Just go to hell, you fucker
I can't even understand how you did have such a stupid idea, now she needs to repeat her year because of you
Fuck you and don't ever come in my sight again, you selfish brat
Just because you know you will pass does not give you the right to fuck with another person's ratings

I’ve battled depressed I failed to realized I had for many years. I didn’t love myself, I forgot what it felt like to love myself, and then one day my life turned around out of the blue. I believe my turning point was when I realized that I wasn’t alone and that people did care about me. I just wasn’t motivated especially after almost losing my cousin to suicide 3-4 months back. It changed my DNA, my personality, everything about me changed until I told myself that I had enough.

Today marks the 4th month where I last had a cup of coffee, soda, or junk food in general because in all honesty it was just making my depression worse. Today also marks the 4th month I’ve been going to the gym without fail and I’ve now noticed how far I’ve come. I love myself more than ever now and I am VERY goal oriented as well. I have one more year left until I get my bachelors degree in Software Development and soon after I’ll go in for my Masters and who knows what I’ll do after that.

It’s all uphill from here and by sticking to my new routines I am feeling a lot better as the days and months pass.

Attached is my progress thus far, left is from when I felt at my lowest and right is the progress I’ve made so far with improving myself and where I am at now.

I love myself, I love those that love me, and I LOVE feeing AMAZING like I do now when I wake up every morning waiting to see what the day has in store for me 😄❤️

Fuck that fucking company three way while dozens of homeless HIV crack junkies puke and shit their diarrhea on the three bosses!

I can't put it in words how stupid they are!

Let me try to tell you the latest story while I try not to get multiple strokes.

Backstory: We are three devs, all with a TCCI certification. One has been working for us for almost a year, the other one has been working for us since one and a half year. Both are good friends of mine, btw. I have been working there for almost three years.

Fortunately, I am allowed to work on a reasonable computer. The other devs work on PC's with Windows 7 and 8!

One has just 400 MB space left on his drive and has to delete every month some shit because he does not want to be able to call up websites anymore... How awful?!

The PC of the other great Dev Crashes three to six times a day and needs about 30 minutes to start up!

We can be so productive, but...

We told that in February one of our bosses and asked him to buy new hardware. His answer: yes, of course, I understand that, it's my turn (he always says that "ich bin da dran")

We got a new colleague in the middle of this fucking month. She is responsible for conception.

She works on an old notebook, but today she gets a fucking new PC to work on while the devs are trying to weld with a sparkler! Better hardware than every other Dev PC!!!

Guess what? She is the daughter of a friend of one of our bosses!

We are the only devs at this company.

Fuck that fucking company! Fuck that fucking bosses!

I think we don't go to work for that fucking company anymore!

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

You would think.

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

Now the real fun begins.

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

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

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

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

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

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

seriously, I know git is not the most user friendly, but really....

I attend to a course in my high school, like, it offers you a technical and a high school diploma in the end of tree years of course, anyway

last year I had this project. I had 4 other people working with me. I suggested we use git as there would be many people working in the project and git would help us manage all the files and get everything together in the end.

they didn't even bother to try learning it, I was like "fuck it, let's go without it", no one did anything till the last 2 weeks. then I was all stressed out getting the code together, manually, and the deadline was close.

In the end I wasn't able to put the chat this guy have made, he got mad and I was like "motherfucker, it would be one damn command `git merge` and your fucking chat would be in the final project"

oh it was great to get this out 😎😀
don't even know if I'm making sense xD

So this fucktard decided to write the most inefficient way to collect thousands of records.

The system I am working on allows users to book facilities. There is one feature where an admin can generate reports on the bookings made between any two dates. A report for bookings made between January and April generates 7878 records.

So this shithead, after making a call to the server and receiving 7878 records decides to put it through 4 fucking foreach loops (this takes around 44.94 seconds).

After doing that, he passes it to the controller to go through ANOTHER foreach loop to convert those records into a JSON string, using..string..manipulation. (this takes bloody 1 minute and 30 seconds).

Now, my dear, dear supervisor is asking me to fix this saying that there must be a typo somewhere. Typo my arse. This system has been up for more than a year. What have they been doing all this time??? Bloody hell. Fucking idiots everywhere. I now have to refactor
..fucking refactor.

It was friday evening and almost everyone in office had left. I was assigned a bug related to some of my code changes. I called my senior to help me debug (has three years of experience, whereas me having only one year exp, who is also a very good friend of mine *always helps in debugging*).
So the code goes

switch (someEnum) {
case One:
doSomething()
// no break
case Two:
t.x = someEnum
break
case Three:
.....
}

I had recently added new enun One and was reciting the code logic to him as we were looking through code.
Him: Hey you haven't set t.x in case One. How did you miss that?
Me: No look, I haven't but a break on it. It will go ahead and set it in next case.
Him: What are you talking about? if the someEnun is One why would it execute Two case. Lets copy that line up there and try it locally.
Me: No no no wait. Are you saying that groovy doesn't need breaks in switch (Me being new to groovy but good with Java).
Him: Why would you need break in switch case even in Java?
Me: *stares at him*
Him: I'm going to execute a psvm right freaking now.
Me: *while he writes the psvm* Why did you think there were breaks in switch in any code?
Him: Shut up. *writes psvm code cursing me everywhere*
*executes code*
No way. Really??
Me: Tell me why do you think are there breaks in switch.
Him: I though they were to get you out of switch block and not execute the default block.
Me: So were you coding switch until now without breaks?
Him: I don't know man. I'm starting to doubt all the switches I have ever written.
Me: Anyway that's not the problem, so moving on.
*a while later*
Him: If a interviewer would ask me how would you rate yourself in Java. I would be like "Well I worked on various projects for 3 years in Java, but didnt know why we put breaks in switch. So you figure it out yourself."

One of the best moments in office.

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Every year my team runs an award ceremony during which people win “awards” for mistakes throughout the year. This years was quite good.

The integration partner award- one of our sysAdmins was talking with a partner from another company over Skype and was having some issues with azure. He intended to send me a small rant but instead sent “fucking azure can go fuck itself, won’t let me update to managed disks from a vhd built on unmanaged” to our jv partner.

Sysadmin wannabe award (mine)- ran “Sudo chmod -R 700 /“ on one of our dev systems then had to spend the next day trying to fix it 😓

The ain’t no sanity clause award - someone ran a massive update query on a prod database without a where clause

The dba wannabe award - one of our support guys was clearing out a prod dB server to make some disk space and accidentally deleted one of the databases devices bringing it down.

The open source community award - one of the devs had been messing about with an apache proxy on a prod web server and it ended up as part of a botnet

There were others but I can’t remember them all

Wanted to live outside the US. Was dating a Korean girl who moved back to Korea and was like why the hell not, let's go.

Worked at an American company that had a Korean office, so i thought it'd be easy mode. Took a working vacation to that office and interviewed. Brain froze on basic algorithms stuff - binary search. Failed to understand a logic question. But oddly enough, did well communicating with Korean developers with limited English knowledge.
Director talks to me at the end of the day, tells me they're looking for someone more senior. I bombed it, not mad.

...

Then he tells me he has a friend at one of the largest companies in Korea and that he'll be there to talk to me in two hours.
Dafuq

Chat with the dude. Supposedly, the larger company culture blows, but he has a little haven of badass developers and is known throughout the company for being an effective team builder. We talk for 90 minutes, and he days he'll hire me. Take a short online test to make sure I'm not a derp. Four months later, living in Korea and working, alas, sans girlfriend.

Been a year now. Ends up the company culture eventually crushed my boss. He was moved off the project, and then the project was scrapped. Yet they're starting a new project with the same group plus more because logic.

Today accepted an offer at a smaller company for a salary equal to my current salary plus bonus. Also, vidya gaems yayy.

I have got to have the silliest luck

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

Today I learnt never trust a coworker or see them as a friend.

So I have been thinking of quitting my job to further educate myself. The work I sit with is mostly the tiniest CSS changes. Which is frustating and demotivating to work with.

One of my coworkers told me in confidentiality, that he was looking for another job in another company and he only told me. And wanted to keep it secret from everybody else. I felt this gesture of him trusting me meant I had to trust him back with something else. I told him that I am applying for an education for later this year. But I don't want to say anything before it has been approved.

He understood fairly well and we got to be a thing outside work.

Last week I learnt I was seriously underpaid compared to all other coworkers despite me being one of the people with the most responsibility. I felt this wasn't right, so I talked to the pay responsible and said this paygrade isnt substantial, and I felt it was demovating to go to work knowing I was the least paid coworker.

He understood fairly well he said and said he would bring it into management to discuss.

But then he said one last thing. "I have heard something about you applying for another education, is this true? Since I have seen you put your summer vacation really early this year"

I had to lie and say no, that was like before I knew I landed a job here.

I dont wanna say anything to my company before I get the approval from school.

But still now I am in this position of feeling stupid for trusting this coworker, mad that he violated my trust and feeling very guilty for having to lie to this person's face.

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

!rant

*me trying to add one more field to a SQL request*
*asks coworker* Hey, do you know how I'd get this field? You have to go through 4 tables just to find it because of the way the tables are related.
*coworker looks for a bit* Oh. That's crazy. We should ask the DBA.
*we ask our 60 year old DBA for some help.*
He walks us through a minefield of inner and outer joins and selects and we finally arrive at a solution. Kudos to our DBA, who in the eyes of us young devs is a wizard.

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

My first try at greentext.
>Be me
>18y.o recently recruted to a university
>1 month before moving to the university
>Be alone with his computer && electronics hobbys
>My town sucks
>Go on first year student integration camp
>Yay im going to meet a lot of people like me!
>Camp near the lake, 100km from home
>Day 1/7
>Moved my stuff to a house
>I dont know anybody
>Meet 3 friends who are going to live with me
>One of them is great, i like him, he likes to code, uses mac and iphone (it suffices for his needs, he understand everybody else who thinks otherwise)
>Two of them are pro party guys / alcohol vaccums
>Fucking pricks with their boombox
>99% of students are just there to drink a FUCKING LOT
>WTF.jpg
>Day 5/7
>I had been drunk only once at the camp and i havent drunk since because of AlcoholAfterEffects®
>Have a sad moment due to me wasting my time and money here.
>Totaly wasted my time... and found nobody like me
>After that day i meet 2 programers
>I have taught them OOP
>Had a great time
>Night game!
>Bizarre student party rituals
>Use my torch i made literary 8h before the camp had started
>Torch is made from pvc pipe, 9v battery, chinesium buck converter, old led module, switch
>Find the guy with the HUGE TORCH
>Wow. Is it the 100W homemade floodlight?
>Conversation about our constructions
>Both sides were looking for a friend with similar hobbies
>Exchange the contacts
>Hopefuly meet thogether and make few projects in the future
>Present time
>Got 3 friends in one day
>But still dosent understand the huge amount of alcohol nearly everyone is drinking

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

BEEP-BEEP
Every now and then, periodically
BEEP-BEEP
and then quiet. Get into working mode, concentrate again, a...
BEEP-BEEP

wtf is that.. Took down my smoke alarm, prolly the battery is getting low. Put it next to me, waiting...
BEEP-BEEP
nope, it's gotta be smth else. How can I hunt it down when I can't even tell which direction it's coming from?!? I know. Play smart. Measure the period.
BEEP-BEEP
it's been 3 minutes 5 seconds since the last BEEP-fucking-BEEP. Now I can plan my time ahead. Go to one room, wait fo..
BEEP-BEEP
Nope, it's not there. Carry on with all the other rooms, waiting for that annoying beeping.
BEEP-BEEP
I think I at least know the room. Good, narowed it down.
BEEP-BEEP

this is getting really annoying. I've been playing with this nonsense for an hour already. Alright, it's in my kid's room. The PC is off, toys are off. What could it be....? Binary search the f
BEEP-BEEP
uck out of it! aight, I first try to identify from which part of the room it's coming from. Stand in the middle and tu
BEEP-BEEP
ahh, right, it's behind me then. Fine. That's the PC corner. But it's off, it can't be making sounds. Esp when it has no speakers plugged in - it's got only Bluetooth speakers which haven't been turned on for what, a year already? but then w
BEEP-BEEP
hat could it be... Sounds like it's indeed coming from the PC corner. Checking all the LEDs -- all are off, nothing's turned on. Move the speakers away, try digging around to see if the kiddo didn't leave his toys behind the
BEEP-BEEP
PC. Wait, the sound has moved behind me... And I've only moved my BT speakers. Which are turned off. That's odd... could it be? Put one to one ear and another one to another and wait for the remaining 15 seconds
BEEP-(you are a fucking idiot)-BEEP
whispers in my left ear.

Turns out, some BT speakers can make low-battery sounds even when they are turned off.

I (and many devs might too) need some advice.

Well, I'm happy and sad at the same time :) :(
I'm so happy because finally I can put a floor pet on my avatar. I put my yellow favorite cat (its name is "Güero/Blondie"). On the other hand, I'm so sad because last week, my stupid and drug addict neighbor poisoned my cat :'( (not the yellow one, it was a gray cat. I'm 90% sure that he did it, he tried to do it last year). I know that it was only a cat, but I felt terribly all the past week, I couldn't even think or code. Fortunately it was the ending of the sprint and my code was successfully tested, so I didn't have to code, only trying not to cry at the office.

What would you do in this situation? I mean, those days when you feel like sh*t but you need to go to work and finish the code.

!rant;

I'm so sad today. I completely lost my confidences in what I do. I recently I created an app , spent 72 hours doing that , made the app as simple as possible, The intention is clear , to help those who are in need during this pandemic.

Recently my country have the campaign (initiate by the people) raising white flags for help (food, financial help). Since our government begin to arrest those who raise their flag for help and summoned them for MYR 3000 .

So I thought making a platform where people can raise their flag digitally might be easy, but I go rejected .

Well in Malaysia, No one give a fuck about you unless you are a celebrity . Sometimes I wish I am , therefore I do changes. But unfortunately I am just a 25 year old self taught software engineer but not someone with PHD or fame .

Fuck me.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

Is this something cool?
I wanted a portable battery but I had no money (student life in Mexico), but I had a couple of damaged tablet batteries and a damaged router case.
A year ago I did not use it, but now it is useful when I occasionally go out to capture some Pokémon.
The downside is that it only has one USB port to discharge and micro-B to charge. And of course I do not go out with the antennas, I take them off, I just put them on for the demonstration, haha.

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

Gonna go to uni in a few months. So I applied to 2 companies for a side job. (10hrs/week - some kind of scholarship)

First interview:
Of all the applicants I seemed to be the only one with enough technical knowledge to be considered. :)
They rejected me still, because I don't have enough time to have a proper onboarding process. They offered that I could start off in the holidays in the second year of uni.

Second Interview:
Had a test with logic and a little bit of maths. Nearly completed that and then had a technical talk with their team lead. He said that I sound like I know my stuff. They are gonna contact me next week...

I think I aced the interviews, and being complimented on my knowledge feels validating.
Let's see where this is going...

I have one! Once upon a time (about a year ago) my mom went online shopping on her own. Her husband was out of town and so she had no assistance. At about 10.30 pm she called me, freaking the fuck out that she entered her credit card details on a sketchy site and they charged her for more than she ordered. She was in hysterics, didn't know what to do. Superwoman to the rescue, I tell her to go and deactivate her card and jump on a train back home (she was crying on the phone she was so scared, couldn't just leave it until morning) fast forward an hour, I'm in my hometown, she picks me up and we head home to check out the situation, and... She had just received the email invoice twice. They hadn't charged her twice, just some email mishap made the email appear twice and she never thought to check her bank account before summoning me home 🙄😂 we laughed for a while and I got a home cooked meal so it's all good but Jesus christ mom. What would you honestly do without dad?

So everyone is complaining about working from home. Fuck it, I love it. My productivity was never higher than now.

I didn't have an office space before at home, so I created one. I spent money on it but that's good because this whole corona thing made me realize how much I don't miss:
- company politics, who said what said
- commute
- people bothering you in the middle of you doing something
- catching-up breaks with people I hardly care about asking about holiday I took last year but they "ahhh thought it was just last week! so did you eat anything nice?"
- answering forced "any plans for the weekend" questions
- participating in conversations about nothing

The worst thing is that I'm actually a very sociable person 😂 so working from home means I can go meet my friends at 1630 sharp instead of 19.

I just don't need those fake relationships at work I guess.

Im already discussing with my manager possibility to work from home most of the time and I think I'll soon start to search for something 100% remote.

!dev && rant

What's people's problem with Wikipedia.

Earlier this week I told my cleaning lady about how Black Friday was so pointless this year, and apparently it's the first thing she heard about Black Friday (she's in her late 30's and a mother of 2, go figure). Not only that but she believed that it occurred every end of the month because someone else told her so. She said it would make sense because it's close to everyone's payday.

So I go and look up some information about Black Friday for her. All the DDG results somehow shit or cluttered by marketing wank.. your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, appended Wikipedia to get some reasonably good information quick. And that looked for all the world like that was the case. Apparently it's got to do with American Thanksgiving.. who knew?

She still didn't believe it. "But that's Wikipedia..." So she looked it up on her own phone on some random local site.. it confirmed that indeed it occurs once a year. Well, confirmed to the extent that there was "2017", "2018" and "2019" on the page... Yeah.

Finally she believed it. At least she didn't double down on it anymore. But seriously.. you're gonna take the words of one random person over a medium that's constantly being improved under the many eyes principle?

"People can edit Wikipedia so therefore it's bad"

I really don't get people...

> 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? :)

!rant - Story:

I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!

Finally! I've had a though time.
After kindergarten kids went to primary school while I had to go to a place called "Vorschule". Kids with disabilities go there. I, for one, was not physically disabled. I was psychologically disabled.
My German was not that good. My native language is Turkish. I had to spend 1 or 2 years there, before I was able to attend the primary school like the normal kids.

In the primary school a few teachers started making racist comments. I didn't really understand them, but my father did. After 2 years of attending that school, I switched to another primary school and continued with everything there.

In the secondary school (comprehensive school) I got bullied a lot. I was getting racist comments on a daily basis. Even by some teachers. Whereas some other teachers were showing it indirectly.

In the same school a teacher made me get a bad grade in one subject on purpose. Thus I got a bad certificate. Not the certificate I deserved.

I spent a year in economics after the secondary school. I was in a vocational school. I didn't like it, because I wasn't really interested in economics.

"Why did you choose that then?" you might ask. That's a legitimate question.

I didn't get accepted in anything related to informatics.

Anyways, I got bullied there, too. Physically beaten by trouble makers in my class and mentally by a french teacher.
He told me that I will not be able to get my certification that allows me to attend a university after me telling him that I will change the school and try it again in informatics. Several times.

I was in the new vocational school after that one. It was very stressful.
I, again, got bullied there. But this time not by the kids, but by some abusive teachers and directors.

One of them was a racist moron. My ex-PE teacher. He someday told me that I won't be able to achieve anything in my life.

I was always naive and kind of let all these words destroy my future plans in my head, but I had a little bit of hope nonetheless.

Today, I got a letter in which it was written that I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!

Omg! I'm so fucking happy! I could explode! (A lil racist pun)

!rant

I've been struggling for the past year with:

Dev work
Ops work
"Management" work

This last month I made a decision, I don't give a fuck anymore and just gonna do my dev work which is the one I'm paid to do.

Never been better. Its healthy whem you let all those fucks go away :)

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

so I had a very important video conference for some rather large cloud infrastructure that Im engineering. I decide to look "smart" so i decided to wear a jersey during the video call. I aced the meeting, happy people all round. I walk to my room and my wife says "you do know your jersey is inside out...and back to front..and the label is sticking out from under your chin....How did the meeting go?" me:"..fine until you pointed out a look like a 2 year old dressed me !" ... well thats one way to kill the happy feels!

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

>>> Stadia thread <<<
Stadia is a new Cloud Gaming platform that runs on GCP and details were announced some minutes ago.

For maximum performance you would need at least 35mb/s, while about 10mb/s are enough for 720p l, Stereo gameplay.

Maximum performance provides 4k, HDR and 5.1 Surround Sound and comes in at 9,99$ / month for Stadia Pro. As far as announcements go, there are no lower performance tiers available.

Stadia Pro will get you unlimited access to your Games (I believe this is Bring-Your-Own-License, but I might be wrong), while Stadia Basic allows unlimited access to one specific game. For that you probably buy the game directly of Stadia, which then includes any fees in it's price.

Stadia will be usable on all devices that run Chrome and on the Chromecast Ultra. Android will get it's own app, first available on the Google Pixel 3, to be expanded later on, iOS was not mentioned.

Google developed a custom Stadia controller that works out of the box, including an Google Assistant and a DVR button. However, all other controllers should supported too, but I don't believe that's the case for playing on the Chromecast Ultra.

Starting now, you can get the Stadia Founders Edition, that allows you to be one of the firsts on the platform, includes a Controller, a Chromecast Ultra, 3 months of Stadia Pro, 3 additional months of Pro you can gift to your buddy and some Destiny Bundle with the first and second game, including all add-ons, plus the Destiny 2 Season pass.
The founders edition can be pre-ordered right now for about 129$.

Stadia launches 'later' this year, founders edition buyers will be the first to get public access on launch.

Ever since i was a little boy, i was fascinated by the stars in the sky and what made them shine. I used to wonder how our universe came in to being. What made it what it is today. What will happen to it long after we re gone. Will it die? Will it live forever? How big is it? Why is it big if it s big and why is it small if it s small. "God did it" was never a satisfying answer for me. God does not play dice as Albert Einstein said. So many questions went through my 10 12 year old mind. Until someone recommended to me the book, "A brief history of time". The book answered a lot of my questions and gave birth to more. Computer science is like my crush. I love it as a friend. But Astrophysics, its the true love of my life. It not only quenches my thirst, but it satisfies my curiosity, while making me more curious. Its an endless cycle. It teaches us that we came from the stars, we go back in the dirt, and only to be returned to the stars again.
Stephen Hawking, his work, his books, taught me so much. Inspired me. Made me more curious. And today the world has truly lost, one of its greatest people.
You will be missed Sir Hawking. RIP.

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

When I cost the company half a million.

We recently got incubated and signed up for an accelerator programme, it was a life changing moment for me especially after having worked with my startup unpaid for almost a year. So naturally, it meant a lot to me.

But my friends / colleagues had to leave for a trip leaving me to work along side this other startup in the same batch. They needed a front end guy for their web stuff so we naturally offered our services except they needed me to work on Angular and I didn't know jack shit about it but pretended I did.

I couldn't reach out to my friends for help because I felt bad and wanted to prove my worth, and I pressured myself to the point where I called the client our batch mate brought on board making him leave.

I lost credibility as a professional, trust as a friend and my place at the office because it's gotten extremely awkward to go back there.

I fucked up my one way ticket out of my current certain household circumstances and realized I'm just a shitty developer who's all talk and no show.

Story Time.

TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).

In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).

We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.

So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.

But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.

Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.

Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.

Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.

Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.

And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.

I can't deal with another week of this.

Just came out of a car crash of a meeting, client expected a finished product, ready to sign off, but got a product that has so far to go.

I am a junior developer, paid junior salary, 1 and a bit years out of uni, and I am basically "lead" of a project that is way above my level of pay, I have been for a year (yes so fresh out of uni I was given this). Clients basically want out now, they reckon it's going to die. We have another week to push it, I have pulled 12 hour days without overtime. We have one other developer outsourced, plus a part time front end guy (who I trained).

I want out so bad, but if I walk, my company will be screwed and their company will be screwed.

Morally, I don't want to do that. But I can't see this ending well.

Fuck it.

At a previous company we hired an 18 year old guy and father from a minority and without a high school degree. He could write enough code to get the job. However, he took 3h long lunches, came in late to work and apparently had a problem taking orders from women. At one point all the juniors got an earful because of his attitude and he got let go, not long after. It still saddens me because he could have made a really good career if wasn't for his attitude.

!rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

!activism

Guys, what should we do about Article 13 ?

The bill passed, well, that's unfortunate. We can still scream as loud as we can that it's a very bad idea, but let's face it, it won't probably work...

Personally, I'm sick of this shit. Every year they try to "regulate" the web with a new fucked-up legislation that they actually don't understand. I don't blame them for not knowing any better, but I blame them not to surround themselves with actually competent people (and no, lobbies are NOT competent, only interested).

So there it is : I want to act on this one. With traditional, ineffective methods (petitions, mails...), but I want to get further this time.

Here are some ideas :
- create/promote a platform explicitly made for "copyrighted" stuff (basically memes). Located outside of EU. But is it enough for being outside of the law ?
- Put some physical-paper memes near the EU parliament (I live in Brussels), just to mess with them ^_^
- Make the filtering algorithms crazy by spamming them with copyrighted content. I doubt this one will have any effect though...

Any ideas ? Let's go crazy there, they deserve it.

My boss and one of my coworkers “touch me”...

I’m usually one of the first ones in the office. When my coworker comes in and walks by, he touches my shoulder from the back in a “hello friend” kinda way.

Especially when I’m trying to ignore him he pokes my shoulder. He could you’d waved his hand in front of my head.

My boss is trying to be the “buddy” I guess. When having lunch and someone says something funny, he literally rests his hand on my shoulder or kinda rams my shoulder with his shoulder..

They think that’s nice and “bonding” but I hate it and it makes me very very uncomfortable. The ONLY ones who are allowed to touch me are my GF (I don’t have one) and other girls i know in a night out after a few drinks.

Not even my best friends touch me cause they know I don’t like that.

Im giving obvious signs that they should stop but they don’t get it..

On the other hand I probably have some serious problems that It makes me that uncomfortable in the first place, but not sure how to fix that.. i don’t even go to the barber shop because they have to touch me to cut my hair. So I cut them myself or my dad does it once in a year.

Two days ago, I was solving a coding challenge on hackerank, I was so frustrated I couldn't get one year to pass, I tried c++, python, Golang, same shit, still that same test...I couldn't sleep, I close my eyes, I see this in my sleep, I go back to my keyboard, 4am, I am still on this challenge, 6am, nothing, then I decided to go have breakfast and hang out with a friend, then while hanging out he said "don't finish the pizza, that's my lunch" immediately it clicked in my head that I was missing a logic of less than zero as it was stated as a constraint, I immediately went back home and now all test cases passed....guess what, I now have malaria from not sleeping under the net 😭😭...

P.S: I am Nigerian tho, mosquitoes are a thing

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

so there was a tik tok (yes i'm a 17 year old american, so i use tik tok) about making an iphone app: "how to make an iphone app, step one open your mac and download xcode..."

i commented, "if you're not rich and can't afford a mac, learn flutter..." and a bunch of people go "just get a job it's only like $1k"

there's so many rich people out there who just don't understand the concept of debt, how there's not enough jobs, there's so many problems.

there's nothing even political about it. when the amount of unemployed people is more than the amount of job openings, not everyone can have a job, that's just a fact. how even if you have a job, you might be spending most of your money paying off student loans.

some people are just so stupid. they start off in a position where their parents have loads of money that gets them into great schools and internships and programs and they still want to claim it was "hard work" that got them there.

Will try to keep that one short.

So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.

Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.

I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...

Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like

30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC

And just casually missclicked...

And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.

No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work.

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

> Advice to new coders

Don't worry over picking language A or B.
Just pick A, use it for a month, then move on to B.
In a normal 3 year college degree you'll try multiple languages, some of which you'll never use again, and they'll each teach you something.

I had classes in Java, C, C++, C#, Prolog, Assembler, F#, JS.

Never used F# again and no one uses Prolog. But they were great for learning recursion and logic.

It's not like you take "a step down a bad path" if you pick a language you're never gonna use again.

You'll also learn new stuff on the job. We have one team that uses Go and one that uses Rust. None of the devs ever studied those languages. They were mostly former Java devs who leaned on the job.

Tldr: I just FAILED AN EXAM because of my uni's SHITTIEST SERVERS EVER. YEAR AFTER YEAR THE EXACT SAME SHIT HAPPENS, THEIR SERVERS OR NETWORK FAIL HARD AND STUDENTS FAIL EXAMS BECAUSE OF IT, AND THEY NEVER FIX IT.
FUCK

In the middle of a 3h exam at uni, using Matlab through virtualdesktop, when suddenly it stops working entirely. Trying to restart it, no go. A few other people are having the same issue as well.
After 20 minutes of waiting, one IT tech shows up saying people in other labs are having the same issue, big problems.
Ended up wasting nearly an hour waiting for shit to work again - which it did, but only when the extra time they had given us ran out.
Desperately tried to salvage what I could of my exam, but I don't think I did enough to pass.

This is not the first time it happens. Exam after exam, shit like this keeps happening over and over again, and every time some students get fucked in the ass and have to take the exam again - the next semester.

This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the country, and top 20 engineering schools in the world.
FUCK THIS SHIT

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

So, I got my very first gaming laptop on March 2015. Took a break from the almighty PC Master Race.

It's an Asus ROG G751JT. It was doing great, running my favourite games at 60FPS on high-ultra settings.
Few months after purchasing it, I've been getting a lot of BSODs with the same error (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)

As told by the guys at a local forum, I was told to try replacing the RAMs and I was stupid enough, I did. It has 4x 8GB HyperX Impact DDR3L.
The error still won't go away until I changed my SSDs. Which worked for a while until a week ago.

Getting the same BSOD countless times. This time I decided to directly talk to an expert, which is a friend of mine and guess what. It was the motherboard after all. Spent a lot of $$$$ to fix ONE BSOD.

Now I'm stuck with an Asus T100TF for about a month because I had to send it for warranty claim.

smh jfc anasmy y u so stupid for a year and a half. 10/10 worst experience (since it involved a lot of money)

What do you think of my stupidity? Comment below (10 marks).

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

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?

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.

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Hello my Friends.

TL;DR i meditate as I draw, here’s the result. What about you?!

Does any of you exercise on any kind of meditation? Not the popular meditation forms, more alternative meditation? I. E. walking meditation, dancing meditation, reading medidation, etc. ? Remember, it’s all about being here and now and letting go of any pre-programmed thoughts, right?

I myself, have a ritual which is performes once-twice a year. I call it drawing meditation. When daylight ends, and the moon rises, I sit at my desk in a dark room with one light, which is hanging aboce the white sheet of paper. I take black pencil, turn on some music mildly and turn off my thought receiving part of the brain. I hear every thought which is passing by, but I have no attachment to it. My hands are drawing, without my interception. It feels amazing, and I believe this method helps me to clean up some space in subconscious file system.

This activity of mine, takes strangly short/long time. Once I’ve sat for about 16hours, once 6hours.

Furthermore, I’m always amazed by the abstract art pieces which are the end result. I’m attaching the image of the last drawing made in this way to the post.

Can I hear what you see in it?

So my car has a problem with a steering column lock. Sometimes the actuator pops an error and it does not unlock until I clear that buggar. Carrying a lappy with vag-com seems somewhat annoying so I got a obdeleven bluetooth dongle with am app.

Once you get it to work it works perfectly. Have been using it for a few years now. It's like a half a year or so since it got a last update and it's been stable as a rock since.

Today me and my fam took a night out with a car. Drove here, drove there, had fun. Time to go home, as the little one is getting sleepy. Got in a car, insert a key, turn it -- no ignition. Damn that steering lock!

So I pop in a dongle, open the app, hit connect,... Wait, what is that? A toast with "a new update is available. [[update now]] [[cancel]]".

Cancel ofc, I need to go home asap! Will gladly get the update when the kiddo is in his bed!

[[cancel]]. The toast disappears. Okay, now [[connect]]

"a new update is available. [[update now]] [[cancel]]"

mother f#$@%!!! Allright already, [[update]] it ffs.

Updated the app. Now [[connect]].

Loading.. Loading... "could not connect to device"

tfq?!?

Reinsert the dongle, connect
restart the app, connect
restart the phone, connect
clear all bt devices, connect
do the rain dance, connect.

Permission to panic: GRANTED.

Dear devs. If you are rolling out an update -- never ever EVER make it non-postponable, non-cancelable. No matter how critical, your updates must NEVER be mandatory.

Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).

One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.

Now, I am having fun again! An example?

For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!

Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔

BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.

Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.

Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀

Finally, I can play around with a proper server.
HP ProLiant DL380 G6 = dual 8-core Xenons @ 2.4GHz with 32GB RAM and 12TB / RAID1-0 of WD Purples (we happened to have them for some reason).
Already pissed at HP because they don't support JBOD and already pissed at myself for using CentOS, but other than that, enjoying the hell out of it!

And it's ALL MINE! ... Well, technically it's the org's, but it won't go into production for half a year and I'm the only one with the root access so, for now, it's MINE! 😅

Our relationship is like a diode, you take and never give (I demand sex as compensation).

Btw, I really used this but with simpler words with two girls who wanted a ride to go and have fun with other boys in the clubs...

My best friend gave them a ride for over a year.
When we denied more, they started calling me... Wonder why.

Took them one time, asked for gás money.
Only called me one-month later, didn't ask for gás but said I wanted some snug and fun in return... OK, you can have us both (OH YEAH!!!).
On the club, they go for the muscular guys, leaving me alone.
When I got tired, got to one of them and said, ask your friend a ride home because I'm going now. (they ran for my ride since the guys they picked were all pricks and would probably dump them somewhere).
Never called me again...
Told what I did to my best friend, next time they called he demanded sex for both of us, never called him again.
And that's how you fuck opportunistic people. Fuck them.

When our company (past employer) got acquired by another company and everyone got to have a meeting where you got a black or blue envelope. One indicated you were being let go, the other indicated you were being offered an "opportunity" if you would relocate to NJ. What was an awesome company -- they destroyed the soul of it in one day.

Oh well their CEO got let go after a US Congressional investigation earlier this year. Karma, bitch!

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

Interviewing is much harder than it was even a few years ago. I go into it knowing I probably won't get the job. It may sound negative but it relieves the pressure. I also make note of what I didn't do well on so I can work on it. Last year I wanted to leave my job so I would go to interviews at lunch and do phone interviews in the parking lot. I was turned down for soo many jobs. Just a couple of years ago I could get a job in one or two interviews. Things have gotten more complicated. It used to be if you knew even a little about a backend language and a little sql you could easily get a job. It has all changed. I think the javascript framework of the month thing has only made it worse.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

So our HR have recently started to enforce arrival/departure time while also giving us a room for freedom (we can be at work from 7:30 till 9:00 and leave accordingly from 4:30-6:00)
So 2 weeks ago my manager asked me why on a date I didn't checkout/checkin, I looked out in my vacation log and sure enough it was a day off. I said to myself maybe be ause this day was requested last year they didn't remember it no problem
Anyway fast forward to today and my manager asked me why on the 25th of January I left (early) at 1?
What? I don't remember leaving early except for one day last week (Feb 7-personal reasons and was requested days before)
So i check my vacation log to see if I forgot something and i see that Jan 25 is a Saturday. We don't work on Saturdays! I go and check with my manager telling him that.
Then it hits me. I checked my taxi app and on Sat Jan 25 I had a ride at 1:22 AM!! from work to home. Yes i remembered that on that day I had to stay late for a project
WTF HR??!
Sorry for the long post

Hello, my name is Adam, I'm from Poland.
As a 16 year old dude I thought it would be a great idea to go to an IT focused highschool so I'd get my degree after finishing school but guess what- I completely fucked up.
First, there were the little things, like the teachers favoring other students that already knew stuff, which was okay and all- the problem began when Poziomka appreared (one of our PC service teachers). That motherfucker almost fluked me because of dumb shit like the PC's we worked on took forever to boot, so he's just go and give people F's, "Why?" you may ask- well because "It was obviously the student that made the PC run so slowely".
There were a few more incidents like when we were disassembling and assembling those dumb HP Compaq's PC's on time- and that fucker gave me an F because it took about 10 minutes to boot by itself.

That shit got me so demotivated its unreal, soon I found myself in a pretty dark spot, with my parents divorcing, my whore mother taking all the money- me not finding any reason to do anything in school and the cycle looped.
I'm not gonna pull the depression card here, but what I'm generally trying to say is that although I'm not "awful" at IT in general, so PC assembly, networking, programming (fuck that, I'm fucking awful at it), HTML, I still find it difficult to do anything right.

I have a question, how do I get myself back up? Any ideas?
There's so much material I've gone through in the last three years- and I just wanna make sure to get good- somehow.

I'm just a talentless dumbass kid who just wants to know how to do linux, programming and such, but I don't know where or how to start anymore.
If anyone has any stories where they turned their life around and managed to do IT right- please, tell me how you did it, I just wanna know is there a proper way of doing it.

- Adam

"Don't go too crazy with the design, this is just quick to get it out, this is a one time deal" - management

Half a year later...

"Well if you would properly design components up front, it wouldn't be so hard to extend the code" - management

Well if there were some sort of god forsaken process in place, with assigned tasks, priorities, iterations, and conventions, maybe everything wouldn't be a last second shit show and there would actually be forward progress on a project instead of throwing shit over the wall and hoping everything lands in the correct places.

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

Why apple is a peice of shit..? Why even people love it.. It makes apple to grow more.. Although they don't deserve it.. They don't deserve the trillion dollars.. Why don't they fuck them self..
In a year they release a peice of shit and people are like applauding on it.
Are you fucking serious people?
The people who called as "apple fanboy" please go fuck yourself.. Tell me one reason to love apple..
I am not talking about the price issue. I am talking about they think that they are the best.. But no they are not. They are a bunch of asshole who are working to make money.. They don't need to respect.

I watched some of markipliers videos back when I watched yt

I felt down and like I wasn't giving my best and stuff
Searched for "markiplier inspiration"

Marks video "believe in yourself" is just that
Inspirational af

Say what you want about him, I guess there are people who think he's about the money or stuff, but no matter how you look at it he is a good guy.
He makes you laugh when you need it (if you get the idea of watching his videos)
He has a kind heart, he is a fucking inspiration on himself, inspiration in person.

Comparing myself to myself, I still think I can do better, but that's also what he encourages, set your own goals and just try to be a bit better than yourself
Only compare yourself to your past self.

I may not be as great as I want to be, but I am a lot fucking better than I was a year ago.

And that's what it's all about.

I'm gonna try a bit harder as I go, I wanna BE BETTER as he says, I am going to be fucking better.
It won't be instant, but I'll try.

I hope some one who reads this crap will get inspired a bit as well.
Believe in yourself, and know that others believe in you as well.

...His hair looked better in blue.

A while ago I stumbled upon this cheap vps provider called dedistation (lowest was $15/year), so I end up buying a one year subscription and transferred all of my personal sites to it. Fast forward six month later, uptime robot notified me that my vps is down. No problem, I'll just submit a ticket. Few days go by and I yet to receive a response. Not a problem, I'll just try and login via the serial interface and get my shit, no luck there either.
Seems like these motherfuckers just packed up and went offline without a shit given.
No response, no notification untill today! How more twat a company could be?
Lessons learned the hard way
- always backup regularly
- check and transfer nameserver or no emails for days.
- you get what u pay for (haven't learned this fully yet. Went again with a cheap legit-ish provider (arubacloud)

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:

I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'

Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.

I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.

But it ended and I let it go.

In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.

I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.

And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*

And that's how I got my current job.

*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.)

Took me a year after graduation to land a job that stuck. Submitted about 100 job applications, most of which were immediate or semi-immediate denials. Got through one screen call and one technical call with Google before getting passed on. I did two technicals with G.E. where I really thought I knew my stuff...but didn't make the cut. I finally landed a job with a contractor for the Department of Defense, but my clearance was going to take over a year to finish, so they let me go after a couple weeks.

Every day, I would sit at Starbucks for eight hours; four of which, I would apply for jobs and practice for interviews. The other four I would self-medicate on Steam and wonder if the last six years of schooling was worth it. I was ready to move out of state and/or cut my losses to find a new industry when I was blessed with my current job.

For anyone going through what I did, don't jump straight to doubting your skills. Breaking in to an industry can be very hard. Have patience, keep getting better at what you do, and be open to opportunities. 💯👍

Me : "Wow, the Windscribe VPN is free for a whole year, and I can download up to 50gb of data per month!"
Me : *subscribe, install and launch the thingy, then proceed to start a 38 gb torrent*
Also me, literally 35s later: "... but why does the trending page of YouTube is full of american videos? Where did the french content go?"

I swear, one day I'll stop being this stupid.

On New Year's Eve a few years back I was around 21/22 and my friends were anywhere between 20/25.

My best friend has a big house so he offered to host it there (as every year pretty much), so we all agreed to do dinner and party after.

We decided to go with barbecue, and we all brought a few things.

Without my knowledge, they are all pretty much gamers and also decided to bring their laptops and even towers to play during the whole day and night.

The result was me "alone" cooking with the dad of a female friend (whose wife died a few years back and offered to help since he would be pretty much alone or with some other family members, not sure).

Once we finished cooking and went on to calling them, no one came to eat because "they were finishing just one more game", and eventually the dad yelled at them and left, I just went eating by myself, and they all showed up a few minutes later looking like 5 year olds when dads scream at them.

I can pretty much say that was the weirdest thing ever, but they did learn because never again they did the same!

I don't know what to chose.

The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;

The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;

The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;

The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;

The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;

The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);

The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;

The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.

I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.

Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.

They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *

They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.

Always get into a slight existential crisis during this time of winter.

Is my job worth all the trouble? Should I sell my house? Break up with my love? Start using a different programming language?

Probably has something to do with the psychological effect of this arbitrary point where we consider a year to end, and begin a new one.

I have no idea yet. I think my job is the first one to go, the rest is probably salvageable.

Why is every innovation trying to go towards "replacing programmers"? like, what have we done to you?

GitHub CoPilot will replace programmers!
AI will replace programmers!
This/That tech will replace programmers!

Nobody says,

"Programmers work remote so we don't need to hire managers anymore!"

"Programmers wrote a monitoring script for progress tracking, so no need for managers anymore!"

"We are asking people to install sprinklers everywhere so we don't need firefighters!"

"We can just have one teacher record the subject material once and re-use the same video every year, so now we don't need to hire teachers anymore!"

"We are making everything legal so we don't need to hire policemen!".

Why is everything trying to replace programmers?

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

Well, this one is easy. It gotta be this year, as a finally finished my 2 years training as a software developer in July and I'm still working for the company that trained me.

Just as context, in Germany you have to train for a job for 2-3 years before you can actually start working in the field. During this training, you're essentially working at a company, get (reduced) pay and go to school every now and then. The training ends with a final exam, after which I could finally call myself a software developer. :-)

So this PHD fresh graduate work in our department for a year boast about how professional a PHP developer he is. Today, he , my the other 2 co-worker and I have to submit the project, He technically "Taichi" his responsibility away and said he can't do this and that. Expect we do everything for him. What is more sad, is as a PHP as he boasted, He dont even know how to use Xampp, apcahe.

Our CMS messed up because of him, Server are F***ed , he keep sabotaging our source code that works, and made one of my coworker cried due the stress he given. He keep telling us that how professional he is, how suck we are. Ironically, he as a professional , he can't even do the basics like even know echo" something "; can also printf("something"); in PHP. He said he studied in US and from Jordan. I know that people like me only have Olevel in Malaysia. So dont show off to me a foreign certification that can't even help you to complete the job.

I hope this project can be complete without this guy. All show and no go. Where's the team work tho?

Continue with my ALL-OUT year of JUST DO IT. Trying to see what happens when I go YOLO for a year.

It started well about 4 months ago, but I slowed down a bit. I just want to pick up the pace again and JUST DO EEET. See where it leads.

Been working on a lot of side projects. I want to finish a few. One is already pretty much finished.

Then, towards the end of the next year, I think I'll start looking for a dev job.

So I've been working as an operator in IBM for a year now. Two months after my onboard our team got an onboarding freeze. Since then more than a half of the team left and more are supposed to go, soo there is a problem covering all the workload. I volunteered to take 4th customers workload (out of 4 customers our team supports) because I already knew most of the work that is done there.
At a one-to-one meeting with my manager I asked for a little raise, because I have the 4th customer, I take other peoples shift anytime they need to take a free day, I update the documentation regularly, I write scripts for coworkers for installing software/automating what can be automated (and I'm the youngest here...) bla bla, telling him that I think I do a lot for the team and I deserve it. He told me that he would rather take away one of the customers workload. I rolled my eyes and went with it.
Two days later this asshole gave a raise to a guy, who was onboarding with me, because he wanted to motivate him. That very same day he told us that it seems like two customers are going to merge into one workload.
I'm so pissed because of this. I do my best all the time so I can get promoted to 2nd level linux team (I'm kinda one foot there) but the freeze is still preventing me to go. I'm already so tired of dealing with the bullshit of customer not knowing their own infrastructure, shitstorms of tickets during changes after level 2 didn't set maintenance mode again, repairing coworkers linux boxes because they don't know better and I'm so pissed at this un-initiative dickhead of a manager that gives a raise to lazy people.

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

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

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

My sister's laptop ate shit the other day and she ordered a new one. She got me thinking about my five year old rig, and how it was starting to show its age, so started half-heartedly pricing the stats I would want in a new machine on newegg and Amazon for fully assembled machines, and was always getting gouged or having to make some kind of sacrifice for another feature.

So after my wife responded to me trying to sound offhanded about buying a new computer by only rolling her eyes, but not actually raising any actual objection, I committed to the idea and started searching in earnest.

I realized that a fully assembled machine would always cost more, be underpowered for its price, be basically impossible to upgrade, be made of shitty parts, and always require some kind of compromise on my part.

Normally in the past, i would go to the barebones section on Pricewatch, order the basic stats I wanted, and fill it in myself after that. But it appears that Pricewatch might be dead. So, for the first time since probably 2002 or so, I'm building a computer in its entirety.

I'm really excited. Everything should be here by the middle of next week.

I'm fucking done.

I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.

After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.

Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.

For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.

What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.

This is one from when I was in school, so I wasn't a dev but it made me feel like a CS student badass.

A class mate and I were having a discussion about his study habits. Basically he was freaking about the mount of studying he was going to have to do for this class:

Me: dude, you need to relax. You'll do fine.
Classmate: no, have you seen the amount of work that is on the syllabus? The size of the book?
Me: wait you bought the book? Also we took this same professor for several classes. His syllabuses are always huge. What did you get in the prereq to this class?
CM: an A.
Me: there you go.
CM: but I had to study all the time. I had no free time.
Me: really? I had an insane amount of free time.
CM: what did you get?
Me: B+.
CM: See but I did better than you.
Me: yeah . . . but I had fun last year.
Professor: you know, it's hard to tell who is the better student. The one that had no fun, but got an A. Or the one that had a lot of fun and got a B.
Other Classmates: probably the guy that got the B.

Hurray for peer and professor validated laziness.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Rant about IT teacher

(This happened a few months ago)

I go to highschool and in ninth grade you learn about Excel and databases in general. In the first half of the year we learned how to use excel and in the second part of the year we learned about SQL databases.
So we learned SQL and how to set up a database using LibreOffice Base. At the end of the year we had to do one final project which was setting up a database and writing some queries.
We had to do it in groups of two and we had to choose for what we wanted to make a database.
We had like 5 minutes time to discuss it in the groups and me and my friend decided to do something like GitHub, so a database with tables for all the users, repositories, etc.
Then we had to tell our teacher what we wanted to do. Others made databases for hospitals, shops, netflix, app stores. The teacher asked the other groups, they told him what they wanted to do and he wrote it down. Here is how it went down with my group:
Teacher: So what do you want to do?
Me: A database for something like GitHub
Teacher: For what?
Me: GitHub
Teacher: what?
Me (very slowly): G I T H U B
Teacher: what is github?
Me: ...
(I was very surprised that he didn't know GitHub)
Me: well, you can upload files and work on them together with other people. There are also things like branches...
Teacher: Ah ok, so a cloud service
(I was done and wanted to end the conversation)
Me: Yes... it's a cloud service...
(Me in my mind: why do i have to be here)

We named our project 'GitGud', a little bit passiv aggresive.

Yeah so apparently my IT teacher doesn't know GitHub, however he installed Ubuntu on some of the school computers so I guess that's nice

We got an A so that's good.

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

Ohhhhhh shit, this is a good topic.

Well, I just expected more... Better.

Like maybe the programming lecture could have been Java 1.6 rather than 1.2, and taught rather than read from an archaic time of dusty powerpoints.

Maybe we could have used Spice or a reputable circuit modelling tool rather than CircuitMaker; a tool no longer being maintained that barely makes it past install because it was written in a time before circuits.

Maybe day fucking one of the first year, happy clappy, let's teach you HTML lecture the tutor could have just shown us a copy-pasted hello world. Rather than the ugly, mixed-case, no-end-tag-having, broke ass HTML 4 scribble she felt the need to go over every detail of.

It was funny. But when I told the head of my dptmnt that I was getting bored at work they kinda freaked out. I really love my workplace. The people are nice everywhere and this is something I am not used to.
I started working when I was 13 at one of my dad's business. It was a lot of manual labor and every day my hands would be bruised because of all the cleaning and shit I had to do. Then he moved me to another one of his businesses and it was worse but I continued doing it for only 1 year. By 16 I had moved to simpler things, I was a waiter and even tho I hated it I was making enough money to go out on dates and buy whatever a 16 year old wanted. I continued being a waiter until I was 17(changed to two other places) and before I turned 18 I joined the U.S Army. That broke my body in ways that I would normally not believe a 18 year old capable of. It was around the time that I discovered programming but even after I left the military(at 22 I believe) I never worked on a programming job. Back at home I worked in retail. And believe you me....it is far more pleasant to be constantly getting blown up and broken than dealing with the most retarded people imaginable(this is what made me hate Mexican people even tho I am Mexican myself)

Fast forward at 23 and I landed my first programming jobs. As stated in other initial rant it was surrounded by assholes. Assholes everywhere that would cower at the idea of speaking to me face to face due to the possibility of being left as physically broken as I am.

But at 27 now I found myself in a happy place. With nice people, good coworkers, an amazing manager that also serves as eye candy and good benefits. But the job is boring, boring beyond belief and this is due to the fact that they have a self taught and academically trained computer scientist doing the most menial things on a daily basis. The shit that I do would be more becoming of a designer, which has a different set of mental skills that would probably engage them more. But I really don't want to work on the web unless I am doing something that actually takes some challenge, even tho I maintain Java and PHP web services, the shit is so boring that anyone would be able to finish the proceadures in hours on a day leaving one with nothing engaging to do. Sometimes I let shit get close to the deadline just to feel some sort of pressure that would keep me awake.

I just wanted to vent on how ceremoniously BORED i really am.

I want more shit to do. Can't really have much patience for the freelance shit since it doesn't make sense to hire me in exchange of having some indian dude doing it for a quarter of the price.

So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.

I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.

I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.

Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".

This is going to be a great year.

Previous department director. I loved working with the dude.

He had a no bullshit attitude and would always back up and defend his people, he would tell us that whenever he sticks his neck out for us we better be in the right because he would go full ballistic and did not wanted to make a fool of himself or the department. Dude was fucking amazing.

He was happy when I accepted the promotion but told me that he wanted me to shadow him to learn more about proper management techniques. It was a clear mentor trainee relationship, but he had 100% full trust in my ability and knowledge.

He retired about a year ago, got a new director, dude ain't thaaaat bad but he has a lot of cons, as a person I like the new boss, as a boss I am not convinced entirely since he has not been around for long, but it does feel that he does not listen, goes in one ear and out through the other kind of person.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Alright, server got hacked a week ago. Bad enough on its own but okay, perfect time to change the server infrastucture completely instead of doing it later this year. Since Saturday we are working on setting everything up (game server, apache, etc.pp.) while making sure to configure everything correctly to be safer this time.

We are finally at the point where we could go back online. And what happens? One team member _now_ (6 days after the hack) suggests that it might be a good idea to format the hacked server and configure just what we need to patch the clients with it.

Great fucking idea, why didn't you have that idea 5 days earlier?! There was more than enough time already to format the old server and configure it. Another day delay, yay. X_X

Aaah, ranting really helps in those situations. Oh and Hi, I'm new here. Nice place, I like it. ^_^