> Customer calls
Her: I have over 5k 404 request to [insertwebsite]/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
Me: Sound like a missconfigured exchangeserver/client. Let me have a look.
> Takes a look and can confirm the IP and the owner of that IP
Me: It looks like someone/something from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is failing to resolve autodiscover.[insertdomain].com
and defaults to @ record on the zone. Do you happend to know to whom that IP belongs?
Her: No, and I dont care, just block it. I do not like the 404 that shows up on the summary.
Me: Alright
> Blocks the IP in the firewall.

>>> Fast forward to next day >>>

> Someone calls, it is the same girl
Her: I cant reach my website! Infact, I cant reach anything! WHYYYYYY!!!
> I remember, blocking that IP yesterday...
Me: Oh, can you please visist "minip.se" (whatismyip.com, swedish version) and tell me what you see?
Her: Yes, it is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Me: Do you remember that IP that you request that I block yesterday?
> I can hear the shame coming from the phone.
> Turn out that her collegues did'nt have any mail delivered to them from the time I blocked their IP
> Her boss is really mad
> Atleast she had a cute voice

My first rant here, don't know how to start, but fuck these self proclaimed senior developers who can't even get their concepts right about basic things and don't believe in reading docs.

Fuck you for asking if sequelize has a method to return details of the logged in user of your app, it's a fucking ORM you dumbfuck. You are a "full stack" developer for fuck's sake.

Fuck you for making those "minor changes" which breaks build and then blame it on any random plugin or lib used, or my commits.

Fuck you for expecting me to review your code on Sundays because you couldn't finish it on time.

I don't like java, at all, but even I get that without it we wouldn't be where we are right now and can't reach where we aspire to reach. But you can't keep chanting "Java is dead, Java is dead" every chance you get. No, it's NOT dead. Nor is going to, anytime soon.

And for god's sake, please stop choosing one library/plugin over another just on the basis of stars on repo, it's not the only (or valid) criteria. Look if you actually even need it. Think.

And please learn how to google first, and also stop using "the" before every the noun, the adjective and the verb. It's the fucking the annoying to read.

And yes, there are different linting presets out there, and just because a piece of code in a plugin/library/boilerplate is not following your specific, and may I say horrible standard, doesn't mean it's a "bad code". It's written by people who have created/worked-on these libraries as side projects on which your entire career is based upon.

And I haven't even talked about the code you write or your domain knowledge or the way you treat other people. So get off your high horse and behave like a developer, a real one.

This is where everything started. I got the chance to work with actual production code. While it is very fun to work with, in some places it's also very frustrating. And this is from where, most of my rants come from.

Thank you @dfox and @trogus for making such a beautiful community.

The best part of this community is I never have to think or take time to make jokes or posts so that I can get upvotes. I've always wanted likes or retweets or reddit upvotes. But it never worked out because I have to think so much to make clever comments or posts. Most of the time, I gave up.

But in devRant, all I do is just share what's happening in my daily dev life. My frustrations, my happiness. That's all it takes. Everyone understands, everyone cares and everyone loves.

Over time, thanks to devRant, I've understood that I was part of the wrong community. This is the community that I deserve, this is the community that every dev deserves.

Thank you all. I love you. And I promise, more rants are coming :D

Especial thanks to @Yeah69 @kevbost @yarwest @tisaconundrum @Linux @donkeyScript . I have no idea why you guys all of a sudden rapidly upvoted me. Although I would love to reach 10k naturally but won't complain haha

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

At work:

"I do not get your concerns over ssl, it works fine when we use ie"

"What do you mean by xss? A regular use would not even try ans attempt something like that"

"We need to keep the txt file with the passwords there, its an internal project, the public would not even attempt to reach our site, just put them back"

Ah the many stories that I have from this place. It is an otherwise good place to work at tho, but oh well...

Me on a daily basis tho

So, when there is shit hitting the fan at work I tend to stay during lunch to take care of it and make sure I can take as much of a hit for it before it reaches my employees.

the lead developer walked to my office to let me know that he was about to take lunch and asked if i had plans for lunch. I told him that there were some reports to be done and some meetings that i had to attend and would be staying back, he asked if i was going to get something to eat and I said that I would try to get something as soon as possible. My man knows that I am on a strict regimen due to my workouts, and he normally takes concern over it.

I did not get something to eat, but the hour mark when he came back I was fucking starving and still stuck on a call T___T my man walks into my office as I was on a call (meeting) and he leaves a bag with my favorite burgers in my desk as I was waving hello T___T I thanked him afterwards.

Y'all, if youse a manager, take care of your people, fight for your people, my boys know i go the extra mile for them and we used to chill out having bbqs every other week playing pathfinder(i suck but make a fun party member) before the pandemic. Your coworkers might very well be your extended family. Even if you are the manager them peeps will look out for you if they know you are not a power hungry egomaniac that is more focused on keeping higher ups happy.

These dudes are my friends, my family, they were the board of members tasked with knowing if I was to get hired when i first joined in, and even tho I am now their manager I am still their friend, shit like this is possible and what I would implore everyone to strive for, because even if your organization is a faceless entity full of people that don't care for you, the dude at arms reach from your office is there, people are there, fellow human beings are there.

Fuck, just be nice to everyone else and I severely hope y'alls work life is a chill as this one.

The Manager kept masturbating over "low hanging fruit".

The apples on the bottom of The Product have all been picked.

The apples at the top are starting to rot.

The Manager masturbated a bit more over the low hanging fruit.

The bottom of The Product is now so slippery with Manager Cum that the brave engineers can't reach the top anymore.

Time to bring my axe to work.

If you divide an integer with two over and over again, you will get closer and closer to 0, but you will never reach it.

Kind of the same feeling as watching your rant gain more and more ++'s, but never hitting that magical 300.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

Allright, I'm pissed.

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

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

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

> Shit, Regret

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

> Big shit

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

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

> Fuck

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

* Feels save *

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

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

> Nope

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

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

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

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

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> FML

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

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

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

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck for today!

I once worked Tech Support for a point of sale software package. There was really no internal help desk, so we got all of those questions as well.

One day our front receptionist that her computer is being really weird and she can't type - it keeps inserting 3s in the middle of what she is typing.

I take the short walk down the hall to her desk and see that, indeed, a never ending string of 3s is being input to her screen.

"I can't figure out what's wrong." she says.

Then I reach over and remove the edge of an open binder whose edge was resting on the 3 key and enter key on the num pad.

"That should fix it."

Walked back to my desk.

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

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

I have teens in my classroom who want elite hacker status but complain about doing programming exercises outside of class. >.<

I explain to them that learning to code takes a lot of practice and can be frustrating at first. Some still went to the dean complaining that my class is tough. I work at a private school where open communication is encouraged and social justice is a thing.

So, I'm over here like "How do I reach these kids?"

I'm optimistic and I try different approaches to teaching and learning. Some stuff has worked. A lot haven't.

I figure I'd ask here: Does anyone have a suggestion for any creative programming exercises/projects that are beginner-friendly, legal, and hacker-ish? (I teach intro to Java.)

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

I've optimised so many things in my time I can't remember most of them.

Most recently, something had to be the equivalent off `"literal" LIKE column` with a million rows to compare. It would take around a second average each literal to lookup for a service that needs to be high load and low latency. This isn't an easy case to optimise, many people would consider it impossible.

It took my a couple of hours to reverse engineer the data and implement a few hundred line implementation that would look it up in 1ms average with the worst possible case being very rare and not too distant from this.

In another case there was a lookup of arbitrary time spans that most people would not bother to cache because the input parameters are too short lived and variable to make a difference. I replaced the 50000+ line application acting as a middle man between the application and database with 500 lines of code that did the look up faster and was able to implement a reasonable caching strategy. This dropped resource consumption by a minimum of factor of ten at least. Misses were cheaper and it was able to cache most cases. It also involved modifying the client library in C to stop it unnecessarily wrapping primitives in objects to the high level language which was causing it to consume excessive amounts of memory when processing huge data streams.

Another system would download a huge data set for every point of sale constantly, then parse and apply it. It had to reflect changes quickly but would download the whole dataset each time containing hundreds of thousands of rows. I whipped up a system so that a single server (barring redundancy) would download it in a loop, parse it using C which was much faster than the traditional interpreted language, then use a custom data differential format, TCP data streaming protocol, binary serialisation and LZMA compression to pipe it down to points of sale. This protocol also used versioning for catchup and differential combination for additional reduction in size. It went from being 30 seconds to a few minutes behind to using able to keep up to with in a second of changes. It was also using so much bandwidth that it would reach the limit on ADSL connections then get throttled. I looked at the traffic stats after and it dropped from dozens of terabytes a month to around a gigabyte or so a month for several hundred machines. The drop in the graphs you'd think all the machines had been turned off as that's what it looked like. It could now happily run over GPRS or 56K.

I was working on a project with a lot of data and noticed these huge tables and horrible queries. The tables were all the results of queries. Someone wrote terrible SQL then to optimise it ran it in the background with all possible variable values then store the results of joins and aggregates into new tables. On top of those tables they wrote more SQL. I wrote some new queries and query generation that wiped out thousands of lines of code immediately and operated on the original tables taking things down from 30GB and rapidly climbing to a couple GB.

Another time a piece of mathematics had to generate all possible permutations and the existing solution was factorial. I worked out how to optimise it to run n*n which believe it or not made the world of difference. Went from hardly handling anything to handling anything thrown at it. It was nice trying to get people to "freeze the system now".

I build my own frontend systems (admittedly rushed) that do what angular/react/vue aim for but with higher (maximum) performance including an in memory data base to back the UI that had layered event driven indexes and could handle referential integrity (overlay on the database only revealing items with valid integrity) or reordering and reposition events very rapidly using a custom AVL tree. You could layer indexes over it (data inheritance) that could be partial and dynamic.

So many times have I optimised things on automatic just cleaning up code normally. Hundreds, thousands of optimisations. It's what makes my clock tick.

!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.

One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.

A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.

That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".

After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

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

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

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

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

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

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

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

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

When I started my current job 6 years ago I was given a desk phone with a 100mb port. Speed didn't matter at the time as everyone was given laptops for our desks. I changed positions in the company where I'm going to be provisioning servers and whatnot over the network. Started using a desktop that didn't have a Wi-Fi adapter. I requested a new phone with a Gig switch port, if possible, so doing file transfers on the network wouldn't be limited. IT had a couple of questions...

IT-Have you noticed slowness when downloading/uploading?
Me-No, but its a 100mb port...so.
IT-Well I just did a speed test and we're getting 60up/5down. Your phone is over that.
(Working from home? Our fiber was way faster than that I thought.)
Me-That's fine, but this will be for internal network transfers. Not going out to the internet. We have gigabit switches on campus correct?
It-Yes but you shouldn't notice a speed difference.
Me, now lost-If you can't change out the phone that's fine. I'll figure our something.
IT-Now now, lets troubleshoot your issue. Can you plug your phone in?
Me-Yes I have it, but I'm remote today. There is no way for it to reach the call manager.
IT-Let's give it a try.

40 min of provisioning later he gave up and said maybe it is broke. Got a "working" one the next week.

PS first post, and writing on phone. Yay insomnia!

A month ago. The code for a feature was removed because my boss thought it would not be required. When that was done, a lot of regression testing was done and a lot of code was changed all over the code base. And those changes were merged to main branch along with a bunch of other changes.

But now, he wants me to put that feature back just as the release date is approaching. It's just a humongous waste of time. Now I need to find where all the tentacles of that bloody feature reach and manually put back the code. And the bloody testing needs to be done all over again.

When will I get to stop dealing with these kind of people.

I have this side project that I’ve been working on for the past 6 years part time but over the past 2 years just as a sysadmin to keep it running, it’s unpaid work but whatever, dropping in once a month or so doesn’t worry me.

Well the owner of the domain hasn’t been reachable for nearly 9 months and the domain expired a while back, not much I can do about that, so I pushed everything over to work at the IP level while I reach out and wait - that was 2 months ago while I waited for the owner to renew it or for the domain to fall.

Today the domain fell, so I jumped on to buy it back up only to find its already purchased... 😦

so I find the owner, it’s fucking parked on a shitty “buy me” page with a price tag of $4500 USD. Fuck these slimy hoarding domain parking bastards.

I know the site was on its last legs, low membership and traffic but I’ll be fucked if I’m paying that much to reacquire it.

Due to working from home I decided a few months back to invest the money I save instead of keeping it all in my bank account.

About 10-20% of it goes to a long term investing account and the rest into the one I manage actively.

The nice thing about homeoffice is that I can have a lunch break an hour later when the market opens and review my shit, then again checking up on it in the late evening before the market closed here.

Have been playing around with trading for years but never did it with patience and discipline.

After 3 months I managed to reach over 16% profit.
My account is small so it’s not a lot of money but I’m focusing on the % rather than the $ at the moment. It’s a start..

Anyway, thought I’ll share my progress with you guys as some of you probably invest as well..

Im exclusively swing trading, so holding my positions between 1-14 days with no leverage.

😬

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

Spent the last days trying to reach paypal tech support, hung on the phone across the globe, with people at paypal CS, who weren't even familiar with their own terminology, read tons of VERY 'straightforward' documentation and it kept me up two nights straight.

ALL because I REFUSED to believe that it is like I understood it between the lines that I read.

Today I got my answer. You can create Billing Plans (rules on which you'll base your subscriptions, i.e. amount, intervals, duration..) ONLY over the rest api, and only when a customer purchases a first subscription, you're able to EDIT the plan on Paypal dashboard!

What fuckery is that!? You have a edit form, but you can not provide a create form?! TY paypal for making me build a whole billing plan manager for usually a one time transaction per website.

I AM SENDING YOU MY PHONE BILL.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

What do you think about ageism in the tech industry? I see articles where Facebook/Google pride themselves that their employee median age is not over 30. Why is that of any importance? Is it hard for seasoned developers to find a job or adapt to the "youth culture" in tech companies? Any of you felt bullied by your younger colleagues? Finally, will this change in the next 10 years since developers in their 20s will be approaching their 40s, or once they reach that age they will go to the special developer graveyard and commit harikiri?

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

over 5 years in "industry" and i still don't feel like i have a fucking clue what im doing

intermediate, senior, etc seem out of reach

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

Actually finishing a project.

I am a person who gets a lot of ideas for projects I want to work on, then I start writing the code for them, then I reach a wall, stop and restart the cycle all over again.

Fuck my life.

While I prefer tabs over spaces for indentation, I usually don't mind using spaces as this is often decided project-wide(or even company-wide) by powers out of my reach and the people also normally decide to intend by the reasonable 4 spaces.
However, now I am working on a project with 2 spaces indentation and oh boy, what a pain it is to write any nested code.. am I really the only one with this problem?

If finally happened. My cats broke me down.

After years of spotty internet, in which I couldn't resolve websites, to which the solution always was to reach down and push the RJ45 jack with the broken off clip that connects my router to my pihole back in, because my cats pulled it out once again.

They made me do. They finally made me do it. After all those years. Today, my cat pulled it out like ten times in a row... So I finally did it. I walked over in the other room, grabbed a new cable and plugged that one it.

Try that again, cat. I dare you. Try it again!

Why has Google implemented those stupid menu bar buttons across the bottom of their apps. Isn't the YouTube app over jammed already. With most android phones using on screen buttons, you have to reach your thumb over the bezel, nav buttons and menu bar just to make a scroll motion for your content. I've sent Google feedback multiple times to of course (typical Google) to no avail. Let iOS have lower third menu buttons. We don't all have an S8, which as I see it is the only way this is alleviated.

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

So not too long ago I made a rant about this time I told my superiors of a problem and it got shot down because "We don't want to save developer time".

I warned them that the CPU was going to reach it's limit because the issue involves exponential growth on CPU usage the more we develop.

As it turned out, despite my thoughts that we wouldn't reach that limit for over a year, a new development led to it blowing up in their face today.

I am now treated as the expert on the topic and they're rushing to plan my suggested implementation in the next release.

I'm mildly amused.

For all my friends here who have known me for years can easily notice there has been a drastic change in me.

I used to be confident. That shit was hollow but I used to laugh in the face of fear. I was ignorant and that ignorance fueled a lot of the much needed confidence.

Over the years, I learned a lot. The more I know, the more I realised how much I don't know. And for all that I know, I have to use the brain power to retain and implement it, else it rusts.

This image is of my 2021 goals that I drafted last December. Wasn't able to achieve the first, the last and the art one. But surely got myself surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.

Now they have rightly said, be careful with what you wish for.

MY CONFIDENCE IS SHATTERED.

I feel dumb. Constant imposter syndrome. While I am learning every moment and there is no measure to it, I feel incompetent to an extent that I have started questioning how did I even reach this far?!

While, yet again I am the youngest in my team, my manager is bit micromanaging and agressive with OKRs/KPIs and tech team isn't very supportive creating constant friction (something I never faced with developers in my life because devs are my best friends), I fear how much more time will I take to ramp up in this new job and feel confident enough to tackle things on my own without constant nudge from leadership or different teams?

Or is it just that I have burnt out firefighting and lost the motivation I had?

After all, what does this all even mean?

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

Every recruiter voicemail.

Hi (name)

Your resume recently came across my desk and I wanted to reach out and let you know about a couple positions I'm working on. I've looked over your resume and you look like you'd be a great fit.

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

When I was a kid I loved Microsoft because they built that thingy that I could play my computer games on. I learned how to reinstall the magical but fragile Windows out of necessity, instantly promoting me to the position of the family's computer whizz-kid.

Now I just see them as one of many shady international mega corporations who on behalf of their shareholders best interest (oh the irony) are fighting to gain power so that they one day may own the planet and basically rule over everything (yess, stocks reach all time high!)

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

Well. Fuck.

A sunny monday morning. The sun almost glimpsing over the horizon. I'm on my way to the office, taking a breath of fresh cool air. It is infused by the scent of sweet pastries.

I reach the office, but something is different. Why is the door slightly opened? Carefully I grab the door handle. I do my first step past the doorframe and wooosch. Thick and sticky stuff is running done my spine, finding it's way through my clothes. I feel so un-fucking-believably dirty in this very moment.

This should give you an impression how I felt when I had to change a DNS record in this completely broken setup for just a matter of seconds until the letsencrypt client renewed the certificate.

I'm feeling seriously dirty.

I love software. Seriously, I love it. /s

Transmission is given a bad torrent (which, given that it's a torrent service, you'd expect it handles quite robustly) and completely fucks up. Like, really badly. It doesn't respond to RPC anymore, systemd has to resort to sending it a SIGKILL to get it off the process tree, and the web interface.. yeah. Nothing.

It doesn't log by default, so fine I'll add that to the systemd unit and restart it with debugging options enabled.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec

Turns out that /var/log/transmission.log can't be written to by my Transmission user. Well shit. Change that to /home/condor/transmission.log.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec
# systemctl restart transmission-daemon

*blood starts to reach its boiling point*

Still logs in the wrong fucking location. Systemd, I told you to log over there. I did everything I could to make you steaming pile of shit reload that fucking config. What's the fucking problem!?

*about 15 minutes of fighting systemd*
Finally! It spits out a log in the right location! Thank you Transmission and systemd for finally doing your fucking jobs. So a bad torrent it is, hmm...

*removes torrent from .config/transmission/torrents*
Transmission: *still fucking shits itself on that ostensibly removed torrent*

That's it. BEGONE!!!

Oh and don't get me started on the fact that apparently a service needs some 400MB of memory. Channeling your inner Chrome Transmission?

Going old school, but...
Does anyone else want to literally reach over and strangle people who move your desk items, including swinging your monitor around, using your pen and paper, moving your fan or bottles, or other things?

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

Go to bed tired. Wake up tired. Get up tired.
A month ago I was excited doing my work, I even was planning a huge change on one of our projects, detailed everything and passed it over to other folks to get funding. Now I seriously doubt I could pull it off. When I start reading a line of code I forget how it started before I reach the \n.
There was this thing I was asked to implement... A nifty one, I already could see the implementation. As I came to it I got stuck. Like when your body gets "stuck" when you get scared to death - you know what you have to do (i.e. RUN), you know how, but for some reason you just can't... Couldn't come up with anything. The other dev had to take it over and implemented it all in like 4 hours. Just like that. And it took me another 4 hours to understand how and why it worked when I know it should not take me that long as I used to write similar algorithms myself for fucks sake! I know I could have written it myself... but I couldn't..

I'm seriously worried.. Is this the end of my carreer as a dev? Am I broken somehow? I have some vacation days saved but I doubt it would be enough... Don't know if changing workplaces would work as well. I've always wanted to leave 9/5 and start working on my own project full time but now I am not sure I could pull it off either.. wtf is happening.. wtf... wtf..

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

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

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

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

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

I barely sleep.

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

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

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

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

I don't fucking know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if the universe were bored.

Reach office early and you know what stack over flow is down god save me it's 15 minutes already some one please up it.

Bad start for monday.

I am very patient but I've finally lost it...

I haven't been able to login or even reach the login screen in Aetna for over 6 months... (I've tried different browsers and different computers...)

I thought such a big issue would be fixed immediately but finally.... I BLEW UP!

So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.

The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.

The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.

Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.

What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.

Unless of course either of them is < 1.

So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.

And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?

I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.

But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.

Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).

The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.

You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.

It turns out my intuition was correct.

Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.

I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:

if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1

This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.

And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.

So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

not dev.

A follow up on my HSBC credit increase rejection rant from last month. So they ended up saying "we chose not to give you an increase even though your account is very good. Feel free to try again in 3-6 months but I can't guarantee your request will be approved."

I let it be.

Today I got an email saying that following a recent review of my account, they'd like to offer me an increase. The same increase I asked for last month and got rejected, and then had my credit score ruined over. Bitch what.

I am petty af, tomorrow I'll call them and tell them that "after having reviewed their services, I choose not to give them consent to increase my credit limit. I understand this isn't the outcome they were hoping for, but that is my decision. Feel free to reach out again in 3-6 months but I can't guarantee that I'll change my mind. "

Yes I know the rep on the other end of the line wouldn't give a f*ck, I just want that recorded. I don't really need the increase, just wanted to lower my utilisation. They can suck it.

Top do-over... I was extraordinary in biology and microbiology. For some reason, I still remember every little detail, everything that I was learning regarding it felt so natural and easy for me. My heart was pulling me to IT, in the end, I become an average, okayish IT guy, with reasonable programming, networking, and other IT skills, but I had to suffer the hell out of studying to reach here. I never was in love with biology, but damn, it frustrates the heck out of me that I'm so freaking good at it... So, my do-over would be to go all-in with Biology.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

I just can't get over the fact that the .com domain I have been eyeing for is still out of my reach. This name popped to my brain after brain storming over a week when I started making sites when i was a teen.

The domain has been sitting there unused with a basic webpage containing some ugly web design from 90s era.

I have been eyeing it for over 6 years now and just found out he renewed it for yet another 3 years!

I don't want to approach him about it either, I'm not that desperate for it that I'd pay millions for it.

The wait continues...

Anyone been in a similar situation?

This weeks question fits me well, as I am still unsure about the full details of how the fuck this all came together and was about to just rant about it anyway.

Ever since this companies network equipment and cabling has been updated, a lot of vital tools went down and bug out every now and then, at seemingly random times.

The codebase is a horrible mess to begin with and random things execute at random times and at random places spread all over different resources that get random hooks from random physical values etc.

Turns out (or at least what it so far seems like) all of them somehow sync their clock and other variables based on how many (valid-?) requests it gets per measured time and similar oddities, so when the network equipment got updated, that meant that multiple processes now could reach each other much faster and therefore threw off thousands of values and internal clocks.

There's a total of like 600 systems that are all "separate" from each other but all need to communicate in-sync for the production chain to properly work. Thankfully I didn't sign anything yet, so might actually just redirect them to somebody else, I am not ready to age 20 years, even for the amount that would pay.

"reach out"

"touch base"

"ping an email over"

Just a couple of examples of terms people like recruiters love using that make you cringe so hard you want to throw yourself under the next bus. Very similar to clients who say:

"can we make it pop"

"I showed it to my graphic designer friend and they said it needs more fonts"

"I've made some improvements in Word for you"

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

after exploring a lot of ui frameworks and architectures, i am trying to go back to android dev but again with the curiosity for the one single question that i had at the start of my career 5 years back : why is it's ui so complex?

can anyone help me understand it?

like comparing with the most basic ui framework : html/css/js, why android is so different? we got activities, fragments and views. the worst thing in android is lifecycles, that each of these ui components have.

The view lifecycle is simple to get over with : whatever is the lifecycle of its parent, is the lifecycle of view.

a view's parent is another view, whose parent is another view, whose parent is... and so on until we reach the root view which is stored by either a fragment or activity

therefore a view's lifecycle = lifecycle of activity or fragment

till here its very clear. the fuckup is simply in the next part:
WTAF is activity ?WTAF is fragment? why are their various functions called in the sequence they are called? oncreate, on start, onstartview, ondestroy... why?
activity is still somewhat okay, but fragment is completey weird af : it can be a part of activity: basically it can cover your complete screen and behave as an activity itself (so you don't get to say that activity === screen and fragment === view) AND IT HAS ITS OWN FUCKING LIFECYCLES! So does that mean fragment's fucntions cna also be called by OS?

what's more mind fucking, is the fact that android activity can destroy/pause or recreate fragments on its own, by some "views" like viewpager , or even hold multiple fragments as "alive" at the same time, using something called a "backstack" ??!??!

and each of these fragments in the stack can be called by system at any time? like wtf???

all these stuff is super confusing and i haven't even scratched the surface. the newer , more complicated stuff like viewmodel, livedata and again "lifecycles" has a complete seperate behavior and functionality of their own. plus the various "reality-check" scenarios like: when a user is streaming a video in picture-in-picture mode while keeping your app in split screen with maps in the second split, when a call comes and the video keeps running, and user rotates the device, let me know the clusterfuck situation for the 3rd fragment in your 5 icon navigation view currently at the payment page with 2 fragments and 1 activity in backstack!!!

god bless thy soul for this shitty framework isn't going anywhere , rather its super strong and getting more clusterfucked with new beautiful shit everyday.

(if someone can ignore my gentle language, i would really like to know/get redirected to some resources where i can learn more on this)

In my country there is a huge economy deflation.
Like 1 year ago 1USD used to be 1500 pounds.
Nowadays 1USD is more like 7800 pounds.

Wait a second let me explain more into details the whole flow.

There are 3 to 4 prices we are being dealing with:
* Official Bank price that refuse to change the base price: 1500 pounds
* Bank ATM machines that exchange your dollars on a 3900 pounds per usd
* Black market: 7800 pounds managed by random mobile apps that spread rumors
* Foreigners currency: the only way to grab your reach dollars.

Long story short:
Whenever you want to win extra cash, you ask any of your relatives to lend you money from any bank in the world ( foreigners currency), try to ask in black market who is willing to exchange, you meet, you check on any mobile app what's the current price and you do the exchange.

So in order buy USD dollars on a low price, devs build 2 mobile apps one that send a POST request to change the amount in DB and a second one fo retrieve this value.
So whenever he want to buy dollars he change the value to the lowest. And whenever you want to sell the dev raise the amount slowly. So far the government has no regulations over developers why? Because the one behind the forensic are at least 60 to 70 years old more like their informations are dead.

So we struggle.

That moment where you're scared for you job because one of your merges seemingly broke the builds for the 2nd time in a week, had HR reach out, a more senior developer take over the ticket after it gets sent back from testing twice ONLY TO FIND OUT LATER IT WAS ANOTHER PERSONS TICKET THAT WAS CAUSING THE ISSUE

Going back and forth with Microsoft technical support right now over a SharePoint issue. Good Lord I want to reach across the wire and smack them in the face with a sea bass. Not enough to hurt, but get their attention and smell like fish for a while.

No genius, the warning on the PowerPivot Data Refresh page 'Warning: this page is not encrypted for secure communication ..' IS NOT the problem. The error messages I sent *three times* from the ULS logs are the symptoms you need to be researching. Stop guessing and trying to blame any random message you see on our configuration.

how do you deal with workplace bullies? or is it just me who feels certain types of talks and actions are a bit intimidating and contributes to a hostile workplace environment?

i usually feel this around people of power. like say you are a TL and you are casually flexing the power to impact X guy's KPI scores in response to a funny taunt about holidays, while some guy Y from same team is in proximity whose leaves are not yet approved, isn't it some kind of intentional bullying?

or like there is some discussion goin on with TL and dev, where dev is trying to justify some reason for something, and suddenly the SSE jumps in between, start agreeing with the TL, adds a few jokes deviating the situation and the dev is left with his reasons and justifications undermined?

or like when some messup occurs by the team and TL suddenly pulls out a threatening card citing "people spending extra time in tt/leaving early" or some other reason as cause/punishment of messup?

Why do people of power need to make us remember that there is someone above us? and why does this need to be done in public?

lets say even if there are some notorious elements in team, who does take leaves on important days, and who are giving poor performance due to slacking/TT/early signoff, why should i be also told about it? just to get a warning?

And let's assume that there ARE people whose work is not causing the mess. They ARE doing good timely work and there are no complaints (not even the ones that don't reach public ear) , how should they not get intermediated by such situations?

I will not say i am the most perfect person doing the best of coding, but if i am being constantly kept in an atmosphere of fear and power; and being constantly cut/over powered during my discussions, i might end up doing mistakes as well

I absolutely love how capitalism fell on its face when greed went far beyond anyone's imagination.

Corporate wants all the money to themselves and wants to give out as little to us peasants. Housing prices went beyond most people's reach. Banks almost never gives loans. Inflation and interest rates are up everywhere.

So now people are like "Alright I'll live in this rented flat and not have any kids" and now the birth rate is the lowest in the last 50 years and this is reducing the size of the talent pool for these companies.

I saw an interview of Elon Musk where he went like "We don't have an over-population problem, but its actually an under-population problem.", and this is the first thought that struck my head.

What rich people don't understand, is if they want to be rich and stay rich, a significant amount of people have to stay poor. And due to low birth rates, this isn't going to last long.

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

Don't just think starting salary - think about your income over the course of your working life.

Your starting salary might be high - but it might mean that your ceiling after that is quite low. If you reach your ceiling too soon, you'll have to retrain to get more dough.

Retraining is starting again and might not jive very well with a partner and children in tow.

Same as every year, attempt to take over the world!

Honestly tho, I don't put goals for myself as I never reach em.

Just going with the flow, not giving too much a damn about anything and seeing what comes ;)

!rant
I currently don't have access to my good computer, so I installed a remote control software on it. I also made sure I could turn it on over the internet (Wake on LAN).
This worked well for some time: I powered it on remotely and after a few seconds I was able to connect to it.
Now what I didn't know was that WoL only works if the computer has been shut down completely. It does not work if it's in standby mode.
So I turned it on today, but didn't establish a connection immediately, and after a few minutes, it apparently fell asleep (standby). Now I can't reach it remotely, and I also can't wake it up again with WoL. And as I don't have physical access to it for about a month, so my only hope is that there is a power cut and it will be shut down the hard way.

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My mom was a media designer and as a kid I liked watching her doing stuff with CorelDRAW. And as soon as she played Sims in the evenings I really wanted to learn how to make a window and stuff in it happen.

So I started learning C, because my stepdad had a book laying around. (He did not know how to code by the way, now I'm asking myself why we even had this book)
But never got further than a few console applictions asking for input, messing with it and printing something.
Later I got into HTML/CSS/JavaScript (in that order over a course of a good 3 years or so) because I wanted to do stuff people can see and easily reach (an exe wasn't the nicest way of showing people something imo)

And that's when I totally fell in love with JS and it never stopped from then.:D

I did a few excurses to C++, Java, VB, C#, such kinda stuff and learned many many things about how stuff actually works. C being my very first language immensely helped with that.

I'm also trying some game development, as this was one of the main reasons I started coding, but I'm not creative enough and do it less and less.

Nowadays I do HTML, CSS, JS, TS and PHP for a living and I love it.:D

Whenever I reach the point where static analysis can't help me any further I always feel a sort of thrill mixed with terror. This is the real deal. Until now the problems were easy to find, the questions had well defined answers to choose from, the rules were universal. In the part of the logic that cannot be checked, the invariants upheld manually, where the best the type system can enforce is for the programmer to clearly state what they're doing, lies the real beast. In proofs commented on functions or invariants as logical expressions over plain English variables written in the doc comments of a struct.

In the blurry and pompous future I imagine for software development, that's where the programmer's time will be spent. Once we all agree on what a string is, what it means to depend on someone else's code, and what parts a UI should be made of, all a developer should have to do is make decisions and derive proofs an automated deduction engine can't do on its own.

israel population = ~10 mil

uk population ~70 mil

popular vote uk = 0

popular vote israel = 325

huh?????? i finally believe the conspiracy theory... there is total bullshit moving through the undercurrents of international society. actually the entire media and everything on the planet is shifted by angry retards with an IQ of approximately 27 who read something on twitter and therefore they must of course conform and do it

rich hands of influence reach far across this modern world....

my twitter dies on wednesday, I think i'm quitting this platform too... i'm just so sick of wasting time 'discussing' with people who literally have informed their entire lives by sources of media that all have an agenda, and yet said reader can't recognize that. go to bot school you fucking 🤡

also inb4 eurovision is a clown event, i know it is, but the fact that 'israel' as a country was for a good 10 minutes at 1st place of the vote is simply mind boggling to me (and to be fair, switzerland, france, israel, portugal, and croatia acts in terms of art and musical talent were all shit IMO) but what do i know? apparently the 700 mio people who live in europe don't agree - but even then, who knows anything about anything as to the actual 'numbers' that are posted on these 'votes' - could all be fake, or, even worse, the entire WORLD could be fake and i'm just typing to a fucking reflection of my own conciousness on this box

ach i'm very close to just turning it all off, its just rubes on top of rubes, derivatives on top of derivatives all more retarded than the next, and each night

then i get people like kiki who rage at me for getting drunk, then 'brag' they ran 5k. i ran more and drank more than you today, get over it.

i didn't need pills to do any of it either.

or i get sid the it kid, who gives non ironic lessons in fucking PHP 😂😂😂😂 in 2024 on youtube, and yet acts like he's a badass because he pointed out a 'redundant' 'const' in my code 😂😂😂😂 actually i don't know why in the first place i listened to any of it... going my own way has ALWAYS been the best way

by 2030 i will sell my saas(es) for 500k(+) and wonder why i even gave clowns on this platform the time of day

you know what? fuck it, it's been fun devrant, as of today i become a hermit, sick of this planet, and these apes

read books, go running, learn math (or any skill at that matter) and stay calm.

i can't describe in words to all of you how much a fucking abysmal waste it all is... just build useful stuff that helps people. the enormous (and trust me, it is absolutely eclipsingly enormous) discussion about everything around everything else is truly and utterly mind numbing and time wasting to the absolute core

farewell

I have an interest in methods to make myself smarter. At times some ideas seem to be just out of my reach. I don't always know the reason why. Eventually with persistence I am able to figure things out. However, I always wonder if there are techniques to learn things faster, better, more completely, with less struggle, etc. Would being smarter help with this. I wondered, "Can I create a program/method to increase IQ through training?"

So I found an interesting book called "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard J. Haier.
Very quickly I was engrossed in this book. It is written in a very accessible way and slowly trickles in the jargon. The book is basically the culmination of 40 years of studying the subject. The main point of the book is: you cannot increase your IQ through techniques and tricks. The only realistic avenue for increasing IQ is through genetics. Your IQ is based upon nature, not nurture. This is a result of the data, not opinion. The writer of this book follows what the science is telling him. This was not what I wanted to hear. He also went on to explain that the statement "You can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough." He said this is false. Some people, no matter how hard they try, will not be able to get past certain limitations in aptitude. This statement will probably make a lot of people mad, but the data led this researcher to this conclusion. Though I sense he found this disheartening (my opinion). I know I did.

So after reading this book over the weekend I am a bit perturbed that there are not recognizable techniques to increase IQ through mental exercises. Websites all over will say otherwise, but it isn't a thing.

What to do? I decided I am going to find ways to maximize my potential. I will create a set of mental exercises that help me use what I got to the full potential. I know when I see different ways to think about things I get a bit better at solving problems. So learning and experience is still a way to improve your intellect, if not IQ. If I feel like I have made progress in this endeavor I will definitely share.

If you have any interest in neuroscience then I recommend the book I read this weekend. It is very accessible for the reader not versed in the subject. I knew virtually nothing about the topic and now I feel I have a good grounding in the state of the art. It has some neat info on some potentially better approaches to AI as well.

YouTube... for video creation.

Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.

3 weeks back took a bug..
**long rant**

Looked into it and found that it is exist in older version(say V1) as well.
Sent mail to client stating i can fix this in current version (say V2). Since V1 is already released and our current code stream is V2 and so if we fix in V2 , the code will not reach V1 code base.
**explained to client**

Client : I mean if you fix why it won't work in older release.

Me: Explains how code streams will work.

Client : Okay.. but it will support the functionality in V1 , right ?

Me: (*internally* are fucking kidding me? It won't work dumb ass.) No. It won't work in older versions. I am fixing it in V2.

client: okay.. Let's proceed.

Me: Done code changes. Send code to review. (we have to send review to upper level manager).

Manager1 : I didn't liked this part. can you change this ?
Me : sure. Done.

Manager1 : Now i liked it. Sent review to Manager2.

Me: why the fuck ? Are you not sure about my changes are good?
Manager 2: I liked it, but need some log changes.
Me: Fuckkkk...... Let me change this.. Done. Now can I promote those changes?

Manager2: No we need to send review to client manager as well.

Me: Goddammit.. Okay.. sent review.

*After a fucking week..*
Client Manager : Looks good. Push the code.
Me: Finally..

(This process took 18 days which would have been completed in 3 days if there is only one peer review)

Now the other guy from client whose tracking the bugs reported why it took so long to fix it.

I think my client manager is over paid and can't even know how his company code stream works. Fuck you . why client has these lazy ass old fucking "I don't look into my email" type people. God I hate these "I am in rich country" people.

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

!dev !tech

it's 2 am, nd just out of curiosity i put on earphones and tried to dance on a romantic couple song . interestingly, my life has been so single and restrictive that I can't even imagine holding hands of someone , nd that feels a bit sad.

after being burdened with the family ethics, relgions, family fights and financial crisis for so long, i feel i have lost a personality that i should have had.

1. i have lost the sense of random naughtiness and unnecessary bravery/arrogance. from what i know, the best way to reach your path is to remain focused on it. unnecessary acts of curiousity or nuisance leads to fights, frauds or worse.
however, people enjoy life by doing unnecessary banter, gossips, nuisance and having fun with unknown things, people and surroundings.
i guess this makes people a likeable/interesting character in social scenarios as me being an alert dog trying to focus on resching the party place, have a safe party and come home at time becomes a less interesting character than the guy entertaining everyone by his stupid talks in the car.

2. i have lost sense of compassion or showing love , expressing love or doing things out of love and not just for transaction.
From what i heard, people in relationship are clumsy to the max level. messages every 5 seconds, random acts of flirting, teasing, playing hard to get, what not.
i ... am simple. if i like someone, they are gonna know in 5 seconds (which is followed by a lifetime of awkwardness, so i have stopped even letting this thing to be known). physically nd financially i have enough resources and plans to be a good person to be with : i can be helpful in situations, am always up for doing anything interesting and have reputable personna. but expressing via those sugary baby talks is not my ☕

3. I haven't gained any passion for anything. i see people having deep thoughts on their passions for poetry, music, dance , guitar, travel, political alignment, causes, or whatnot.
i am not that much passionate towards anything because life doesn't give everyone the chance to choose passions.
i sat with my father in a flea market selling stuff. that wasn't passion, that was a necessity. for me, money>>study>>>anything
i am only passionate about having food on my plate and a roof over my head

-------

so all these things makes jack a boring person. i jave been chasing money so much that i question everyday of its worth it, as it's currently just being used to battle with the financial crisis while having a little bit in savjngs to enjoy life. but am so much worn out by this pressure of earning money that I don't even know how to enjoy life or have someone to enjoy life with , so its even more pointless to increase that limit.

i do try to explore the things i like : dance, singing, traveling, working out but not at the level that those attributes define me

#awkward_loney_life

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

------

2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

----

3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

My most hated term BY FAR is "In theory". It's a lousy-ass, weak excuse for not doing shit properly while distancing yourself from the problem. Short guide: "in theory" may be used prior to or following a statement in which you have little or no confidence in.

The web server shouldn't reach the database server "in theory", it fucking does or doesn't. The SQL cluster shouldn't "in theory" fail over to a working server in case of a hardware fault. Fuck off with your irresponsibility, man up and do things properly. This is the real world, not a sandbox for your shitty dorm room code

Ok, So I am just fed up with these project delivery dates. These are the most irritating aspect of any project.
My current project is already delayed 3 times, because of the optimistic biases of the team lead.

Developers were forced to work over weekends. The QA cycle is taking more time than the dev cycle itself, and it's very irritating waking up with a new bug in the JIRA notifications.
Everytime we reach the delivery dates, there will be multiple bug items on each and everyone's plate that you just can't release the product.

I want to know if anyone feels the same ? How does your management takes care of these delivery dates ?

I dont know if its a feature or bug or just me, but if i go on someone's profile and scroll down to check the rants, i cant scroll up trough the top last rant. It stops exactly, when i reach the bar (rants, ++, comments, etc..). I have to click or touch this bar at least ones to come over it, to scroll further up to the profile description, pic etc.
ps: I'm using an galaxy s7 with Nougat

So how do you find motivation to finish a work project which is supposed to "go long"?

So, umm, this is weird, but i have been in this situation a few times and i am not sure if i deal with them correctly.

- the company proposes a brand new feature : a feature which never existed in the product before.
- they have high level directions (both business logics and technical) on how its supposed to be build
-they set vague but comfortable timelines (20-30days) to complete it
- they align me as the main dev for frontend, some x guy for backend , some y guy for parallel frontend (ios/web) and kinda forget about us.
- the business requirements are evolved/cleared as we go on making the product, the backend keeps on providing evolving apis which get stable over time.
- the business ppl shows that yeah there is no pressure and we won't mind extending this for release as other systems will be "obviously" taking time.
- our (the folks on new feature) feature is sidelined .nd we are rarely talked about until we reach those deadlines and at that time we are questioned.

I... am not a powerful performer in these situations. adding a new feature required solving some major problems again and again , while solving smaller problems too, so as the product finally takes shape . for eg:
1. i will start fast by adding all the possible screens, their abstract code, their navigation logic, their xmls etc
2. then based on designs, i will try creating designs a bit
3. then once the apis arrive, i start adding them and modify the logic to handle those.
4. meanwhile many smaller problems come up , like when sending an image from one screen to the previous screen, the thumbnail don't show up, so i spend 5+ hours ensuring that it works precisely . or how i could make 3 api calls in async and make the upload flow better.

5. this goes on for days, until and i and other people start to realise that my project is not upto the point of completion

i keep getting distracted from the original goal of making a working poc first and then fixing the nuances

You know I'm looking around a t a museum of 3d graphics programming right now.

Not my first time but the same arcade machines are playing the same tooons over and over again in an eerie way and strange;y thertes a basketball game up there on several large screen tvs too...

I remember my first detailed look at opengl.

For some reason it just never worked for me.
But I see all these incredible sources of past fortune sitting unplayed, and think.. wow... what a waste.

these brought me many hours of joy and gave me an opportunity or so I thought to try to make friends and meet other teens when I was younger.

They represent countless hours of lovingly crafted mind-crack, and noone smokes them anymore.

Aliens armaggedon sits right in front of me, holstered faux guns glowing in red alluringly.

the huge box of unclaimed mooks and stuffed sheep sit there sadly robotic arms that can never reach them just hanging rusting, unloved by a new generation to curse them for never grasping anything and stealing their quarters and a HUGE 96 inch or more screen for Tomb Raider, FUCKING TOMB RAIDER hums in a corner just slightly out of my full view.

and noone is here. why ?
and yet the gaming industry supposedly continued to thrive.

in a way arcades were better they kept people from being addicted to wowcrack.

just like raising gasoline prices would prompt the creation of cleaner more efficient mass transit.

The Youth

How is the youth?

Pretty good question we don´t really like to communicate to older people well actually most of us have a mental issue, I know it´s kind of sad but when life gives you lemons you use them to make girls cry and that our way of thinking “I´m gonna die anyways lrts do something epic” cuz we aren't afraid to talt to the president of the united states of America like this but we are to scared to order mcdonalts of our self. I mean it´s a aspect that everyone knows we don´t know that person could be a murder of maybe that´s a little to over the top but like we just don´t like it OK.

You may ask what dose she mean with mental health issues?

Well we all know the good old depression its just that we life in a world in that you have to be perfect and when you are´t than you are a disappointment your parents want you to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that because it´s a well payed job but your generation wants to be creative we need our space to crate need things and do something amazing but this world is just a weird place were everyone has to be perfect and follow a ideal. Your appearance dosen´t describes how you are not everyone that has tattoos is a criminal or dose drugs nobody talks about the real problems.

What are the real problems?

Let me tell you we life in a world were nobody talks abou suicide nobody want´s to hear about it let me tell a fact.

Every 40 seconds somebody dies because of suicide.

Suicide is like a terror act when you were close to that person you got completely destroyed if you were far away than you got hurt but not as bad as the persons who were close. But nobody talks about this because it´s not “normal” that makes the persons who need help not reach out because they think its´s not okay.Stop the silence and help :)
But how dose it feel to have depression?

Well you can describe it as this:

it´s as you would lock yourself in a room with just a window but that window dose not have a handle but a curtain that closes every day a little more until there is no light anymore and the first days after that happens you will be scared and lonely and it will hunt you down but depressed people have to life like this every day and it becomes a normal state of mind until they decide they aren´t worth living anymore and they try to kill themselves. It hurts to see all those people die but it is the truth and truth is´t always fun.

Why am I writing this?

Honestly im asking myself that but it just feels right to tell wahts in my mind because a lot of people feel like they are tongue tied and can´t say what they are thinking and feeling and don´t express themselves. And also in my head is a lot wrong but at least I feel like I am doing something while writing this. I am one of the generation Z and I am proud that our generation has all this strength to fight for LGBT+ community and the black life's and I am proud that we understood that all this community's have to be respected because all people are on this earth and we all have to survive somehow and it dose not matter what skin color you have or sexual orientation.

But these are just my thoughts I hope everyone is doing well druing these times.

And to everyone I am proud of you and I love you.

Ok,
So when at work I love working from Jira/TFS and having little interaction when i'm battling through Code/Documentation

But Next time my manager strolls over to my desk and kicks my chair i'm Gona King Leonidas his ass out the 3rd floor window

FFS please reach out via Lync if u are planning to come up and annoy my tits!!!!!!

"When we feel less secure, with less control over our daily lives, we reach out to brands to connect with a time when things seemed better." - Mark Gobe

So, I have joined this new company where I used to work few years back. Something happened before I rejoined, so no one is working there now except me. It's web agency run by my boss and I am the only employee working on over 7 projects including front end, back end, mobile, devops, and some marketing also.

Now, I got offers from couple of other series a funded startups who are willing to pay me 30% more salary. I know I will have less responsibility and more work life balance. But I hate the politics in those companies.

My current company is making good revenue but my boss isn't giving me the salary I am expecting.

He said it will take few more months to give me the salary I demanded.

I also want to build my own company and provide services someday. That's why I thought it'll be better to stick with the company so that I cam learn other aspects of the business.

So. If the company is making say over 200k usd a year and its paying me around 23k usd per year, isn't this kinda low salary for my experience, skills and value I bring?

How should I go about asking a raise?

Also, I don't wanna move to another big tech company. I hate coding questions in the interview as its been years I have prepared for a proper tech interview.

Also, how secure do you think my job is? Is there any future working here? Will I ever be able to reach a salary comparable to big tech companies?
Is it a good place be in right now? (i jave over 5 years of experience)

Once upon a time to prevent people from stealing my work I created a program that converted photos and files into double sided sheets of at codes with packeted contents so I could scan them into a high resolution file later and recompose them into a series of files

So very aggressively insistent we’re the dumb slaves that run all this crap in being cruel and evil and fucking themselves over that they stole these sheets from the document folders I carried in my backpack and sent me into a traumatized state pre amnesia and wasted 5 years of my life

Now all these same period are either leering programmed fools or withered miserable sacks of skin and I’m no closer to moved on from this bs and I find myself exasperated that everyone and their retard incestuous uncle would want to deny and repeat the same crap over and over as they as they are only making themselves crazy as well. Says something no records equals no future in essence essentially the reason if it’s not physically secured on land that cannot be taken away and we keep trading law and order for .., whatever these idiots get out of this well all die before we reach much furthet

Soon launching a social networking app just for devs. Post Dev memes, Collab, rant, brainstorm over ideas, reach out to anyone for chat, post your cool devspace pictures and earn rewards. Stay tuned!

Ps- I know there are many similar platforms, this is just a project I developed learning coding app development so just don't brag me about the concept. Although, a better UI/UX never hurts!

The project is fully coded by me and am open for Sr. Devs collabs for the project.

Before he began dropping the 20K proposed to remodel my flat, I told my father I much preferred a contractor who was recommended by someone I knew, as opposed to using a big corporation like Home Depot. FAMOUS LAST... a neighbour in my building highly recommended the contractor we chose. And, week 7 [or is it 8?] of what was proposed to take no longer than two weeks has begun afresh!
On Friday the fellow who is the owner of the contract remodeling company was here touching the paint. He was here because I forbade the two painters he sent to do the initial painting job.
My internet cut out suddenly around 1300 Friday. He set to leave for the weekend shortly after that. I mentioned the outage to him. The essence of his reply was that there was no way it could have had anything to do with him. The following day, my internet provider sent a tech out to diagnose the problem. What was the problem? The head of the remodeling firm removed a face plate from the wall where there were telephone wires and disconnect them when he tore the wires as he replaced the face plate.
Although the tech told me he wasn't going to charge my account the $85.00 fee for his services because the outage was caused within my flat, I wish to be sure of this. Which brings us to the punchline.
My internet provider is a lame ass business model, dreamed up by a squint-eyed ex-circus monkey, never well endowed in the top story, and now just plain sad.
There were some 911 outages in Washington State last Thursday night. All during the day Friday when you dialled their freephone #. the recorded announcement, before saying anything else, told you they were experiencing heavier than usual call volumes, and my wait would be greater than `10 minutes. Fine. What fried my La Croix silk was that after their customer service dept closed for the weekend, that outgoing message remained.
Today, I wanted to contact my provider to see if they would know if the $ was going to be charged to my account. After pressing the 'send' key, my computer came back with an error message, saying they were having technical difficulties. So, I went on over to the 'chat' page. There's nothing to click on to take me to this enfabled location. So, can't reach them by phone unless I want to hear, every 30 seconds whether or not I wish to, how sorry they are for my delay.
A few years ago I would've used this as an excuse to have a technicolour meltdown. The reason I'm posting this is that I am now able to see beforehand what I'll be doing to myself getting upset over the circumstances. When I do reach somebody, I'm going to tell them as lightly as possible, that if they were an airline, I wouldn't board any of their aircraft. Ever.