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Was irritated and annoyed because of a client.
Someone called the support line and I was ready for some temper-holding practice.
A very sweet lady was at the other side and she couldn't figure something out and was overwhelmed by all the options she had in her new hosting package.
Very calmly helped her and guided her to the right place, step by step. She did exactly what I said instead of playing a smartass.
She finally found it and said that she appreciated it and a ton of thanks 😊.
Now that's a good way to end a work day!10 -
Someones keyboard just stopped working in my job.
They called the helpdesk and i told them to unplug the keyboard from the back of the PC and try a different usb port before i send them down a new keyboard.
Their reply?
‘How am i meant to do that? I mean... *laughs* I didn’t go to college for this kind of stuff. I know you did but you need to explain it in English for me instead of using technical terms.’
....
So i had to describe what a USB looks like, and tell her how to follow the (only) skinny black cable she has on her desk, down the back of the desk and into the PC. She got overwhelmed by this cable being the same colour as the thicker VGA cable, so ended up unplugging everything!
Its fine though, as when she plugged them all back in, everything was back working.
She finished the call by saying:
“Like, i know how to use a computer but I just don’t understand all this technical mumbo jumbo, like USB’s and stuff? How should i know about that?”
...
I sincerely think interviews need to have just 5 minutes dedicated to the person showing that they know what a bloody USB is!!, can turn on/off a PC, open outlook, and follow basic instructions.
Ugh I work with idiots 😢18 -
Do NOT be overwhelmed nor discouraged when you realized how little you know.
after all software dev is still a work in progress :)6 -
- Hmmm, react is not as difficult as I thought. Good tool, let's use it.
- Hmmm, Vue is amazing, let's use this instead, much easier.
- Hmmm, Angular 4 is out, let's retire to a deserted island and sell coconut water for a living.10 -
My first hack... Back at the days when phones had disks to dial a number. I was a kid of cause, I'm not that old. I used to like to call my grans. Once, when I supposed to go to sleep already, I've found out that there is phone socket in my room (the one connected to the copper wire, that is where the word "phone line" came from).
It took me about a half of an hour to detach handset from the toy phone and about two ours to reverse engineer dialing protocol (you just need to disconnect the line sequentially corresponding number if times).
And after that I've heard my granny's voice. I was literally overwhelmed that it worked.6 -
Story time. My first story ever on devRant.
To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)
My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!
My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!
I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!
At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!
Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.
Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...
Thanks for reading ...12 -
> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job
I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.
My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.
Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.
I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.
On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄
I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.
I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.
I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.
I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.
But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.
I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.
But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.
So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.
So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.8 -
My boss is a grumpy 25 year oldish "Mr. I know it all". We all hate him for that attitude.
Just joining recently, the code base which I got introduced to was totally new and I was overwhelmed.
Boss told me to write an Sql query to wipe the table data. I being reckless wrote a query to wipe the table only and submitted it to my boss.
Few hourse later we were informed by our peers that a certain url was not working. On further investigating we found out that my boss carelessly copy and pasted my query and executed it which wiped an important table clean.
Now he doesn't talk to me straight and I can't look him in the eye because obviously I burst into laughter.
Job well done☺️2 -
How people see me:
Father: computer nerd (he's a coder too)
Mother: website maker and computer nerd
Brother#1: some computer wizard
Brother#2: noob web coder (he codes as well, but systems programming) - thanks bro!
Colleagues: The ALIEN™
Girlfriend: 404 not found
Friends: The NERD™
Dog: some hooman spending lots of time behind those lighty rectangles
Fyi, I am passionate about computers in all domains and always helped debugging people
My solution to not being overwhelmed with futile demands? Talking to them in complicated words, so they will only ask questions about true problems and not garbage :D3 -
Depressed.
I have never been so depressed in my life. Today I felt so sick, tired and numb.
Fuck depression.18 -
Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!! My stickers are here 😀❤
I'm overwhelmed! It was a long, worthwhile wait! The first set that was shipped never reached me ): I had mailed dfox about it and he had replacements shipped! He is so awesome!
10 -
Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )
when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.
I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.
Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.
They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.
They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.
There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.
They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.
At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.
After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.
They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.
I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.
They're rarely finishing any project.
I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.11 -
One of my teammates was pulled to help on another small project... He started to get overwhelmed with being on two projects at once, so I volunteered to help with this project as well. Expecting to just help with his load, he is being transitioned off this project and I'm taking his load...
Lesson: Do not help others.1 -
Dev slump.
For me dev slump is usually feeling overwhelmed and that leads to being unmotivated.
My solution usually involves, go slow, way slower than usual. "Make function... that takes a thing. well that worked..." rather than try to think of everything at once.
Also get some easy tasks broken out and do those (even unrelated). That tends to get me going, feeling productive, then I start to approach the harder stuff that was maybe more demoralizing.1 -
Those 10 seconds when there is a feature request and you have to answer the question "How much time will it take?" inTheSpot8
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**noob alert**
Hi all, I'm new to this community. I found it out couple of days back while downloading some apps on play store. And I don't know how much time have I spent here since then... Damm, I've an interview after 2 days.
My query is, I am stuck/confused. I have so many ToDos. ToDos to learn new things, from UI to other langs to machine learning to database to etc etc. And I keep on postponing it because I can't decide which way to go first. There is so much fuzz about BigData/AI which sounds cool. Sometimes I want to build UI for my imaginary idea, then somebody says a man must learn linux and DB. Top of that I'm preparing for interviews, so I think I should get a job first and then start learning. But when I get a job, I get *busy* with job. It feels like Captain America, all he does is official work. I sometimes feel like trying open source coding, but quit the idea because I get scared or overwhelmed by imagining the big community behind it and I won't be able to make a difference or I might get bashed by others as I get bashed in StackOverFlow :-(
I'm unable to get help from friends/family/colleagues, not because they are bad. It's just they don't get it. People think just because you have a job which pays the bills and save money, everything is fine because there are lots of people who dream to get a job, so be thankful for what you have. I'm thankful... But it's not helping. I really want to do things more than what my job asks me to. The kid inside me is awake since I became adult.
Have you been in this condition or is it just me? Or is it too confusing? Could you please help me out. Thanks a lot. Sorry for serious post. I'm a java programmer by the way.9 -
Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.
I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".
People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..
So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...5 -
My phone just froze. But this one time, instead of being mad at it for stopping I had the thought that it's probably working harder than when things are going smoothly. So I watched with compassion as my phone tried to resolve its internal struggle, it being so overwhelmed that it could no longer communicate with me. It was like watching someone having an anxiety attack. There, there. Take all the time you need, little friend. You're safe in my hands ♥️8
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Who's got time to be an imposter. 🤷♂️
I am out of my depth 90% of the time, always diving into areas that are foreign to me, you just need to enjoy the buzz of knowing you are coming out the other side more knowledgeable then you did going in.
But if you do get overwhelmed with this condition, step back, take a breather, and use that moment to think things through at the big picture level before moving forward again, sometimes the right solution is hard to think off when you're to focused and drowning your way through a bad one.8 -
So yeah, we released our app for 26k people to use two days ago. Due to circumstances not under our control, that was developed way faster than it should've. Today we're two days in and everything is going horrible. 26 thousand people are having trouble using it (not every problem is our fault, but ofc they don't give a shit) and our support team is not big enough to handle every request. We're not able to find any more people to help us handle it, so some developers are being used for support. But that slows the bugfixes a lot. We're at risk of losing our jobs because we will not be able to make it work in due time.
In Italy, at the beginning of the year a particular type of invoice became necessary and to handle that everyone needs a particular kind of email called "certified", you know, because Italy, and today our certified email server went offline for the whole fucking day because the provider was an overload of feces. We were overwhelmed by the amount of people that needed help.
I don't even know what to say, if we don't fix it we're fucking fucked, like literally.
I really hope everyone is having a nice new year. For us, this is going terrible.3 -
warning: huge ass rant, language.
sooo, i’ve been away from too long from here but in my defence i had nothing to rant about.... LOL YOU WISH.
this yeah and part of the last one were a huge dumpster fire. i had terrible and stupid clients, but this time, oooh my. i had the kind of client that puts you in the state of taking drugs to talk with him.
so, basically my job is to use IT to run businesses and part of it is going paperless and bringing intelligence to their DMS. I have 5 years experience on the field, not a senior, but let’s say i do know my way around the job. this involves a lot of windows services, scripts (in vbscript..), powershell tasks, i basically lick Microsoft boots for a living :D
So, huge part of the job is taking “physical” (on paper) processes, taking them to digital, then making them better, once they are used to the system. (nothing secret I work with M-Files)
But this guy. Dude. this is the kind of person that needs to look good towards his boss. it’s the guy that says his words are “cartesian”, with a “precise meaning”. My, Fucking, Ass.
When it comes to structure (folders, flows, trees, whatever) it’s important to think about design, you want to touch it the least at the end. i have to modify workflows and objects countless times. and yes, i had with him a long and extensive design phase. the dude basically says “yes” without reading what’s been done, and then changes mind and asks “who the fuck approved this shit”. the problem comes when you write services to process huge amounts of data to be saved idk, on the FS, and decide that it was wrong, and that it needs to be changed and retroactively. then change it back. then change the process. then make it bigger, so big your staff gets confused as fuck. then you want to impose stuff to your suppliers, which they don’t give a fuck about your requests.
then. THEN. then you come to me, say it’s my fault you might lose your job because release must be pushed further because you didn’t want to lose your fucking pride by admitting that you were wrong about something it’s my fucking expertise, something your 15 years experience accountant also told you, as well as half of your accounting department (the way VAT is treated basically). get fucking fired already. for real. and guess who had to implement something wrong on purpose knowing It would be a fucking nightmare to properly reverse?
without mentioning that some stuff makes so 0 fucking sense, jesus, get wrecked by a horny duck dude. who the fuck needs to store e-mails in public folder for each fucking email in the company? take a cryo backup solution. no, each email that comes into each mailbox needs to be assigned to a working site. without exception. why would an email to order pizzas for the dinner be assigned to a working site?
also, thanks a lot for making me writing a huge service the other way around because you didn’t read my emails. thank you. because how the fuck am i supposed to know that i need X data from Y and not Y from X? (over, over simplifying here). the number of hours spent there , uuugh.
but hey, don’t worry, I hopefully got to spend the morning of my birthday, which was also a day off, helping you out because your staff is basically overwhelmed.
god, they aren’t the brightest stars in the sky, but I can just understand them. poor souls.
but hey besides all this. it would’ve been nice acknowledging the many mistakes done on your side my dear client. no, while being 100% e-mail backed, somehow the error is in our side. (my boss knows it isn’t don’t worry he covers me).
like, a couple of days ago he asked me to solve a huge bug on an invoice validation workflow that must’ve been a bug because was designed in a shitty way. it wasn’t a bug, it was his “cartesian” specification. which i told him btw wasn’t that clever, but never mind.
hopefully client will have a 3 weeks leave. i will enjoy every day of work without him. every hour.
i will do excel macros for what I care.
once already my boss stepped in to calm down the dude, shit was going south and I was going to basically fire myself because if a phone call I finally didn’t do. i was ready to insult the shit out of his face with his boss. god thank my boss for that.
sorry for the slightly long rant
have a good day y’all2 -
I like JS,
If you are getting lost exploring frameworks, that's your problem.
If you're overwhelmed by the choices,
That's YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM.3 -
Story time.....
I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.
He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.
He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.
At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "
He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"
Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.
Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.
I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.5 -
Does anyone feel overwhelmed by all the new technologies? It's like every developer nowadays code in JS, and knows ES6, React, webpack, babel by heart. I have been working in Java for less than a decade and sometimes feel like I can't catch up. Even in Java ecosystem there is now Scala, Groovy, Gradle, Kotlin... Not to mention other languages like Python, Swift... How do you guys have time to pick up everything?? 😖7
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Way after office hours, random ping!!
Client: Hey man you're a ninja, i have heard so much about you from my team, you're really good. Thanks for everything.
Me(Overwhelmed): Gee, this is my job :)
C: So, can you do a small change to the website!! 😨
Me: Okay
2 days later. After office hours!!
C: Hey Ninja... and all that crap...
Me: Starts typing... Goes offline!!
Fuck you!!4 -
Few weeks passed, and I as a freelancer without job all I did was seek for one and couldn't find anything.
Now I'm overwhelmed with all the work and interviews I got in the past weeks xD
Never balanced...
No work at all, or too much work.3 -
Overwhelmed by a shitty codebase? Use the boy scout rule and leave the code you're editing a little better than you found it.
Worked wonders for me when I realized I could spend literal months refactoring and desperately needed a systematic approach.
Little by little that rotting house of cards will turn into something okay. It's a nice feeling looking back after a couple of months and see what you've done to make things better.
Also, make sure to remember the cost of wrestling with hurried legacy solutions in your estimates as well. Just adjust the level of bluntness depending on your work environment: admitting that things can/need to be improved can be unpleasant for some to hear even though it's true.5 -
I wonder, how will I ever able to understand memes posted here😂😂.
So much stuff to learn out there that I get overwhelmed.
People talk about VIM and bash and Emac and what not 😓.,and here I am studying border-radius in CSS😂9 -
How do you deal with a problem that feels completely over your head? I want to develop side projects but sometimes I have trouble starting/continuing when I feel like I can’t find a solution after hours of research.
Who/where do you turn to to find solutions when you run into this problem? I feel like I lose determination when I run into a wall I can’t get around.12 -
So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.
So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.
But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.
My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.
Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.
I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(3 -
Am I the only one who feels overwhelmed, excited, confused and in an anxiety/desesperation-scene on developing JS base de software.
Don't judge me, I'm a newbie10 -
Unfortunately, I was causing the bad experience of the group project.
Had a 3D modelling class at university. I was totally overwhelmed and had no time to do anything for the project. I was too scared to face my team so I decided to just break the contact and didn't show up to the presentation.
I thought I would get a bad grade and that I will have to take the class the next year again.
But the worst part is, I got a better grade than the rest of the team because someone did the part, I was responsible for, so well.
I felt so bad for my behaviour, I cut my hair and shaved and hoped they won't recognize me at the university.
I'm sure there are or will be some rants about me this week -.-'3 -
This is just a bunch of things I needed to get out that I’ve been holding in for a while now.
Recently I’ve found myself In this state where I feel so depressed, lazy, and just pressured to program in general. I feel like it comes from me dismissing my abilities a lot of the time and I get demotivated to do stuff but at the same time when I do sit down and code I get distracted so easily, I can get work done but I just feel like I’m everywhere.
I want to apply for positions but I’m in this duality where I both feel like I can or can’t do it, I feel like wherever I apply to will not be accepting to people that don’t have a big degree or a ton of work experience and that I’ll get fucked on it. I’m fucking anxious that if I do get a job they will be like “hey fucking do X” and I will have no fucking clue how to even do X, and I’ve had people tell me that they know for a fact I can do it but I still fucking can’t believe it because I just completely doubt myself because I have failed at things like learning certain frameworks or failing to make the things I want and having to turn to simpler projects first because I’m too overwhelmed by the scale and I didn’t do any thinking about it before hand.
I don’t know if I’m making sense at all, I always write out rants like this and I always just erase them because I fucking hate whining like this but I need to let it out before I go more crazy I’ve been holding so much in for a long time now and it’s not been good.
I just over all feel terrible, anxious, and unproductive and I want it to stop.6 -
I can't pass a whiteboard interview to save my life. I did pretty well on a fizzbuzz whiteboard a few years ago but in reality in is fairly straightforward. I am interviewing right now and the more I practice and study I realize my teacher in college was right 25 years ago. I should never have become a programmer. I am a likable and fairly competent coder but I am completely overwhelmed and stressed.14
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So. I was pretty sure I had fixed the problem we had with compiling in Windows 10. Thing is I did it in a stopgap non-permanent way because we have to be done with it by the second week of February to support our subcontractor.
Turns out I had an older version of the framework we build on installed on my box and the newer version decided to fix their windows 10 compilation issues the right way. So we can't use our stopgap solution. So basically I look like an idiot and more important people than me have to work on the problem because I am not allowed to install anything on my box myself, our SA is already overwhelmed, and only the higher ups have the newest framework version. Good thing it's a long weekend and I have plenty of of beer and whiskey.1 -
So, i've noticed something:
- My grandfather drinks nothing but the water.
- My grandmother recently increased her water intake due to meds making her retain water way less
- My dad has been drinking more water in an attempt to be healthier.
- I don't drink the house water without boiling it first, as i'm the only one that thinks it smells and tastes like wet dog smells, aside from with like kool-aid or similar where the taste is masked enough to not be detectable.
Well, what does this matter? I'll tell you:
- My grandfather went from fine aside from minor balance issues to totally mentally fried in 24 hours.
- My grandmother is spacing out while driving and falling more and more.
- My dad went from fine to overwhelmed by basic decisions in a couple months of moving here.
- I've noticed a slight decline in my mental health, but this is probably from issues i've had with my college and general stress.
Correlation ≠ causation, but... it's usually-unfiltered water from a well placed uncomfortably close to a lagoon, and it was never tested for safety before use (despite my protests.)19 -
Do mechanical keyboards actually make a difference?
Is it worth the dosh?
What kind of keyboard do you use?24 -
So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.
Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).
Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did
2 -
When I was a wee little lad of 13, still with that hopeful gleam in my eye, I signed up to work as the webmaster for a local org.
At the time, I had played around with HTML and CSS and a little JavaScript, and I thought all I'd be doing was updating some pages with announcements or whatever
I got paid in SSL, which is a thing kids in Maryland have to do to graduate, and the whole idea is that you need to do 75 hours of volunteer work in your community
The people there promised me 8 hours a month for what I thought would be easy work, and so I eagerly signed up.
What I thought would be updating a few html files and emailing them to the org was actually having to manage a full on server running PHP4 LAMP stack
Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. I tried to make the updates they wanted, but I had no idea how to write PHP, let alone manage a database and server.
I think I got out of it by just never responding to their emails once I realized how fucked I was, but that was definitely the worst learning experience of my dev career1 -
Not sure if this counts, but a few years ago I had decided to start a tech blog and I was so excited about it at first. I was like, "I'm gonna make a post EVERY single day!". And well.. for awhile I did and then I was feeling pressured to keep doing it and started to feel overwhelmed. Then about 2-3 months later, I got burnt out, hit a low point and unfortunately, deleted my entire blog xD I later learned to pace myself when it comes to things like that.3
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Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.
So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.
We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).
Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.
Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*
Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.
Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.
SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances
Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -
SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -
...
Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.5 -
As I am not that advanced (started off as a 'jack of all trades' - huge mistake) in programming (about a bit below average), I'm just overwhelmed by knowledge of someone here, yet I am happy to know how much I can learn in next couple of years. 😀 I feel kinda stupid when I see everyone posting what programming horror or stuff they are going through and I am there be like (sometimes) - I know some of these words 😂
I am a newbie in this community (but soph. student in uni) thus I'd like to just say hi and wish everyone a good day even if things are not good at the time🤗😃💪5 -
I'm getting beat up pretty bad by Rust. I like it so far but man is it hard. Imposter-syndrome is almost making me lose motivation. Almost, but I won't quit, one day I'll get there.
I think the primary reason I think I'm having such a hard time is that I'm trying to learn stuff that prevents me from making some mistakes that I have never run into. I know a bit of the theory but no hand's on experience on double-free errors, memory leaks and weird low-level stuff. I read the documentation, mostly understand what stuff is for but when I go write code I'm just like "now what?". I don't have enough experience to know when and where to use some concepts and I'm super lost. I don't know where to start and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by all sorts of new stuff is at the same time exciting and frightening.
I have never, as a programmer, thought something was hard. All of my past knowledge required dedication, work and patience, but I wouldn't say I ever felt something was *hard*. But Rust... damn. Rust is hard.
Hopefully at the end of this super steep learning curve I'll know a lot more stuff and have stronger "dev powers" and be one step closer to being as knowledgeable as some of you guys around here to whom I look up to.2 -
Never forget how it feels to be new and overwhelmed. For every question that you ask, remember that you should eventually pay that back by answering one for someone newer than you.
I think a lot of times, once developers get enough experience, it's all too easy to judge or make fun of those who are new for something they don't know. Remember that you were there once and lend a non-judgmental helping hand!3 -
WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS LEAVE CLOSE TO DEADLINES???
My team exists of three developers and a product owner. By the end of the month we have to deliver two new applications. It has not been going as smoothly as we'd hoped so far. However, one of the developers has cut his time for this project from fulltime to 1-2 days a week starting this week. The other developer is also needed on another project and has to run to the rescue whenever there is a problem with the servers, so he doesn't really solve any bugs either. Also he'll be leaving straight after deadline so he has to document everything only he knows and he'll be on holiday next week. Also, the product owner leaves tomorrow and will be back after deadline.
So.. Here I am, junior developer, have been here for about three months and I have to fix everything and do the communication to our testers as well. I'm feeling too overwhelmed right now...5 -
I've been looking into the world of mechanical keyboards, and damm I'm overwhelmed by the possibillities of configurations and products. Why is chosing a keyboard for the MacBook 12" which has only 1 usb-c so hard? Any advice on keyboards and keyswitches?5
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Next Wednesday, I have a project presentation at my school, where me and a fellow student will show to a jury a project we worked on for at least 6 months (and also that the 3rd dude in my team did absolutely nothing). This means that at the end of this, we'll get a diploma, which means the end of my fucking studies that took me 7 years.
The same day, I have my 3rd job interview with a company, in which I expect to either sign a contract or to get back the contract a few days after.
I'm both overwhelmed and shitting my pants.2 -
Went late in life to college.
Got my first IT Dev Job at 30
Now almost five years later, I'm depressed, realizing that I can't do this. I'm a horrible dev and not the kind of "horrible" that writes blog posts about how horrible they are while they maintain several libraries and casually make tutorials on YouTube.
I'm genuinely bad.
I tried learning and improving myself. But I'm always overwhelmed and frustrated, because there are so many things I don't understand. Learning anything takes me an incredible amount of time and then it's only on a superficial level, to the point I mostly memorise patterns but never truly understand. While others go through documentions and they understand everything, I have to find articles that explain solutions and concepts with super simple examples. Without Google I would be lost.
Online or in real life, I'm just getting baffled how poorly I compare to others.
I can't sleep, it's 3 am and I have a meeting in the morning. I still wasn't fired so far, but I should be fired. I messed up in all aspects of life, but realizing your choices were all wrong is dragging me down.3 -
I'm about to take full responsibility for front-end solutions plus doing UI/UX design, and I've pretty much completed the official React and Redux tutorials.
In my defense I only said I was interested in UX but I have a creeping suspicion they think I'm a UX God.
I also used AngularJS for years and I feel that React speaks to me in a completely different way. It's exactly how I want to do things. Big fan of functional programming as well... So I think I'll thrive with React/Redux and friends if I can get some hours in before things kick off. It's just enough pressure for me to put in the work without feeling overwhelmed... for now.
It's thrilling though. I'm somewhere between excited that I'll get to show off my skills and scared that I'll be exposed as a fraud. I have a mild case of impostor syndrome though, so I think it'll work out in the end.2 -
When I was young I'd play games and around age 11 received an Xbox for my bday. Hated the case, so I painted the case. Since I had it open looked into getting a replacement fan.Thats when everything changed. I discovered the modding scene and without having any computer background/literacy got to studying.
The program that caught my eye ran on Linux. *shrugs thinking how hard can it be? * Read about Linux and discover dual booting. To do that I needed to resize windows partition. Learn more about partitions and get to it. Finally prepped... Backup in case of the worst, resized windows partition, working Ubuntu bootable USB, and printed install tutorial. Check, check, and check. Install was good. Sort of.
While Ubuntu worked, the broadcam wireless chipset driver did not. Fast forward a week and I feel that i had mastered the terminal basics. And WiFi worked! Go download the aforementioned program and FTP into the Xbox and BOOM... It doesn't work. More days and hours spent researching. In the end it all chalked up to not setting a static IP address on Xbox.
After all was said and done I had a bitchin Xbox. I think the only thing I didn't put on it was some gold spinning rims.
Sad part about that Xbox is that I never used it after. Instead I just kept messing around with Linux and learning more about computers. Taught myself HTML/CSS. Learned more about shell scripting. Then Windows cmd basics. Tried programming languages but felt a little overwhelmed. Only messed with <10 lines of code to tweak existing programs.
Now I'm learning C# and loving it. Planning on C++ or Java next! -
No no no. That's it. Less than 2 years experience supposed to be leading a team of 12 soon to be 17 most of which have more experience than me! Been given sever admin responsibilities, training and managing 2 large frame works in addition to everything else I was doing before.
With the current set of projects we were given half the amount of time to do over twice the amount of work. Management seems to expect constant over time. And I keep being nagged by management to finish x,y,z. Every thing is high piority and I keep being asked to switch between tasks every hour or so nothing gets completed when this happens every time I make them aware this happens. The worse thing is that the CEO has a way of naming and shaming people who fall behind work infront of the entire company.
I have only been surviving thanks to a few saints in the team who just get on with the work without argument but now found out a bunch of these are moving to better companies!!!
I like helping people but with everything that is going on I can't find time to and I know at times I end up coming across inpatient with them that they don't deserve. But if you are part of a team please try and solve your issue yourself before asking others every half an hour there are too many of you and I need to get things done too.
And why is it so damn hot sitting at the desk sweating.
Ok I am prob on my meriod and being over the top grumpy. I want to find a new job but so tired in the evenings that I just want to collapse on my bed and do nothing. At end of writing this and feel a little better.2 -
Got a promotion and had a loose definition of what my new tasks were. I got overwhelmed with being the go-to for project and account managers, and 75% of our devs, on top of my own work I had to complete for clients.
Eventually I wrote up a 2 page document of things I had to deal with daily/weekly and how I don't have time to do my work, so why should I even bother to do it.
We got it resolved, my boss took some of the tasks off my plate (like training the new hires) and allows me to work from home whenever I need to finish up work.1 -
When you're a total noob and only knew about an html, scss and js file when it comes to websites but then you see an actual website of a company with all separate scss files for components and you feel so overwhelmed... yeah... rip2
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Sooo, my first rant here.
Just joined a company and all of their websites are built on WordPress, and personally I am by far not a huge fan of WordPress, tried digging around for an alternative to suggest switching and just fuuuuuuuuuck, there is just too much shit, and half of it is even worse than WordPress, oh well...8 -
guys I did it
I'm trying to set up a second Fiverr gig for tutoring Node.JS but i needed an estimate of how long it would take so my friend who doesn't like coding very much agreed to help me
and today he said he understood the cirriculum, was not overwhelmed and had fun
yay2 -
So I'm helping my vocational school teacher with his Programming class as a graduate. While we were alone and talking about normal stuff (plans for the class and stuff like that), he brought up discord and after that I told him "I really wanna work for them, but I don't wanna move" and he continued to tell me how I have so much potential, how nothing stops me, how I am going far and that I'm going to do a lot. I wanted to legit cry inside because I've always thought the exact opposite of myself and always just thought about living a normal life, with the same dev job, nice home yknow the norm.
Idk man that talk happened in the afternoon today and Im still overwhelmed with the positivity.3 -
I feel so overwhelmed. I feel like I'm never going to actually learn everything about programming. I feel like I'm just going to learn some new API every time I want to do some thing. I feel like I'll lose the ability to do basic programming. I feel like I need a cup of coffee.3
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I've been developing an application off and on over the past year and a half for fun. Was a good excuse to learn something new.
It is to the point now that it has potential (still needs tons of work) to be much better than several existing applications out there doing the same thing.
I am feeling overwhelmed because I either need to a) seriously invest time into it to make it a fully fledged tool and try to sell it b) open source it and see if other people find it worth working on or c) just abandon it and move on.
Has anyone else been in this type of situation knowing there is potential but honestly may be more than you can do as a single person?7 -
Teacher was asking for project submission using J2EE servlets and jsp.
That very moment, in my laptop, I was working on another project using PHP...
I showed this project.. and he was so happy that only I did the project he requested...
Didn't even bother to check once that it was developed using PHP. He was overwhelmed.
Though, at the of semester, he spent almost 90% just telling about internships and placements.. and nvr taught Advanced Java.. -
This is story and not a rant about my journey in programming. I've left out some details ofc, some of which I couldn't remember and some I got too lazy to add. They're not that important so I omitted them. There may be a lot of errors but it's almost 3 am and I cba. I'm tried but yeah, just decided to share something because it's been a while. I would also like to hear you guys' journey as well. Maybe they might inspire someone, who knows 🤷🏿♂️.
I had a thirst of learning more about computers and how they worked when I was around 13. I started looking into web development because I was really curious how websites worked. I started using cms's like web.com, enjij.com and any other cms I could find back in 2011 to build websites just to get a basic knowledge. A year later I picked up programming because I wanted to start making them by myself from scratch. I did some research and found websites that teach you how to start. I used codecademy and YouTube to teach myself the basics of web programming. It was fine for a while until I got bored and wanted more. I found out about php and it's capabilities. so I learned that using the same methods. I built sites for my Minecraft server, a small e-company I wanted to start and social media sites just for fun. I struggled with bugs and issues of course but that made it fun. The late nights trying to fix them or the late nights where I burst with ideas and was just coding. it was bliss. I wanted to expand my knowledge and tried learning Python but I felt overwhelmed back then and took a break. The years go by, I still made websites using php, js, html and css. I improved my skill with them. Now using OOP, writing sleeker and better code and my web designs improved massively as well as my MySQL abilities. It was time for me to graduate and I wanted to go into computer science but because of how much time spent programming, I fell back on my classes and just barely managed (albeit it wasn't the only reason, I slacked and didn't care because I felt hs was too easy for me at first). I instead went on to do a game design course in Toronto Film School and that's where I learned c# for unity and a little bit of c++ (this shit is so hard bro, I couldn't keep up and I've forgotten most of it). Fast forward, I graduate with decent grades and can now make some pretty nice games. I took a year off after that to look for jobs but as you know, you need experience and it's not easy to get those. I tried making an android app and got stuck with a very simple but that took 4 months to fix and then I burned out. I also lost my programming motivation partly because I felt like I wasn't making anything unique and meaningful. I felt empty so I quit for a while. All my plans fail and I decide to go back to school to upgrade the marks I needed and either do comp sci, mechanical engineering or stem. I forgot to mention btw that my goals shifted from just programming to being an inventor. Anyways, I boosted my grades and I did superbly so I can go into anything I want now. Currently just waiting for my acceptance letter while learning Python again along with react, SharePoint and a few other things to boost my skills and knowledge. I'm slowly getting my mojo back and it's really fun. But yeah that's my journey 😁1 -
What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?
I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.
I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.
After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.
It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.
I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.
There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.
At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?
I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.2 -
Really want to start an amazon affiliate web page, or blog, or a monetized YouTube channel, or something to rake in some extra cash on the side, but... Overwhelmed by the realization that you gotta be damn good and knowledgeable to pull something like that off. Tried to make a web development series on YouTube once and was blown away by how little I was able to explain things without running into situations where I was clueless to some specific detail.4
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I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.
How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life
Kevin H. made a huge mistake.
The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.
And he knew it immediately.
It was, he said, "instant regret."
Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."
Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.
On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.
Time to die, those voices still said.
And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.
"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."
But nobody did, so he jumped.
It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.
He didn't want to die.
But now, he was sure, it was too late.
From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.
Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.
Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.
He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.
When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.
The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.
From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.
While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.
Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.
He also met a woman.
Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.
And he tours the country, sharing his story.
So why re-tell it here?
Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.
Just the same...
We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.
My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.
You need intense curiosity...
You need a killer work ethic...
And you must, MUST have... resilience.
Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.
Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.
It is also, though, a metaphor.
See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...
And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.
Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.
Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.
And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...
For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.
To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.
Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.
The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...
" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."
Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.
And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.
As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde -
Are there any tools, points of reference, barebones templates, bits of advice, etc. that anyone can share or direct me to that could potentially a programmer with ADD stay organised and keep projects/code structured?
Just a bit of background:
I am 29 years old and have battled with severe Attention Deficit Disorder since early childhood. No hyperactivity, just a mind that is constantly running at light speed. I have a tendency to lose focus on the main goal in my projects and I fall victim to feature creep more than I'd like to admit—to the extent that on countless occasions, I've ended up just starting projects over from scratch because they became too convoluted and hectic.
I've spent the past 2~3 months working on a sort of companion app for players of the game Warframe using Dart/Flutter. The main purpose of the app is to provide players with an accessible and customisable agenda to help with keeping in-game goals organised (oh, the irony). I have made a decent amount of progress, but I consistently find myself working on various bits and pieces of code (usually) without finishing each of them before moving on to something else. What I end up with is a tangled yarn ball of code and I get lost and overwhelmed in the chaos.
Any feedback or advice is much appreciated.9 -
I've been working in industry for 2-3 months after graduating from CompuSci last year, doing big data stuff surrounded by people with huge amounts of experience. I've learnt a lot but I'm still being overwhelmed by all the stuff I'm being told to do that seems second nature to my seniors and there's not enough time to Google it all and understand it ;____;3
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Why are there so many testing framworks for JavaScript? Jasmine, mocha, buster ... and for spies, stubs and mocks, there is sinon and for assertions, there is chai. And oh you can record entire external api calls with nock and whatever else I forgot. I am a bit overwhelmed by this overambundancy of libraries. Writing tests is supposed to be easy.2
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From the abandoned university my first dev project came from the course of programming 1(C as language).
I had to implement a robot that moves inside any matrix like map following both specified rules and random moves, and had to reach sooner or later the exit place of the room.
At first I was overwhelmed by the task at hand, then I had to calm myself and start hacking around to get any idea on how to even understand what's required to get to that point.
It obsessed me for the whole first 2 weeks, but the progress was quiet steady.
Then I hit a fundamental problem of state and movement of the robot... And, as always, the best thing to do at this point is to simply detach your attention from the issue|project.
In the same day my mind asynchronously bursted a solution to my problem, and after some time I came back to the project and accomplished it with 100% of the requirements met 😁
This is what it looked like in the console(minified here):
3333333
3000003
3000003
3003003
3003003
4003023
3333333
Guess which is which 😉2 -
Hey I have a career dilemma, was wondering if anyone experienced that and if anyone could give a tip on how to resolve it maybe.
TL;DR: I'm a Front End dev, who wants to become an expert in everything but obviously can't. What do I do? How do I choose what to learn?
Longer version. I started with Front End. Now i'm doing alright with Vue, React, bit of Angular, and other related to the stack tech. Then I started learning python because of a project I was doing (personal client). Didn't go far with this one. I still find it interesting esp. in the machine learning context, which I also want to do. Now I'm studying .NET, because of a project I'm currently doing at a company (full time, I'm doing ReactJS front end there tho). And I'm also studying for GCP exam, because I wanna know how to deploy solutions to the cloud. But one also needs to secure them, so I'm looking at some courses on Cybrary, in a search for appropriate courses.
I feel overwhelmed and unproductive. I feel like i need to specialize just in one field with some general knowledge about other areas. So I feel like I have to select what I do/learn carefully.
Any thoughts? How did you plan your career? What kind of goals did and do you set for yourself? Are you happy with those now once you achieve them?
I'd love to hear some stories. :)6 -
!rant
I keep diving into Racket (my first lisp-like), I often get totally overwhelmed by macros.
You don't know what power means until you program a programming language. -
So I have done some solo projects and some group projects now and I saw that Hacktoberfest was on so I went and signed up. I saw some of the things todo and got overwhelmed with the code on the repo. What do you guys think I should start off with in terms of open source projects. I want to get into some open source projects but don't know what to look for or where to start. Any help would be appreciated.1
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I'm so sick of having to maintain a 10 year old back-end codebase that is built on a proprietary php framework that isn't documented at all. I am still a student, and I'm left mostly alone to figure things out. It's been a while since I started, but it sucks all the energy out of me to figure out how things are built...
My senior is too busy with other projects so when I ask a question I only get answers hours later, and we work remote. He is so busy that he has to consistently work overtime.
I am so overwhelmed...5 -
Guys, this is not a rant. But I need a career advice. I don’t have a BD in CS, but I studied by myself and took some other classes and was working in the field for more than an year now after graduating from university. I do full stack developing with javascript and sometimes java at a startup now.
My goal was to eventually get to grad school in CS. I found some programs what accept students from non CS back grounds too. I can’t do BD again it will take too long. And I’m old ! lol
If any of you had similar experiences, or know some good programs would you let me know? Should I prepare portfolio or should I accomplish something great in order to get accepted? Or should I just try applying first? I’m focusing more on east coast to choose schools from but open to anything for now.
It’s quite scary to really start working on this since I already have a job and there are so much information regarding grad school, I get overwhelmed. Though it’s something i need to overcome. It would be really helpful for me if you could share your two cents.
I love what I do now, and really hope that I get to study further and explore in depth. Also I’m interested in AI or machine learning. Also if you know good source for reading recently published papers on CS let me know!
Thanks for reading! :)11 -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.
1 -
!rant
Well I really gotta ask now!
I am Really interested in building CyanogenMod from scratch for my currently unsupported device but I'm overwhelmed by the wiki of CM. Does anyone has an idea where to start? There only a hand full of devs for my device and I want to help. 😥 -
So being in ops, I have certifications in networking and Linux, and am currently working on my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.
I've been talking to a few "professional" (they have jobs) devs that I personally know, and with the exception of 1, it seems like version control, automation, networking, and server related tasks are beyond them.
As I want to get into the dev side of things (devops preferably), I feel somewhat overwhelmed at some of the requirements of the job, especially knowing that I cannot take too much of a pay hit as I have a family to support.
My question is this, based on real world experiences with hiring, how much weight do you think knowing your way around networks, cloud, virtualization, servers, and all of the other things ops does when it comes to getting your foot in the door for a dev job?
I've casually looked around, and it seems that getting the foot in from this side is almost impossible.2 -
Alright! What's this hype on another X language/framework. Let me just jump right in because that will make me a cool kid.2
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Trying to start a dev meetup with a friend, super excited but also nervous! I'm just a junior dev, absolutely overwhelmed by every aspect of the pool of knowledge available to me but absolutely excited to embrace it! I'm just a lowly angular developer but my aspirations are great :) I hope to bring people of unconventional ideologies together to discuss concepts in ways thay are... Well, unconventional!
Here's to learning, and growing!1 -
Made a new account since there are peeps who know my old handle outside of this amazing project I mean site.
I've been feeling like a complete failure past few years. Back when it first begun I was sick. Sick with the atrocious sickness called inability to say no. So I had signed up for multiple projects, I've been a member of a drama club (which disbanded after a year with nothing to show for it), I've been a member of an active student group and all of that at the same time combined with my studies since I was (still am) a student.
At the end of it all, I was completely overwhelmed. I tried to do them one by one but I screwed up, I screwed them all up in the end. I was never used to such level of responsibility prior to starting my studies and I bit off more than I could chew.
Ever since then just like falling dominos falling uniformly to form a picture, every single time I took up a responsibility I got overwhelmed and failed them all. It gotten to a very depressing point where I couldn't even go to uni, I was terrified of seeing my professors to whom I had failed.
So here I am, getting closer and closer to my midlife, still a student, feeling like a complete failure that I am.
I don't want that. I don't want to be a failure. I don't want people to second guess wether to entrust things to me or not. I don't want to grow up to being a bitter man blaming everything and everyone for my failures. I don't want any of that. I want to change for the better and I'll do everything in my power to do it.12 -
I'd like to dive deep into web development.
I'm creating a little tool for myself on a web page, including server-side php, css, html, mysql and jquery, all just for fun and the experience.
I've got several ideas on how I want this tool to work and behave ...
But it's fucking difficult to wrap my head around all those technologies available. I don't know how to achieve certain things (yet) and what even to look out for😣
Fun fact: I already experimented with HTML, CSS, jQuery before as a noob. Yet today I've forgotten almost everything and need to start almost all over again, now even including PHP and MySQL, too.
This is gonna be fine. 😐 -
Right now I have all these ideas in my head that I want to do after my exams are over, but I feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I came up with, from finally starting to learn how to create and develop my own website to video editing for a small documentary that I want to do on my city just to train these skills.
If that is not enough, summer is here and I want to do lots of stuff with friends and my gf.
Any ideas how I can manage all of this?4 -
I have a very little working experience with someone else's code, and even lesser experience working with a professional code base. All my previous apps had around 8-9 java files at max, with very rare moduling and folders.
And this start up where am currently the intern, has handed me theiir develop branch, it has almost a 100 java files, 50 external libs, massive use of architectural designs ,data binding and custom views and so much more ! Damn, am overwhelmed , but so excited to learn the practices i was procrastinating for so long 💗💗💗
The only problem is lack of a mentor, since the sir who made this beauty is a superman who is currently handling the server and ai side and isn't usually available.
But i guess i will do fine, hell it's a FBI's data key in my hands :D1 -
Why so many weird frameworks and libraries? these days I study so many frameworks and install things and I am actually overwhelmed. Sometimes those things conflict each other and end up messing up my PC. Do frameworks and libraries make dev environment fancy? I am not sure, to me it seems that things are going messy. Please give me fresh perspective.2
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I'm doing this internship because I'm a self taught programmer and I want to land a job at this obviously. Well I get this boss that first asks me for a chatbot. I'm a bit overwhelmed but decided to take it because didn't seem that complicated just time consuming. Then he goes and scale the chatbot to a full blown A.I. that talks, has a avatar reacting to emotions, has speech recognition and a lot of things. I been making progress on the normal bots you see around messenger and slack. I asked for more people to work for me and there is a guy who is working back-end and has never sit down and taught me his system even do I ask everyday for it. Seems like this internship is a waste of time. Any tips?10
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How do you train someone to be a programmer fast? (No not like a 'learn to code in a weekend' thing.) Books? Throw them in the deep end? Work with them side by side for a while?
We will be hiring a guy as a programmer. He is very tech/computer savvy, but literally 0 school or work experience programming. I've known him for a little while and honestly trust he'll try to learn but I feel with as little as he knows he is going to get overwhelmed fast. He is not technically under me but it's going to be my responsibility to train him.
I'm worried he's going to get completely overwhelmed and burn out quickly.18 -
!dev
My time management skills are abysmal. I am in my senior year in school and a few months back decided to appear for the informatics Olympiad. So now I am reading a book on discrete math, while reading books on algorithms and data structures. I code every day for around two hours. I have my math syllabi in school which is all calculus. My physics syllabi consists of all of EM and Optics along with nuclear physics. I haven’t touched chemistry since the beginning of this year. I try to give a considerable amount of time to math and physics because I f***ing love studying those. But doing that means slacking off on the Olympiad stuff. I am completely overwhelmed. My midterms are two weeks away and I am so unprepared. I am really clueless on how to manage time. -
Ppl, always remember to take a walk when you don't know how to do something or when you feel overwhelmed.5
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Hey Everyone I’m new to coding and I just wanted to ask what I should be do when feeling overwhelmed and burned out from code, I have anxiety and ADHD, I am not able to focus for very long.7
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I started coding after getting into college and was overwhelmed with so many people around me who were already pretty good at it. Slowly I started learning things on my own, getting few internships to apply those skills and built few small projects. Managed to get a dev full time job, spent the last few months learning Spring MVC and Spring Boot. When I now look back, I definitely feel I've walked few miles, although there's still a lot to learn. I once doubted whether I can be any good in the dev world as my peers were bagging good jobs/internships but now it certainly feels that I can move ahead in this path which I liked so much. Yes, programming is stressful and painful sometimes. The learning curve is steep but if this is what excites you, go for it! Spend few months training yourself and then applying what you have learnt. Just, never give up! You can do wonders!
Oops, was I supposed to rant here? That is of course necessary. You can't imagine a dev life without rants but let that be for another post. -
Just started with learning react, and with the little JavaScript knowledge I have I feel kinda overwhelmed.. I’m following a Udemy course which explains it all very well but as soon as an assignment presents itself it’s as if I have learned nothing.
Super frustrating and demotivating to “forget everything and feel like a total idiot when I have to complete an assignment..4 -
Accountability Post: I'm 6 Lynda.com tutorials into a 17 tutorial set to rebuild my full stack skills and try to bring them to more current standards. Also looking at additional course paths but feeling a bit overwhelmed when I think of the time it will take just to get through them, let alone all the practice. I must do this, though, and more frequently, even, if I intend to successfully work in this same field for the next 21-ish years until I can retire.1
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Am I the only one trying to learn angularjs with a 2 month old tutorial and already breaking changes were made. It's soo frustrating I just wanna quit frameworks and do it manually.3
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!Rant, but something I wanted to share.
I started as a placement software developer on Tuesday, and yesterday I was working on production stuff.
Admittedly, it's an admin dashboard so it doesn't need to look great, but man, trying to get bootstrap tabs to switch and display a div with the charts we want on it using angular was a time and a half!
Despite being overwhelmed with information, and being mostly out of my depth developing in JavaScript (my main languages have been Java and C++) I'm having a great time, bar the 6.30am wake up time! :D -
Hey All, hope everyone is doing absolutely well, need some advice/help i'm kind of stuck and overwhelmed at the moment :"D. I Really would like to get back into c++, i have not done much programming for quite a good few months on this particular programming language, i love to learn by doing and following examples, if someone could recommend me some good books or other resources i'd be very grateful :=), or some good tips onto getting back into this language :-).
Thank you once again for taking the time to read through my question :D.
Milo <3 :D5 -
wanted to set up a k3s cluster with my pi's. took me a fucking whole day to find useful ansible playbooks (which I needed to fix because outdated).
I want to habe metallb and nginx ingress running, so that differs from the default.
and now i spent the whole day trying to install a fucking pi hole and for some reason metallb does not fart out an external ip for the pi hole.
found several issues regarding this matter.
maaaan i am completely new to this whole clusterfuck and i feel a bit overwhelmed atm. i thought this would be easier. am i just an idiot?8 -
Share your thoughts on the RxJS learning curve.
I'm learning RxJS and I'm overwhelmed by the number of operators.
1
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