Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.

I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.

After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.

I reported it.

Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.

I was offered a job.

Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.

They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.

It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.

My mom uses an App to make free international phone calls with my aunts. But to generate credits in the app, she has to watch a lot of video ads, do a lot of stuffs in the app, which is time consuming & boring. So, I created an automation that keeps watching video ads, closes the ads when its done, downloads apps & runs them to get more credits, etc. So, the automation keeps generating credits everyday. now my mom can make free international calls whenever she needs...

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

hey, y'all android users listen up. i wanna start a new project but im not sure if it's gonna be useful. essentially, i want to make a scripting language to program people's phone, so devs or android super users can make the most of their phone. users will be able to create, share, and schedule execution of the scripts all from the app. is it a good idea? is their something like it?

example of a use i personally would have: there is a set date for when the soccer league schedule for the youth league i play in is supposed to be released online. however, the set date is never met, and it is usually a few days late. in this case, i could make a script to request to the website with the schedule and see if the html changed from last time, and if so it would send me a notif saying "check for schedule" or something similar.
then, i could schedule it to run every five minutes, and i wouldnt have to check manually.

its essentially bash automation for your phone.

good idea?

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

I have to go through roughly 700 data entries and adjust the system's data accordingly ... by hand.😑
We don't have the tools to automate this reliably, the only available tool, tells you that an error occured and what happened but not where. That would've been kinda helpful...
The problem is that the respective data object of the data entry often contains a phone number, which has to be in a standardized format ... which it is not. Every number is formatted in like 10 variations!? A dozen different separators like spaces, commas, slashes and hyphens. And it must be edited manually 😖
My solution: built a goddamn chrome extension to format the string on click. Done. Saves a few seconds each time and a lot of headache in future. Of course given the correctness of the extension.

since my favourite phone automation app llama is no more i discovered automate. you build your 'scripts' with functional blocks. it's quite fun but debugging is messy.

mildly interesting: implementing a guided setup instead of defining the values directly leaves me with 77% setup and ui vs 23% actual task.