A developer and his new projects

Stakeholder: Users are connecting invalid memberships to their web accounts. They shouldn’t be able to do that.

Me: Their memberships were valid when they set up the account. Your team’s record de-duping project is the issue here. You decided to mark those memberships as invalid.

I’m real tired of this stakeholder acting like this is a website issue or user error. Plus, this chaos could have been avoided if they and other involved stakeholders had just cc’d me on this de-duping project. I would have said their approach was not a good idea. But they didn’t because they want to do what’s convenient for them. If they want to be a reliable source of truth for our data, then they need to be responsible with how they’re handling that data.

Me always...

Me: I've not done this before, so any guess would be pure assumption.

Client: Okay, but still, you would have some idea, right?

Me: It might get done in 3 days or may take even 30.

After 3 days:

Client: But you said that it will be done in 3 days. Now you are saying there MVP is not ready. Do you even know, your part is the most critical one in the project. We believed in you. We trusted you. This is insane. It was a wrong decision to choose you.

Me (in my head): Didn't I say, this is the first time I am trying to scrape Coles? It might take time?

Me (in actual): I understand, it is getting delayed. Am trying to get this up ASAP....

Anyone else experienced toxic clients but still didn't lose their cool?

Visual Studio 2022 compiles our internal c++ cmake project as a mix of x86 and x86_64 binaries, then fails to link.

VS 2019 correctly compiles everything as x86_64.

No idea why. And, obviously, it's not a documented problem.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This is the strangest thing that has happened to me:

I once worked as a intern at a consultancy company. Me and another junior got a brand new customer project assigned to us (bad idea I know) we spent 2 months working on that project, building a website from scratch. The customer paid 10 000€ for it. The website sucked and didn't work properly in the end.

I ended up leaving the company for unrelated reasons and left the project. A couple of months later I asked the other junior whatever happened to that project and he said that the customer seemed to have forgotten about the project and no one was working on it anymore

Like what? How do you just forget about something you paid 10 000€ for? I mean I'm happy they did as it was the worst project I've built

Fuck corporate managers who set goals without consulting the team as to what they can commit to!! "These are the goals that you need to commit to and you need to get them done in three months!" ... New team. Members come and go (even I replaced one). Low cohesion. Many dependencies. Unclear goals. A PO who's certified in many different ways, but has no damn idea what to do. Sure, let's get this shit thing done in 3 months.. aaaand we're late 6 months. Nice job. Stupid fuckers. I'm so glad I'm just consulting on this project and not a member of this chaos organization.

...another (probably about fourth) completely futile attempt at making MASM compiling pipeline work...

...what the fuck... seriously, i've spent together about two weeks of time trying to make a fucking default hello world compile... ml64 problems, then rc.exe problems, apparently i was missing some dumb CommonService.dll which not only doesn't exist anywhere on my computer, but it doesn't even seem to exist at all in this fucking dimension. After several hours I had the bright idea of "fuck MS rc, let's just grab any other random resource compiler that I can find, and see if that one works".

Funnily enough, it does. Except Visual MASM can't run it from it's build process because it fucks up the commandline call, so I need to run it manually, and then when I run the build from V-MASM, the rc call still fails, but then it checks for the resulting .res file and finds it, so it happily continues with success...

...and now fuckin... what even is it? *goes to check*
oh yeah, now linker is shitting itself:
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'user32.lib'

And I'm just completely defeated, just searching system-wide for the lib intending to copy it into the linker folder because fuck this fucking bullshit, I've had enough of drowning in MS BuildTools versions and installations and uninstallations and fixes and modifys and repairs and all that FUCKING BULLSHIT.

HOW. THE. FUCK. is this in any way usable for anyone. I suspect nobody ever actually tried to build an assembler project in the last 30 years, so nobody noticed it DOESN'T. FUCKING. WORK.

THIS.
THIS is why I hate anything that's not a proper IDE where I install ONE thing, and do everything in that ONE IDE and let IT figure out all this linuxy-soft-coupled bullshit of twentyfuckingthousand fucking useless commandline apps threwn around the whole fucking system where I'm fucking supposed to know where the fuck what is and which version and GO FUCK YOURSELF.

GIMME. FUCKIN. ONE: IDE. WHICH. WILL. INSTALL. ALL. THAT. IT. NEEDS. TO. BE. FUCKING. ABLE. TO. FUCKING. WORK. AND. COMPILE. SHIT!!!

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Why the fuck is gradle so horrible.

I literally have no idea why anyone would ever use this thing (other than being forced too because somehow the rest of the world is using it).

Every plugin has an arbitrary DSL that you have to magically know by piecing together enough snippets. At that point, no one is actually intuiting anything based on the beauty of the DSL, every build is a frankenstein of different snippets that were pasted from different versions of gradle blog posts or SO posts.

And if you do get it o work then the DSL changes, or it isn't compatible with another plugin.

I just want to write a fucking integration test in Kotlin. Can I just add an `integrationTest` task in `tasks` right next to `tasks.test`? No, obviously it goes in the `kotlin jvm() compilations` section, DUH.

The first thing anyone in the universe should have asked is "how is this better than literally hand writing a makefile"? At least then I would be able to see the commands that it ran.

Now I'm googling how to make the new jvm-test-suite plugin work when you're using the Kotlin plugin but every single result on Google for `jvm-test-suite kotlin` just returns the docs for jvm-test-suite (whose snippets obviously didn't work in my project) because those doc pages have "Kotlin" written above each of the gradle snippets.

Please just end this.

Oh and dev rant sucks too. It thinks anything separated by dots in a url.

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "Yes! I can't WAIT for tomorrow to begin! I'm gonna make SO much progress on that personal project that I just KNOW is gonna change the world and make me a billionaire! My time is now!"

Next day, 9am, first call of the day: "Ugh, waking up SUUUUUCKS! But, fine, just gotta get through the workday, then it's beast mode time!"

5pm: "Ugh, that day SUCKED... meeting after meeting, constant interruptions for the few minutes I got to hack code, SO many emails, and hey, good day, only five new things pushed down from corporate to bang my head against! Feelings pretty mentally exhausted, but it's all good, I fortunately love this programming stuff, so first dinner, then a little exercise, spend some time with the family, and then it's time to COOOODE!"

10pm: "Ok, house is FINALLY quiet (fucking dog), just a little noise from my daughter staying up way too late again... kinda spent, but this project still excites me, and I may not get as much done as I was hoping, but fine, I can still make some tangible progress and that's what matters. Maybe just one last quick check of email, Reddit, make sure there's no new Hot Ones or Honest Trailers I gotta watch, update IDEA plugins and see what's new, then it's work time! Nothing can stop me now!"

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "SHIT! I GOT FUCK ALL DONE AGAIN! GO DAAAAAAAMN IIIIIT!!!!"

Best:
- I built a good automation mechanism with a decent UI [slackbot]
- used as few frameworks and ext libs as I could. Mostly based on bare java
- client wanted to migrate it to Spring
- got 3 peeps assigned for the migration
- 2 months later their effort failed.
- win: my project has not been molested with Spring

Worst:
- i had an idea to develop smth on top of jmeter, using jmeter as a lib
- I downloaded and imported jmeter's src code
- static contexts, singletons, jmx/rmi everywhere [java is deprecating rmi support]
- not gonna happen... Not gonna build a new project on top of a legacy codebase.

As a tech lead i sometimes find it very hard to defend developers for no fault of theirs.

Management is completely incapable of noticing hard data like git logs or action items updated on an excel and seems to have an idea that the devs are incompetent , but the ba that sets impossible goals and crap business documentation is competent.

Should i just let the project and juniors burn.

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.

I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.

Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.

And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.

And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.

And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

How I approach the project: got an idea run at super speed thinks something important on my way there and return with the same speed. 🤔🤔🤔😐

So I got a new project idea , an app that takes your image and fits it in a mac window like a border .
Basically when I make a new website or app and I want to post screenshots of it , just the plain screenshot of the app looks bland but if I have a nice aesthetic ✨ mac OS window around it with rounder corners and stuff , it would look very cool . I bet everybody here has seen something like this once or twice. Is there an app that does this already ? takes an image from the user and puts a window around it , with the minimize ,maximize and close buttons and let's the user download the final image . Not necessarily a mac window with there could be option for different types of windows . Even VS code repo on Github has a mac window around it lol . So I would like to make an app that makes this whole process easier instead of requiring you to edit images of your app (in case u don't have windows or a mac for screenshot)
What tools (tech stack )would I require to make a web app for this purpose ?

It feels like having awful group project experiences in college is a rite of passage.

I once worked with two other students that had no idea what git was, and outright refused to learn/use it when they could just "email the code." I begrudgingly worked with this, and the night before the assignment was due they both emailed me their work.
One of them had the AUDACITY to send me a PHOTO OF THEIR CODE. As if I was going to take the time to re-type everything myself. Not to mention it was all clearly copy and pasted code anyway.. what a nightmare.

Triaging this project that's running on IIS makes me feel like my skillset is wasted on such banal garbage - while at the same time hoping nobody realizes what a mistake it was to put me on it because I have no idea how to troubleshoot or fix it.

I try not to be that guy who blames every issue on their tools but I can't believe some of these issues and respective fixes. Our QA was down for 2 months because I hadn't uninstalled a default module which prevents POST requests.

now... Im just tired and bored of what i do. i had a very hectic year rewriting a core functionality in my company, it was full of optimizations, logic improvements and learning new things.

I took 10 days off hoping id come hating my job less. I learned kotlin and worked on a personal server side project with it during the vacation and honestly i loved it. I missed learning new languages and concepts.

so i thought, well if i enjoyed coding during the vacation then my burnout is cured right ? well once i went back to work today I felt like shit and couldn't do a thing. disgusted of the idea coding for my employer. Too tired to continue my personal project after 8 hours of my job

I guess im back to square one

I hate group project so much.

I yet again successfully stirred up a big drama in my project group. For project, I proposed a CDN cache system for a post only database server. Super simple. I wanted to see what ideas other people come up with. So I said I am not good at the content and the idea is dumb. Oh man, what a horrible mistake. One group member wants to build a chat app with distributed storage. We implemented get/put for a terribly designed key value store and now they want to build a freaking chat app on top of a more stupid kV store using golang standard lib. I don't think any of those fools understand the challenges that comes with the distributed storage.

I sent a video explaining part of crdt. "That's way too complicated. Why are you making everything complicated."

Those fools leave too much details for course stuff's interpretation and says

"course stuff will only grade the project according to the proposal. It's in the project description".

I asked why don't they just take baby steps and just go with their underlying terribly designed kV store.

"Messaging app is more interesting and designing kV store with generic API is just as difficult"

😂 Fucking egos

Then I successfully pissed off all group members with relatively respectful words then pissed off myself and joined another group.

"my greatest fear in life is my best not being good enough."
Currently, I am building my second business around blockchain.
I am stacking on using the popularity of cryptocurrency and it's novelty to push the product universal.
My limitation (what I think):
1. My environment - unfortunately I live in a third world country
2. Naivety: I have never scaled a business, failed in my first attempt(this is my second).
3. Lack of fund: my budget is pretty low, and no I dont have a family support to raise any for marekting and promoting the business, so I am let with option of scaling it organically ( what "organically" means is spamming social media, forum's comments section to grow customers
4. Really the only option present: most folks here wont know what it means to be in a state of "survival", failing will cause you suffering.
5. Poor network: My friends, or the people around dont understand, cant comprehen what this means.
Cons:
1. I get to know what it means to carry your idea to the world again, this I hope will improve my knowledge base on business and make me less naive.
2. Portfolio boost: "wow!" that should be people's reaction when I tell them about the project.
3. If I succed, I hope the incentive will take me out of this shit hole.
4. I really want to get out of this shit hole - this should work!

it's a high prio week in my project and ive to be on site for it and the idea is hurtful

you know, i sometimes feel that whenever i think of a great idea, i start with such a bang, but end up losing motivation and therby delivering a very small scale personal project.

i have made some good apps in the past, some of which have so loyal users that they even mail me to this date. , and i then release an update for them.

those apps were made on an idea that would solve my problem, but i stopped using them. but somehow a few people had similar problem. somehow my app solved for them and somehow they are using it.

i wish i could not burst all my crackers during the development phase only. comparing this to my office work, the office work is still better.
In there, am responsible for delivering a specific output in specific timeframe (say a jira sprint) and if i complete something early, then no one wants me to pick future stuff.

instead i got this limited, exploration period where i can experiment with the codebase, add changes to my liking, get them reviewed / merged if they look good and that's it . once that exploration period is over, i have to pick the task of that weekend/sprint.
I am timed to deliver some stuff in some timeframe. in personal project, i want to put in everything "until its over" .the dev would be made in 3-7 days, with sometimes more than 24 hours per day being on the project, and the poosh! i will deploy it to playstore, market it on social media , and forget about it.

don't know what can be improved in here to make myself more happy with my personal projects? getting feedback/recognition keeps me on my toes

anyone has any tips for this kind of mind-blockage?

The project needs to make bigger changes to a module. A guy starts doing the changes. It turns out that the task is bigger than we though originally. Team lead has a brilliant idea: you need help. So he'll assign couple of more guys to do the same change.

What's the catch? The catch is that we are now all changing the same files. The code is a mess and tweaks and hacks are needed all over the place. So basically one guy changes the files and others just watch YouTube and wait for him to commit. The it's your turn to change the files and the first guy watches PornHub.

You could all just try to edit the same files at the same time, but we all know how GIT feels about that. You change random lines, he changes random lines, someone else changes random lines, all merges go to shit, nothing works and we spend 2x more time on just trying to get it compiling again.

Give me a cool SAAS idea that I can start building as my hobby project. I stuck at it.

hey guys . i want to learn and make spring based backend that would provide endpoints for db and also serve some webpages . any good /modern resources that could build upon my current knowledge and explain me in a sequential manner?

I make android apps in java/kotlin which uses gradle for compiling dependencies, so i kinda understand some basic java software architecture.

i would prefer gradle/kotlin based tutorials but maven+ java tutorials are also not a problem. my main problem is to get an idea of the various "built in stuff" :

- how the app works?

- how the security works? what are those configs? how can i provide role based access, google authentications, associate security with user based db, etc... (i also don't have much idea about any general backend stuff so theoretical knowledge will also help greatly)
how do beans work? can we avoid their xmls and/or customize them from java code

- how do application.properties work?

-...

i have a lot of questions but every article i read starts with "add this dependency in your project" , "override this class" . like am i just supposed to enable some flags and features automatically get added to my project? doesn't this limit the customisation options?and if they are limited then how much are those customisation options ? i wanna understand them all and then choose the ones that are essential

Way to go ruin a collaboration. I wanted to have fun some making a game with one of my friends, but turns out being friends doesn't correlate to making a good team. Some of you probably know this, but I've never had such an experience, not even to almost strangers

Some tips on how to kill off any motivation to work with you:
* Casually insult other peoples ideas
* Don't consider other people's point of view
* Try to talk people out of prototyping/experimenting with their OWN ideas on their OWN time
* Completely undermine their skill even though you have no basis to go on
* Never worked with this person before
* less experienced
* don't have to give estimates on a daily basis
* don't consider the fact that there are libraries that can be used to speed up things)
* Victimize yourself, because someone is "forcing you" to become the bad guy

I don't know if that person is on here and I don't care if they happen to read this. I tried to treat you with the most respect, but if you don't do the same then just fuck off.

Anyways, there goes the idea of a "no stress, no problems" game dev project, because I wanted to see if isometric view would work better than top down.

My idea to have another person to work on a project with, to keep the motivation up backfired a by lot.

Someone within european timezones up for some hobby game dev?