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Owner of company I freelance for: I need you to find out what CMS [website] is running in.
[Checking...]
Me: It's running in Drupal
Owner: Prove to me that it's running in Drupal, because she's saying you're wrong.
Me: Who the hell is "she"?
Owner: The boss over at [PR Company we do work for]
Me: Is she a developer?
Owner: No, of course not. She barely knows how to run a computer.
Me: Then tell I said it's running in Drupal, and if she wants proof, tell her I'm the developer she has begged to fix two other failing projects and I have delivered both times ahead of schedule.
Owner: If you don't show me proof, I'll fire you. I don't need attitude from my employees.
Me: A.) I'm not your employee, you are my client. I don't clock in for you and you don't withhold taxes from my pay. B.) If that's how you want to be, tell her to use terminal and cURL the website for the response header, as well as cross-reference folder structure for CSS/JS file inclusion to show it's running in Drupal.
Owner: What the fuck is terminal?
Me: If you don't know what terminal is, neither will she, meaning you have no business telling me how to do my job. Stick with assigning me tasks and let me use my expertise to get them done. Micromanaging need not apply here, mmm'kay pumpkin?
Owner: You sure are grouchy today.
Me: Yep...35 -
This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃
32 -
Confessions of a Programmer
#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.
#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.
#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.
#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.
#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.
#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.
#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)
#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.
#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.
#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.21 -
LONG RANT AHEAD!
In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.
mvn clean && mvn install
same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.
mvn clean && mvn install
the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...
Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...
I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.11 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
Without even talking to me, why the fuck did you announce that I would be taking the project manager role. Who the fuck wants to do that monkey job? What the fuck is fucking hell wrong with your fucken brain.
You bloody piece of shit with masters from university and can’t handle fucken projects and client’s. Clients are complaining to me about you. Whole day looks for women to fuck during the night while we are dying virgin over here. Fuck you and I wish your dick falls apart.9 -
Worst of 2020:
Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...
Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.
I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.
They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.
The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.
Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.
Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.
Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.
Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).
Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.
😡
Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...
Best of 2020:
I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.
All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.
I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.
So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.3 -
!rant
This dumb pretentious bitch.
We are both computer science students, she is writing her bachelor thesis, I'm in 4th semester, but have 6 years of professional programming experience.
So naturally when she had a problem implementing the MOTHERFUCKING PREPARING SOFTWARE, which she needs to begin writing her thesis I helped her.
First I started explaining every last bit of code, trying to teach her something, so that she wouldn't need my help ALL the time.
After a while I realised that this BLOODY GIRL FROM HELL acquired nearly half her credits by other peoples help, so I just fix the code hoping it would be over soon.
When that software was done, keep in mind, I coded nearly 90 FUCKING PERCENT OF THAT SHITTY ASS PIECE OF CRAP SOFTWARE, she asked me to also "help" her implementing a generator for samples she could test the software with.
Naturally at this point I said I'd be busy with own projects etc. And declined.
So now, nearly 1 Month after she didn't talk to me, THAT ARROGANT PIECE OF SHIT WANNABE SCIENCE BACHELOR asked if I could help her with LaTEX.
At first I was speechless. How could she have that amount of balls, asking me that. As I only am a ranting asshole inside, I declined in the most polite way.
WHAT THE FUCK! I HOPE YOU WILL FAIL YOUR THESIS AND ALL THE 12 SEMESTERS YOU STUDIED WILL HAVE BEEN FOR NOTHING, THUS SENDING YOU TO LIVE ON THE STREET WITHOUT MONEY AND DIE A HORRIBLE AND LONELY DEATH SURROUNDED BY BEGGERS TRYING TO STEAL YOUR KIDNEYS!
Sincerely,
Me.14 -
That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.
I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.
I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.
Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT
secretly hoping to get fired over this10 -
I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.
Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness
I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.
The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.
Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.
The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.
well.
1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/
2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/
3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/
Honestly?
I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)
I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.
fucking. hell.7 -
I started to get super pissed off to people saying you don’t need a college, masters degree to get an IT job. Instead go and gain practical knowledge, showing your practical certificates projects is much better than a having a degree that doesn’t prove if you can do the job or not.
Is a degree absolutely necessary to get a job? No, I agree on that. You can tear yourself apart to be known make projects loads of people contribute in GitHub spend maybe years on practicing and creating stuff for your portfolio..
But excuse me what do you think people do in college studying degrees? Are we getting it from the shop in the corner on a Saturday?
Respect people’s achievements and titles. Especially Masters degrees push you hard, make you sweat apart from loads of courses you work at least a year on a practical project, dissertation, thesis and only pass if it is your own opinion and findings. It is not like a multiple choice exam certificate or you study watch videos for few months and create a web page.
Don’t throw shit on people’s efforts and accomplishments without knowing how it is achieved just because you don’t have it.
Yes it is not necessary. Does it make you learn? Yes! Is it practical? Yes! Does it help you get a job? Hell yes! Why most companies look for degrees? Do you think they might know what it takes to get it and the skills and knowledge you gain?
Don’t come and say in IT degrees not worth it without even knowing how to draw UML. Without knowing IT management you go and be a leader later on, no clue on how to manage projects, people and soft skills sweeping the floor.
It doesn’t matter if you are a YouTube celebrity or a president. What does the title say? “Master” now go, respect and digest it! Don’t be a sour loser.
Ooh I am fierce today and not done yet12 -
Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -
Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.
Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x
Manager - please join our meeting.
I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.
Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?
Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going
Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - ) New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.
Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.
We are all like yeah probably. 2hrs pass 3hrs pass Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.
Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back.7 -
I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.11 -
Finaly! I dont work anymore!
Few days ago my contract had ended. I dont need to go to that stupid factory and process 400 to 800 gears a day! Finaly I wont be all dirty, oily and dusty constantly!
Three months ago I decided to earn a bit of money to not waste my holiday time. (I could do my projects but im a lazy fuck and i would propably end up playing pc games). It was worth it. I earned aproximatley 500 freedom cash per month. (Thats A LOT in my country). It wasnt plesant experience tho. Dust was everywere, i had been working at heat treatment section of that factory (but i was using grinding machine, so yeah perfect place for that) so temperatures were ranging from 40°C to 50°C. I had to wear protective equipment as well!
If you think 36°C is hell try working there!
Im currently at student integration camp for new students. I hope that im going to have great time! Also lectures start next month. Im going to study electronic and computer engieering in english (in poland).
When the school finaly starts Im going to join few student clubs and i hope they are going to help me with my computer and electronic projects.
Thats all! Time to get drunk!
2 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.
I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.
Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.
That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.
Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.
He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.
I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.
Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.
We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.
So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!
I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.
Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.
So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.
And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).6 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.16 -
update of after i got fired: after the fuck developers company llc was left with no developers, there was a girl there that i didn't mention earlier because as i said: the story is more complex. she came there with good intentions but after she knew the cruel nature of fuck and shit she became notoriously mad, we're still in contact with her so it's nice to hear from her some of the gags that happen there, one of which my really intelligent ex-boss the wordpress DEVELOPER himself told her to finish one of the projects i was working on, and a friend of mine who is infamous of his coding shenanigans left it in my hands before he left as well a couple of months prior (well he was fed up before us, and when i told him to stay with us he said "dude just listen to the motherfucker's voice, i can't do this anymore", my lovely ex-boss has this equally lovely screechy high pitched voice that caused me tinnitus), it's an asp.net project, uses web forms, and a lot of apis, the database is sql server, standard shit but there's no original creation script and i fucked up the only existing database which was in a local computer he used to like calling a SERVER, now to the point: this girl is not a developer, she was however working as a reporter?? kind of like jaspersoft the human or sap crystal woman and she claims that she's pretty good at it, and she's a genuinely good person who was dragged to hell just because she wanted to be close to her daddy (she was working in a different city with more than double the salary she's given now), but she's rich and her dada convinced her to come. she's currently learning java ee on her own so she'd probably leave in the next two months, in her resume she wrote that she know php, well i know php you know php we all know php (the syntax) kind of like mr. shit who passed the sololearn php CERTIFICATE and couldn't stop telling his boss and his boss a.k.a my ex-boss goes "sweet!". going back to the punchline of this rant: she told us that he came to her and asked her to finish the project with php.12
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Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)
So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.
Here we go!
Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.
Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.
A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.
A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.
A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.
* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*
Videogames:
Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...
A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.
Imposible/distant future projects:
History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)
Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.
I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.12 -
We have to use this tool in work for classifying new and existing projects for GDPR. Long story short you have to fill out a REALLY long questionnaire, then it gets reviewed by someone in legal. The tool will also assign you tasks and suggest actions to common issues (e.g. suggesting a banner to explain cookie policy if you tick a certain box).
I have spent about an hour trying to re-assign the assessment I started, as i'm due to leave the company in a few days, to the guy taking over from me.
1. There is a “generate shareable URL” button, with the ability to click a button that says “replace me with the logged in user who opens this”. All it does is duplicate the name and description fields and send a new copy to that person, with no access to any of my other content or answers.
2. I did find a re-assign button eventually, again all it does it create a duplicate, and throws and error saying names must be unique when I try to save it.
3. While I couldn’t find a way to do that, I did find another button to at least assign the reviewer. It told me i’m forbidden to change the reviewer on assessments i’ve created.
This is THE WORST piece of nonsensical shit on earth. The entire application is absolute garbage and sssssssooooooo slow.
When you first create an assessment it brings you to a page that has all the questions, makes sense right? Wrong. All the questions are in read-only mode, and they are simply there as a "this is what you can expect to see later on", telling you whether or not they will be freeform, multiple choice etc.
The way to actually answer the questions is to click the "start survey" button hidden in the "status" dropdown.
I don't have much advice to anyone around GDPR, but please stay the hell away from TrustArc. -
Folks...
I think I need to get away from web development...
Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.
I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!
Been there done that.
Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.
Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.
I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.10 -
Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,
And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?
What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.
And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.
Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.
Cool cs programmer are born today😖
31 -
I feel like the web frontend landscape has gone to hell...
It used to be a priority to develop lean front end applications that load fast and work the same on most devices. If resources are required you try to share them. I have always liked the way this was solved using CDN.
Proper workflow: include some small libs you might need, script your interactions, test site, deliver.
And now our friends of the Javascript community have discovered the nuclear science called npm... It started off as this great benefit allowing frontenders to complete entire projects in the language they know and love but I feel like it has grown into an abomination that produces bulky applications with more boilerplate configuration than actual active code...
Surely I can't be the only one who is completely fed up with the direction this is going? Is anyone else looking for a lean way of developing javascript again using only a couple of small libs instead of those monstrous frameworks.
I have even considered to develop a library that makes it easy to develop with CDN (and dependencies) in mind but I don't even know if it will be worth it as more and more people tend to move away from it.
I'm sad10 -
!rant
That momento a friend show me a website that basically lists "last night" commits on projects on github. From what I've seen basically the list commits with words like shit, fuck and hell xD
Here's the link:
http://commitlogsfromlastnight.com/...6 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture5 -
I fucking hate Reddit
Because I don’t interact with other peoples post too much but do so when the post is mine, I’m considered spammer.
The 90/10 rule is ridiculous.
This morning I got banned from r/internetisbeautiful because of this stupid rule.
Not because my website is not beautiful, hell, it got thousands upvotes. But because I used the same domain for different unrelated projects, same way you can have different GitHub pages under one user.
Fuck this, fuck18 -
!rant
TLDR; Lost passion after a few years, wasted a year, went on vacation without really any technology, found my passion and am excited as hell for 2019.
After programming for nearly 5 years, I’ve hit the point of not wanting to program anymore. I’ve burnt myself out, and haven’t had a vacation in 8+ years so we’ve finally decided to take one. I’m not going to say it’s a full blown vacation, but a semi-vacation since it’s with my parents also so I do have to do a few things I’d prefer not to such as meeting relatives.
I didn’t have the motivation to work on any new projects, finish any projects I actually enjoyed, I just did a few side projects for friends that took me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes every few weeks. In general this year has been garbage in development terms, I’ve lost passion. It felt like a chore, I didn’t find the entertainment I once did.
I’ve been away from technology for about 2 weeks now, and have less than a week left before I fly back and I’m excited as hell. During this break away from technology (with the exception of browsing devRant once in a while), has me excited to work on many projects and actually start learning and improving my skills. I’ve actually gained the motivation to work on 2 projects that have been planned for nearly 2 years now, I’ve noted down ideas for them, made diagrams, etc, just never had the passion to develop them. 2019 is going to be one hell of a year, since I get back almost at the end of November, and December I have a few business meetings and University exams that I have to prepare for. Excited to see these projects through, one is going to be for the hell of it, just been a passion project I’ve wanted to do for years now. The other project is actually a project for one of my sub-companies that hasn’t officially released since I didn’t have the passion to work on it. (Not going to go into full detail yet about the companies/projects, going to save that for the future)
Alongside that, I’m excited since my main company that is totally unrelated to technology, is set to do some massive moves during 2019 also. Looking forward to that, and being able to launch my dream company (the sub-company I mentioned before).
Time for sleep now, goodnight! (Wrote this after a few drinks and in the middle of the night, hopefully it’s not full blown garbage)2 -
I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.
But at the same time
I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.
Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.
Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.4 -
Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.
We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.
First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.
First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?
Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)
The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..8 -
A guy with a pretty fucked up aggressive personality.
At that point I already had ...more than a few issues with bald headed aggressive men for other reasons.
So from the beginning I was very wary around him... And his behaviour - sweet talking while you could _feel_ the knifes raining down your neck - made me even more defensive. I avoided him like the plague.
But for better or worse I became his supervisor. I had to work with him.
He made it very evident what he thought of having me as a supervisor - from day one there were very non subtle hints.
Every question turned into a discussion... Every discussion turned into screaming... Every screaming from his side turned into me leaving the room. I've had my anger issues and I don't tolerate such behaviour.
The tip of the iceberg was not only his behaviour, but also his limited knowledge.
He worked > 15 years in the company, me 2.
Guess that played a role, too.
But his knowledge was somewhere between junior to average.
Some of the tasks exploded not only in time because of all the rage tantrums he had - but more because he didn't solve them properly, despite given clear guidance.
Since at that time it was obvious that he either quits or will get fired, we had to look at previous projects.
It wasn't pretty - to state it in a polite way.
Non polite way: A shitfest of the worst kind possible.
All in all - he didn't quit.
Nearly half a year later he had to be fired.
Company couldn't fire him earlier for various (eg law) reasons.
But damn he made that time a living hell.
Rarely a day without screaming, door slamming, discussions that went like "I've checked all my literature, what you're saying is wrong." (without stating what literature, the discussion just turned round and round...) and so on...1 -
Lately, in the company I work for, it's becoming the norm for the dev to finish workdays at 10pm or 11pm, but we still get yelled at when we arrive after 9am. Anyway, every week, the PMs and salesmen have a big meeting to debrief how everything is working so well in this so wonderful company, and whatever. From what I've been told, it's just a big session of self-satisfaction, applause, and gossips.
During the two or three last meetings, some PMs dared to point out that the dev felt underestimated and constantly under pressure. Last time, the boss of the managers answered: "Developers just like to complain."
Yeah, right! We work like hell everyday to respect deadlines of underestimated projects, we have to fight to get hardware, and even a good chair is a precious resource!
Ultimately, another PM trainee said projects were late because dev are just laughing all day long... Go figure!
I feel like most of IT companies treat dev like inferior robots :(5 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?
As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.
I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.
Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!
Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".
What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?
So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.11 -
<rant>
I fucking HATE the Arduino environment right now.
First of all: you can't fucking put your project files in a sub folder to the main file. I can't write #include "src/motor.hpp" because it doesn't fucking know what that means.
Turns out you have to put all your header files in the fucking library folder common for all Arduino projects!
Secondly, you can't call your cpp headers hpp, they HAVE to be called h, or the Arduino environment throws a fit and begins whining about being unable to find the fucking files.
Not just that! You can't reference other Arduino libraries from within your library because the environment doesn't know what that means either.
To get around that you need to fucking include the library in your main file, AND THEN you can include it in the library file that uses it. After all, it should be the programmer's job to soon feed a so called IDE, right?
I'M SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT! 😤
I'm ready to either program the Arduino directly with an AVR programmer or even port the entire project to the raspberry pi where I have a proper fucking Linux environment with a proper fucking directory structure so I can code proper fucking C++.
Hell I'm even fucking willing to spend all weekend porting all the code myself if necessary.
It's not reasonable that correct fucking C++ code is invalidated because I called the files something "wrong" and put them in the "wrong" directory.
</rant>
"user friendly project board" my ass12 -
I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.
So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.
So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...
I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.
There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?
Hmm...
So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?
So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.
What?
I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.
Deep breath.
Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.
Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.
It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...
When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.
It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?
Ahem...
I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.
Blaaargh!
Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.
But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!
FFS!
I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.
Oh no, that would have been too easy.
I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.
I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!
The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.
0/10, would not recommend.11 -
My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.
-
I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.
We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.
The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!
Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...
I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!
True story!
PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!1 -
Sales was about to close what I thought was supposed to be a basic WordPress project with a pretty steep delivery time (two weeks). I thought to myself: "well, ok. It's going to be rough for us to fit it into our existing schedule, but I guess the budget (unusually high) compensates." After I say OK, I find out that they were actually about to sign a FE application that takes data from various document management applications. I lost my shit. I hope there's a special place in hell for sales reps that don't get the specs before accepting projects.2
-
So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.
Now...
I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.
I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...
I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.
Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.
Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.
Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.
Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.
But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..
Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.5 -
Fuck it all to Hell today. I'm cutting into my mostly night time Xanax script at noon.
My boss just made my coworker remove his own copyrighted photo from our Trello board for internal development. The board is only used by the two of us for internal projects. He thinks that our C-level execs would get onto him, not my coworker, for us having a fucking photo of the Boston city skyline on our own, internal, never fucking seen by anyone but us, Trello board. It has fucking animated gifs from Giphy on it, but my fellow dev can't use his own god damn photo as the background.
We're a fucking marketing department for home building materials not a blog using Getty images without permission for fuck's sake.
Then on top of that fucking Cache rules are fucking up on Drupal views and a webform decided to just stop fucking working for submissions after about 26,000 successful ones and it corrupted the last 500 or so in the process.
Oh and fuck Varnish.4 -
Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.
So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.
Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3
I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3
After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.
At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).
My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.
We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.
That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.
TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.4 -
Worst:
Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.
Best:
After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job. -
Not sure if it's the worst code review but it's a recent one.
We don't really do code reviews where I work unfortunately but my coworker used my framework for the first time (build some nice composer libraries for cmdline projects) and asked if I could make them do autoloading.
He never used namespaces before so I was glad to help him out.
What I saw was a dreadful mess. His project was called "scripts" so good luck picking a namespace...
Than it was all lose functions in the executable file. All those functions are however called by a class in another file (if they where not calling eachother as a cascading mess). That class was extending an abstract class from my library as instructed. However I never imagined my lib being raped like that.
The functions themselves are a horrible mess. Nothing uniform completely different style (our documentation states PSR's should be used).
Parameters counts higher than 5.
Variable names like Object and Dobject (in calling function Dobject is Object but it needs a fresh one.
If statements on parameters that need basically split it in two (should simply be to functions)
If else statement with return of same variable as a single line (sane people use ternary for that)
Note that I said functions. All of it should have been OO and methods. Would have saved at least some of the parameter hell.
I could go on and on. Do I think the programmer is bad yes (does not even grasp interfaces, dep injection, foreach loops). Is this his best work no. He said that for a one of script like this it just has to work. Not going to be used elsewhere. I disagree as it is a few thousand lines of code that others have to read too.2 -
well, that escalated quickly...
today a coworker was asked if he could write a query to find customers which placed orders matching some criterias. so far so good. he write the query and put the result into a spreadsheet and gave it to the lead.
"i need it in another format" (he did not specify any format before nor did he tell which columns he is interested in). 2 hours later the query was finished.
then, the coworker got a call from the leader. he wants to see us both in his office.
"okay, we need to write a personalized mail to every customer with the orders in a spreadsheet as an attatchment. we also need this on paper as not everyone reads our mail. we want to send letters. the whole process needs to be finished in half a day and we want it automated. i do not want to have one of the sales department waste 2 hours writing stuff himself".
well, you can imagine my thoughts on that.
the personalized text is not finished. we wasted another 3 hours thinking about how to solve this crap.
luckily i have some projects from the past which can do this shit with some changes... but what the fucking hell was this?7 -
Annoying Indian professors are everywhere. It's a computer vision class are you really teaching us Regression?
What about transfer learning? object detection! Give us papers to read, let's do projects.. what the hell is this I am going take attendance bullshit and teaching crappy concepts.
I did not sign up for this shit! I came here for my Masters to get away from pompous mother fuckers like you ...
My class is also filled with those idiots,who think bias in a neural network is somehow related to class imbalance ? Now the same idiot proceeds to ask questions like...
Why would the weights change in a neural network?
Motherfucker why you in this class ? Why don't you stick to your shit and ask these questions later..
I am so pissed off right now guys ...
I was sitting in my lab understanding the deeper insights of BN, activation fucntions.. various optimizers ..etc Stuff that this idiot motherfucking teacher must be covering... UGGH.
I shouldn't cuss so much.. or at least add variety to my cuss words..
I am pissed off cuz instead of learning the shit I should be learning I am forced to come and attend this class and waste 2 hrs of my life ...
It's the summer i find it hard to focus anyway (want to go out hiking or swimming or something.) BUT. the moment I find some resolve to focus
I get this fucking bullshit.. !
My mind is so fucked right now... I can't think of anything but standing up in class and screaming " Mother fucker, mother fucker...(point to the idiots in class you) motherfuckers shut the fuck up..
Can someone suggest some colorful swear words ?
My brains not working -_-
It is just about now that I start feeling like "Anger" from inside out12 -
!Dev related but still freelance.
So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.
Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:
He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!
Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.
Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell2 -
I actually only started programming a little less than two years ago. I entered my freshman year of college as a mathematics major, but as time went on I ended up enjoying coding in C++ much more than trying to work out partial equations.
I have since become fascinated with many aspects of computer science, mainly web development and systems programming (I discovered Linux and the command line only a year ago and I'm practically in love). I've since been working for a couple fairly new startups with duties from developing a mobile native app in AngularJS/Ionic to migrating content to new servers and developing custom themes on WordPress. I have deep, deep aspirations of eventually being employed by Google as a Senior Software Dev (although I'd definitely prefer working for a company that would allow 100% remote work 😁). I've even finally began developing my own projects, ranging from a URL shortening service to a basic online encyclopedia.
I wanna spend the rest of my life doing this shit. Hell, I hope I die at my computer.1 -
Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.
For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>
The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.9 -
So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).5 -
It was the last year of high school.
We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).
Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)
The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)
Part 1/2:
Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.
I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.
No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.
48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.
Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).
I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.
Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.
Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.
NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)
The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.
So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.
Part 2/2:
The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.
My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:
Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456
Me: … that won't work, got a real email?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: I implemented an email verification system.
Him: … ok … just show me the website.
Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…
Him: Good job.
He stood up and moved on.
YOU MOTHERFUCKER.
I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.
AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT
I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.2 -
I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.
Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.
A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.
So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.
This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.2 -
There are always days when everything related to school projects seems to hate me. In example we have to create a tunnel from our own computers to access uni's private server and suddenly mine stopped working. Me and my classmate were trying to figure it out for 1,5 hour and even our teacher didnt understand the hell was happening and in the end we found out that even tho we deleted the faulty line from host file the firefox still had it in its cache
-
Well think it's time a go through an reassess myself a little bit...
Going to cut out premade iced coffee (As much as I do love my dare's) and just do homemade to save money and help with my acne...
Potentially start going for walks and do some minor working out if my back will allow it.
Pick up my violin and continue learning it...
And for the biggest hurdle.... I'm going to drop most of my current projects and take what's left, redesign from the ground up and just hammer them out with my nose to the ground and ass in the air...
Time for hell ( '-') ‾\1 -
Hey this is Linuxer4fun or BinaryByter, you might remember me as that smartass Teen who fanboyed over C++ and built kernels and compilers and all that shit. Well...
Ultimately i must admit that I have moved away from Programming. I dont have any Projects I could acomplish which would be worth my time, I cant come up eith any, to say the least.
Additionally I'm demotivated as hell because I'm always tired due to my Hourlong Organ-Practice sessions and very long school times.
I think that I want to major in Music.
So incase you wondered, thats where I have gone to. I might still lurk here, and maybe someday i'll restart coding. I hope that I will, because coding was loads of fun!7 -
NO FUCKING WONDER I SUCKED-ASS IN HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA!!!!!
Arghgghhghgh ughhh....
I want to beef up the hell out of my Maths Chops so I can maybe try going back to school for a A.S. in EE or hell even an B.S.
I'm using my company's Safari Learning account for getting free-ish access to college algebra books and I'm self studying.
I'm still in Chapter 0 where the book covers shit you're supposed to know from previous years of education. I'm just learning about some of this shit now!!!
While it's possible that I didn't pay attention in high school lectures, I took geometry in 9th grade and was an A/B+ student and felt confident in maths. I got to Algebra II in High School and suddenly nothing made sense anymore, reality fucking-fell-apart!
Suddenly, I'm failing tests left and right and struggling with the lecture concepts and I could never seem to grasp materials covered in class anymore to even be able to finish the homework assignments.
Fast forward to me being 15 years older and wanting to take a stab at this shit again, but with new found determination to get into EE so I can fuck around with small electronics for pet projects I want to do. I'm starting with College Algebra to try and learn when suddenly, low and behold I have a HUGE FUCK-MOTHERING GAP in my core understanding of the language/syntax/grammar of mathematics.
Been fucking knee-capped for the last decade+ because I either slacked off during those fundamental lectures (which again; is totally plausible) or I had a complete fucking imbecile for a math teacher that glossed over the topics and fucked not only me but the 40+ other kids in that class.
I'm not going to blame the teacher, although I really fucking want to, but I can't remember how the class scored on tests or homework to be able to fairly and objectively make that judgement against the educator.
FUCK!!! I hate my 15 y.o. self right now6 -
Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.
I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.
So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.
Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.
Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):
* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest
Any of you have further recommendations?
Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?
Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?
What about the basics of BDD and XP?
Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?
Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?
Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?
During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?
I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.
What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?
Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?
Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.7 -
Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".
What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?
React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.
All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.
Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?
I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).
Am I the only one?
Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.17 -
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 -
Working on a tiny new project, can't build DLL libraries from our old projects. Contain mixed version of .Net written in VB and C#
Asked our senior developer to help me out.
...
After an hour, he's still not able to build it.
...
So he basically implemented some features I needed on the fly...
😂
DLL hell is real! -
[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
My workplace is still using xml based configuration, and non-spring boot projects.
So every spring boot tutorial I find feels like "Look at how easy you can get this running" and then it's just actually a toy you can't get into production.
Also it kind of bugs me that you need to be online to actually be able to initialize/create a spring boot project and every single tutorial says so.
You can make a local network m2 repository, but can one make a spring initializer service?
Either way, migrating every single project to Spring boot is a no-no,
And I'm stuck with like 5 prototypes of SSO integration from which only 2 work, and the other 3 have their own problems.
One does redirect to the login and all, but the SAML endpoint gets 404 on response when you log in.
One is on OpenID Connect, but I would need to update the project from Spring 3 to Spring 5 to get it working, which upon attempting to do seems to break everything else.
One has an external library handling the security context just the way we are accustomed to, but it only does a 401 forbidden when you go without logging in and I'm starting to think it is actually one of those that require you to extract the token or something manual like that, which wouldn't work for us
The other two are spring boot tutorials that worked out of the box, both SAML and OpenID, still can't use those for the main projects.
I'm tired of dealing with this configuration hell, been two months at this, I want to get features done as usual, not be stuck configuring stuff that might or might not work.
Rant aside, I think I figured I need to use a different Security adapter, but I needed to vent.2 -
I thought I had lost a password to devrant on my old phone tried to rest my password I don't no which email I used among my army of emails address
Well my thoughts today are on a call worker who has a terrible work attitude.... fuck I hate3 this guy .. probably am tired of this job... is it too hard to ask for a company that has better pay and organised work flows .. here is hell hound projects come left right center everything is urgent the system is broke or roten from the core can never be fixed -
I started working for a startup as Server Administrator/ System Integrator beside university to get some dollars with easy work and nice people.
((I Know two of the C*Os so I got a had feeling with this. Besides the upcoming story I'm still really happy with my position and career chances here. God bless my Department which has the most funny/rude guys, love you.))
tl;dr:
Guy fakes his Skillset and fuckup whole department, can´t do most of his basic tasks. I had my first and hopefully last interaction with this bastard.
Heres how everything started:
I was more and more involved in the leading processes and decisions.
Heard about a story where and why the whole dev-department was kicked out of his position because they were crappy developers. And cant just believe the stories they told me about the former Dev-Lead
Now I met the former "Development Lead"
I was brought in because we in the IT wondered why he would like to share his local machine password with colleges. After some questions he came out with the Reason.
He is doing home-office for some days a week now and wants his colleges to be able to start his "software". (already confused by that)
The "better IT-guy" in me offered help for automatic deployment CI/CD stuff so that they can use it as an inhouse service.
BIG OOF incoming:
"The code is not in git because I wanted to clean it up before"
"My IDE is the only place where my PHP crap work is running"
"The 'PHP-software' is to complex for this"
My Lead and I were completely speechless,
I understand the decision to kick this "dev-Lead" from the lead position down to a code monkey/ script kid.
Now I´m thinking about getting my Hands on the Lead position after my exams because if such bastards with no clue about basic stuff, no clue about leading, no clue about ci/cd, no clue about generic software stuff get the job I would easily be the "good IT-guy" with more responsibility/ skill.
Now I sit here, hate people that fake their skills and set back work of colleges for multiple months and never asked for help or advice.
And the little "Bastard Operator from Hell" in my just wants to delete all his files, emails account during a migration to completely demotivate the person who failed to be responsible for a team nor their projects.5 -
Picked up javascript few months ago, hacked through the basics and shit was looking too complicated and all over the place, tried react and got hooked. So I'm going all in on React. Like how you just get to build real projects right from the start.
But hell, I love my Python8 -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
Enterprise projects can go to fucking hell. Clients are stupid ass morons. Zero fucking humanity in their money veins. OH LOOK THIS BUTTON DOESN’T WORK WITH OUR PROVIDED SOAP SHIT API. Oh really? I don’t give a flying fuck. Get that fucking soap from the ground and tell your external company to fucking start communicating like human beings. Fuck. A day will come when I will tell the fucking truth and I don’t care if that will cost me a workplace.
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I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
That debug moment where you have 50+ different vs.net web projects in one solution and each of the said web projects were set up using point-and-click web references, then realised that the developer who created it did not even bother to let people know that you need to run it all simultaneously and did not bother to use host names but instead used the http://localhost:<some-random-port> in IIS express.
Oh, just to rub salt in the wound, each project's programming code files jumps from a mix of vb.net to c# which is a complete waste of time and energy to do.
Whoopdee do. The debug task from hell.1 -
Took me way too long to realise what the (annoyingly simple) solution to the problem I was having was.
This is the problem with derailed projects that just feels never ending, you get stupid after a while.
God I hope I can finish this shit up this weekend. I'm so done with this project. -
I was taking a look at my past rants and I came across this one from not so long ago: https://devrant.com/rants/3646525/...
TL;DR: I said I was happy about my new internship because I was going to work on backend and it had pretty good pay for an intern. I also mentioned it was too good to be true, so there had to be a catch.
Welp, after almost 4 months, here's how the "great" job is going:
- Even though I was hired as a backend developer, I basically just did mobile for 2 months and a half and now I've been doing web frontend for the past month.
- I found out I'm actually being underpaid (like, at best I'm earning 50% of what I should).
I can't complain much though, it's my first job ever and I got it at the 2nd semester in CS without prior professional experience. But still, it's not very motivating seeing friends that started learning programming from scratch a year ago and are already being paid more...
Luckily my contract ends in two months and then I'll finally be able to start studying quantum computing and hopefully (in time) I'll be able to write simple "quantum algorithms" or whatever the hell they're called. I also have some projects I want to make (especially one that involves learning C++ 😋).1 -
Anyone ever stay on a set of projects they knew were going to fail? I got pulled off of 3 major projects to help another team that was failing at their very high visibility project. I got that back on track, but then they needed to keep me on for stabilization work and to onboard some folks. Then they still kept me on and my projects all suffered. I was very vocal to management about my concerns. Finally, management recognized that my projects weren’t getting done so now I’m back on them. The thing is, now it’s probably too late and I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail to meet deadlines on all three (plus there’s scope creep of course). I want to just walk away from this hell hole, but I’ve made some promises to folks that helped me get the job that I wouldn’t be a job hopper (been here 4 years, and each year is worse than the last). I think I’m just going to do the best I can and see what happens - and try not to have a heart attack in the process.1
-
TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.
Okay my team needs some advice.
Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..
Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.
ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.
The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....
We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.
I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...
Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.
Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions... -
What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...
I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.
- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)
Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)
But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.
As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...2 -
Desperately need advice from devs in India...
asking this here since really stressed about this and don't know who to ask to...
I am an engineering student from Bangalore, India from a basically no name college...
I have been coding for 2 years now, web stuff, primarily rails and js...
i have worked with handful of startups, done internships, and am working on my own projects which i will launch soon...
Lately my college has made it a mission to make my life hell even though i always perform well academically...it has gotten to a point where I am not able to work or learn anymore...
I wanted to ask what consequence my career will face if I drop out ?
I believe lack of a graduation degree will make me not eligible for many jobs...please suggest what I should do...6 -
I feel like instead of disallowing people to pull their packages from npm the actual solution should've been to have another company crop up that just cached packages on npm
then the devs that think this level of security applies to them can pull packages from the cached service and there's no such shenanigans like the "everything" package
and people on npm can still unpublish
not being able to unpublish is so authoritarian... but caching is "I'm not responsible for this anymore so who cares"
similarly the cached service shouldn't pull in everything but only things people called for
because in a bunch of my project if something is pulled I'm totally fine with rolling my own or finding something else
but for corporate projects that would be hell for them. they have different needs.
let's be real, there needs to be the 4chan of packages -
Node modules keep just disappearing from my projects.
I turn off a dev server, try to start it again - alas, it does not. Instead it complains about some dependency missing.
Npm install is all it takes to fix it, but why? From what depths of hell did those issue crawl out?2 -
So I was building opencv some time back.
Nice enough package, like most python linked packages I'm finding though I know you can use it via c and its meant to be but why would you want to ? .. it contains a whole bunch of half finished crap that is actually useful in part including the capacity to tear apart video files and manipulate frames one at a time and then rewrite them back to a file. about the only lib that's easy to use that I saw that does that. hell I can even compose my own video frames. also the only other lib I saw that does that thus far.
so...
I post a bug, because of FUCKING CMAKE NOT WORKING. not conforming with the well thought out build environment that most GNU style c packages use.
you know like when you need an upstream source package to build the code, or a downgraded package to build the code and don't want to fuck up your host environment so you have to specify a bunch of lib paths and the like so that ld and gcc work correctly etc etc etc from your custom build location and so you can later use these same values to find the compiled lib and build software against it.
fucker closes my ticket saying i hijacked the c environment................
no.
its because cmake sucks.
they're using and i don't know why a module specifically written to find libtiff.
specifically written but doesn't find the only source on my system that provides tiff which my env variables point directly to !!!!
lazy fucking cocksuckers !
I want to code a solution this issue.
something that translates ac files and am files and cmakelists into something intelligent and easy to follow that doesn't sacrifice the flexibility of make and gnu shit and unfucks cmake based projects !7 -
!=rant
So, my company wants to use MadCap Flare to build our help center. This project is a nightmare so far. I've been trying to push for some better alternatives for down the road. Any recommendations? Preferably a
Some sort of free open source framework. I've seen a couple of developer friendly CMS frameworks pop up lately but just want to get a consensus from my good devrant ppls. -
Any gift recommendations. My birthday comes up in a few days and he asked what I wanted as a birthday gift(gifts are supposed to suprises but being able to choose is good still).
However I cannot ask for electronic gadgets. That knocks a lot of stuff of. The exception is that if something does not make me spend more time on the computer that is allowed. Kinda weird. For example I can ask for a printer or medical equipment like oximeters since that wont make me spend more time on the computer. Both of these examples were given by my father. I could ask for a new printer however we still have a printer but it is currently in the shop since it is not being used and the shops printer broke and is hell to replace since they need chips to verify toners and you need to get those chips separately from what my father told me and the shops printer should be repaired in a few months since lockdown was lifted a few days ago and I won't need to print something since everything is online and they don't need to show student projects yet.
Thia knocks a lot of hardware off since by definition if I am using hardware I still need to code it to do something which is more time on computer which is not allowed. So no fiddling with aurdino or rasberry pie or whatever is the most used hardware kit.
I can buy some course or a book to learn something but I already have problems with consistently learning c# with a good book which will lose value in November and that most topics I would like to learn like computer networking or some new language are practical which is more time on computer which is not allowed.
So the only thing I can buy are some books to enjoy reading for fun or some school books like a science digest book like Together with or the ultra popular maths reference book RD Sharma
So what things should I ask which comply with the rules my father has laid or just skip this thing1
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