devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

I keep a 20 year old PS/2 keyboard around specifically for that rare event I need to edit my bios settings. My mobo doesn’t enable usb until half a second after it stops listening for input because who uses usb keyboards, anyway?

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

The programming things I've seen in code of my uni mates..

Once seen, cannot be unseen.

- 40 if's in 10 lines of code (including one-liners) for a mineswepper game
- looping through a table of a known size using while loop and an 'i' variable
- copying same line of code 70 times but with different arguments, rather than making a for loop (literally counting down from 70 to 0)
- while loop that divides float by 2 until it's n < 1 to see if the number is even (as if it would even work)

..future engineers

PS. What are the things you've been disgusted by while in uni? I'm talking about code of your collegues specifically, I'm also attaching code of my friend that he sent me to "debug", I've replaced it with simple formula and a 2D distance math, about 4 lines of code.

I made a big project on a personal web site. I send form to people to know the future community.
During one month, make it and a friend tell me :
'' For your big project you can use Laravel or symphony, that's be useful for you, but this is heavy to learn ''.
I tried 2 days and stop it...
This is so different... But that could be very cool to know it, I think...

I have a question for you :
Does I have to continue learn it? This is very important to know it?

Ps: I programm in php/pdo and mysql ans some js

i can see a very thin line between me remaining the same good natured person as i am right now, and me turning into completely chaotic no remorse psychopath , in upcoming future.

the universe follows the rules. planets revolve in a pre defined manner, day and night comes as expected. however being a human for last 24 years, i have come to experience 2 different phenomenons : being rule bounded and being random.

randomness is fun. randomness is guilt free, randomness is a wonderful feeling for someone . but at the same time its worse for everyone else. try slapping a random kid in park or eating food at a restaurant amd running away, assuming there will be no consequences against you whatsoever. such a nice evil feeling

at the same time, rules are boring , unrewarding, guilt filled words of hope.
- "do not eat pizzas or you will get fat" :boring + guilt
- "go to gym, you will become appealing and get a good sex " : boring + hope
- "if you perform well, you will get appraisal and you will earn enough to afford your family a home" : hope + guilt

see how these rules are full of hope/guilt/boredom for you while being good+rewarding for others? that's how you are categorised as being civil , as being part of a society of semi evolved apes.

and as if those rules weren't enough , there came this unnecessary concept of faith, religion and spirituality.l, with its own set of rules and hopes.

and it seems like such a great capitalist idea , since the hopes provided via these are not even realistic : keep on doing good stuff, following the rules and you will get a better afterlive/next birth!

i have tried being a good person for my whole life. my parents are religious and i try to be one, I don't drink , smoke, eat other animals, or randomly start slapping kids in the park. i have been a boring personality, i studied , ran in various races od educational life, failed most of them, landed in a decent paying job , and now trying to even gain back a decent body to look respectful and worthy of a future family. feels like i did so much for so many hopes and am still doing it. we all do , no?

but i have seen companies laying off people and leaving them in turmoil, marriages getting ruined, and some person never getting the love, respect and rewards they deserve for all these shitty rules they kept up with

my life book is somewhat even-steven. i did get a few rewards and respect for some of my hard work, but my overall portfolio is negetive : a lot of investment on just the hopes of a better return

let's see if i can keep up with my sanity for next 50-60 years before i am dust again.

=====
ps : try playing bitlife : life simulator mobile game ( download the cracked version from the web though, original one is full of ads) . it just have a single big button and shows text about how an imaginary child(you) os growing every year on click. so far i tried to play the life of kid like a criminal, a heavily educated person, a politician and a job worker. almost all of them recieved "miserable" and "unsuccessful" as the final result. very fun game to play without being evil