In response to:
https://devrant.com/rants/2149067/...
I took your advice.
She said yes 😁

So I got laid off because they told me I wasn't communicating enough.

For what I encountered
Reference:

https://devrant.com/rants/4979669/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4675369/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4956866/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4691189/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4699002/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4717638/...

For how I feel About after got laid off:

https://johnmelodyme.wordpress.com/...

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5445368/...

My previous bosses were real awesome people. However, the current one is an intentional asshole.

He wants to review every piece of work. He thinks I am a retard who knows shit. He has no sense of feedback vs. humiliating criticism.
Fucker questions every single word.

For example, consider the following statement, "They are taking the Hobbits to Isengard."

He'd critical question every word like,
What do you mean by 'they'?
Why have you mentioned it?
Why does 'They' exists in English vocabulary?
Why cannot you try 'Your'?
What data points you have?

And after endless questioning, he'd repeat the same with next word. Making sure to break my spirit of working for him.

And let me add that his communication is saturated with heavy jargons which are difficult to understand. At times, I slow down to understand and absorb and he has a problem with that as well.

My past experience says that I learned a lot from strict managers.

But this fucker intentional criticises every aspect with zero to negative appreciation. All in the name of feedback.

I have gotten tons of compliments and good ratings in the past based on my communication and thought process. However, this fucker feels that my thought process is shit and I don't know how to communicate. Furthermore, he feels that I lack sense of ownership.

I really don't know what he saw in my resume or me to even hire me in the first place.

Given how he treats me and others, no wonder people are leaving. And if he fires me, good luck to him finding a sensible replacement who matches his expectations or puts up with his crap.

It's official, I've come full circle:

"I assume you're not looking for a new opportunity right now, but do you know anybody that might be interested, or do you have someone to refer?"

Yes, let me do more work for you, even though you aren't interested in me at the moment. Shameless linking to a previous post which is the same: https://devrant.com/rants/5404347/...

At this point, I'm convinced its going to repeat until about 2050 when the entire software industry comes to a complete and catastrophic standstill.

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.

https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...

My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.

Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.

Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...

We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.

We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.

Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.

The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.

Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.

Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.

Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.

Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.

My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.

He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.

Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.

So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.

Follow up to: https://devrant.com/rants/5047721/....

1- The attacker just copy pasted its JWT session token and jammed requests on the buy gift cards route
2- The endpoint returns the gift card to continue the payment process, but the gift card is already valid
3- Clients wants only to force passwords to have strong combinations
4- Talk about a FIREWALL? Only next month
5- Reduce the token expiration from 3 HOURS to 10 minutes? Implement strong passwords first
6- And then start using refresh tokens

BONUS: Clearly someone from inside that worked for them, the API and database password are the same for years. And the route isn't used directly by the application, although it exists and has rules that the attacker kows. And multiple accounts from legit users are being used, so the person clearly has access to some internal shit

macOS facts:
- Darwin core is open-source (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu). Not the case with Windows.

- You can use macOS without using any Apple online service like Apple ID, FaceTime or iCloud. Terminal will still work without restrictions, and any app can be installed manually. It's totally different from Google services on Android, without which most of the apps won't work at all.

- macOS updates are trivially to disable. It's a matter of unchecking "Update this mac automatically" checkbox in software update settings. Not the case with Windows, Windows updates are universally hated among developers for intentionally complex UI and update services being very hard to disable.

- Almost every feature or default behavior you dislike can be trivially disabled with one console command. Features won't re-enable automatically like I heard update service does in Windows. The only feature I dislike that I wasn't able to disable was a notification about unsafely unplugging a USB flash drive.

- Out of the box, you get a sophisticated disk manager that allows all kinds of manipulation on drives, just like what you get in Ubuntu.

- Just like on smartphones, you can trivially restrict or provide access to certain features like camera, microphone, etc. on app to app basis. I don't know how to easily do it in Linux, let alone in Windows.

- Apart from mastodons like GIMP, I find open source apps for macOS to have better UI than their Linux alternatives.

- Objective-See offers useful FOSS apps for macOS, they help with privacy and malware detection: https://objective-see.com/products....

I don't want to start a fight. Please, abstain from commenting on one OS being better / worse than the other. Please, don't comment on Mac computers being better / worse than computers of some other vendor. I'm very confused now because of my Dunning-Krueger thing (read my previous rants), so I just want to present the facts about macOS that I think deserve more exposure.

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5220410/...

I resigned from my second job.

First job tenure: 7.5 years
Second job tenure: 10 months

This job taught me a lot and paid me decent, but not enough to cope up with the bullshit and sacrifice, WLB, and happiness.

I landed a job at one of my dream companies I always wanted to be and possibly the best company in my city. Also the role is B2C in nature and one of only profitable start-ups from India. The domain is second favourite of mine (Music > Art/Events > Travel).

Second job was in travel domain, world's largest OTA but the timezone fucked my happiness and that is what my first job offered me.

I could easily score better offers with higher pay and benefits but I was optimising for a work life balance and team in same time zone along with some impacting work.

I do have some interesting interviews coming up and I am not sure how will I end up performing.

When I got this first offer, this job hunting season, I initially rejected some silly policies. I regretted the decision and thankfully after having a transparent conversation with the recruiter, I accepted it. Funnily, the resignation from second job isn't making me feel emotional, guilty, or any negative emotion. Which evidently signals that the job was toxic and I had to step out asap.

The purpose it served in my journey was bring my remuneration to market levels and teach me a lot more skills in just short span.

Excited to see how the future unrolls. I'll keep my fellows here posted.

I really want to spend more time here talking and hanging out with you all. Hopefully I shall be back soon. Until then keep safe my lovelies :)

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

Follow up to my other rant https://devrant.com/rants/4994932/...

I have finally fixed the bug i couldnt fix for over several weeks. I was just missing a fucking if statement check. Not expecting this to work, i compiled, tested and it worked perfectly on the first fly.

Immediately i shit you not have i broken down crying. Sobbing in tears. Uncontrollably crying down on my table for several minutes and cant refocus to continue coding. I have NEVER cried because of a fucking bug fix! But i have also NEVER had a problem so much difficult that i needed several weeks to fix it!

..

Follow-up on https://devrant.com/rants/5001553/...

How the fuck are Jupyter notebooks so popular in research? Like some dude had an idea to take perfectly good markdown and python code, add a whole lot of transitional properties to make version control impossible, encode it as JSON on the assumption that a human could somehow look at it and make sense of countless escaped characters and base64 encoded data, create dedicated software people need to install in order to read what used to be simple plain text, and think "This. This is what 99% of data researchers will use from now on." And somehow, overwhelming majority of researchers agreed that this extremely inefficient data format is the best there is and they should develop all their tools around it.

https://devrant.com/rants/5155862/...

Alright! I take it back. I don’t like “this”. Hooks are better. But are they the best? We will see.

Namaste.

I can be manipulated. Yes, I’m now more resilient to manipulation than ever because I’m autistically good at recognising patterns, yet I’m not perfect.

For a manipulator, there is just one problem — now and then, my disorder obliterates my entire worldview, together with the foreign manipulative framework, so I can start with a blank slate. It protects me. Yes, this protection is akin to our body’s “we’ll boil all the germs in our own blood” tactic that instead of defining winners and losers only leave survivors, yet the force is unstoppable. You cannot secure the land that is hit by a tornado every three months.

That inner Nemesis is so strong that it even defeated a complex, almost fractal-like manipulation of my own mother that I lived in since birth, leaving her with a wound that will never heal. Wannabe manipulator exes didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t care if that force destroys me or not, as during that time, there is no “me”.

About my mom, long story short, she told me “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming-out. Full story is here:
- part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4923052/...
- part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4924040/...

So I saw a blurb about AlphaCode from DeepMind. I went to look at their website:
https://alphacode.deepmind.com/

What I see is the most insanely detailed spec for code I have ever seen in my life. I haven't even seen college programming problems this detailed before. Most specs "I" get are like one or two sentences long "if" it is even written down. A lot of the time the direction is: write some stuff and we will tell you what we hate. Just figure it out.

So DeepMind is claiming they can produce code as well as the average programmer because they ranked 54% in a coding competition. What a complete misleading claim and absolute bullshit conclusion. I am all for creating new tech around generating code, but this is just to sell snake oil to an idiot manager at a startup.

This is going to lead to some really fucked up rants here at devrant.

Remember this post of mine: https://devrant.com/rants/4537512/...

Now this happens. LMFAO

https://linkedin.com/posts/...

If you have time, go through the entire series posted by Mona.

An update on my previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/5367639/...

Today different recruiters from the company’s main office line have been calling me non-stop, hitting voicemail, wanting to talk about different roles. Please schedule calls in advance over LinkedIn. They are completely unprofessional and demanding. I don’t think I want to work with them at this point.

To give my own old rant here a bit more background:

https://devrant.com/rants/5319171/...

Cloud solutions offline for some customers, a bit longer than a week...

https://theregister.com/2022/04/...

Bamboo release fucked up...

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/...

They've withdrawn the new release 8.2.0 and instead went for 8.2.1 ...

Well just because you had to give everyone admin rights in an minor release as they fucked up permissions, who cares.

Following on from my thread where I got wrecked for being brain damaged, and posting about dividing by zero, it is time for round two!
Lightening round: Electric boogaloo!
Episode 3: "Glutton for punishment"

You can read that thread here if you like or skip over.
https://devrant.com/rants/4931841/...

Can we divide by zero? Is there some representation where thats the case? And what are the implications if we can?

In this round Devranters, you will be challenged to determine if OP is 1. insane, 2. a genius, 3. high on mushrooms. One contestant will be eliminated. The winning team will get a bag of rice and sunscreen, while the other team will have to vote to send someone home from the island.

Get ready.

Heres the full rant because DR wouldn't post it for some reason:

https://pastebin.com/qBg80ujN

Follow-up to my exp with Travis CI: https://devrant.com/rants/5006826

As my allotted credits are set to expire on December 23, I sent a request for 25k monthly OSS credits to Travis support on December 18.
Mind you this is only half of the credits of their lowest subscription price and I didn't ask for extra CPU, so not much to ask.

While for the previous credit request, I got an answer within 24h, this request has gone unanswered for over 2 working days and I noticed it got labeled with "Priority: low" although I will be unable to continue my OSS work in 2 days.

Let's see whether they plan to really uphold their promise that "they will always support open-source"

Follow up rant: https://devrant.com/rants/4943574/...
(Funny link btw.)
I tell him "Fine, upload it to the GitLab repo I created a week ago and you never used it." on Friday.
Today, the day *before the presentation*: "Here, have the GitHub repo, ask for permission and you're all set up.".
He's getting the boot.

my quest for the next laptop. (previous discussions: https://devrant.com/rants/5050863)

i have decided on going with a macbook , since non apple laptops are coming with defacto flaws(poor battery life and uncomfortable screen) whereas macbook m1 are coming with flaws that will hopefully get automatically eradicated(aka lack of support from various softwares. i got an official response from google that more emulators are going to be supported in next few months :D)

furthermore i researched a bit on macbook prices and holy shit the mgmt at apple has really gone all numbers on it.
based on my previous results on what combination of ram/ssd/processor will last next 5-7 years for me, i put 1tb and 16gb ram as constants and the mac's product/processor lineup was very fascinating to me as a developer

here is a summary : https://imgur.com/a/7QQDtu1

basically if i ignore the gpu ,
apple macbook air = the price of 30gm gold (and will easily last 4-5 years for the mentioned combination)

apple mbp = air + a fan + inr 30k . holy shit, m1 macs rarely run fans even for big projects and an external fan is just rs 2000

apple m1 pro = apple mb air + fan + 2 additional cpu cores + 85k . so just a 2 core addition = 4 threads addition for a price of an intel i5 8th gen laptop.

so folks i am thinking of cheaping out a little and buying the air . what do you think, is macbook air's higher end model (i.e the one i have in the image ) worth for a fullstack dev?

https://devrant.com/rants/5124329/...

Half a year later, absolutely NOTHING has changed. Except I have more work on my plate in addition to that big project and those integrations and shit… I’m fucked. So badly need some time off, but ain’t got time for that.

Update 2: https://devrant.com/rants/5446637/...

Not saying that my boss is wrong, but the way he gives feedback and teach me is just awful. Just today, a new colleague told me that one of the ex-team member quit because of our boss.

Anyway, the activity I was working on, I nailed it.

In morning connect, boss specifically told what he was looking for and made me do a live task and gave feedback. That made me realised what he was looking for.

I spent the day completing the activity. When I showed him, his jaw dropped.

He tried to pick on few things, but failed to do so.

He loved the output. Praised me and my persistence. Finally, the history repeated itself, and I learnt more about communication.

Possibly my weakest point out of all, where I was failing in interviews and had to fix that. Now, I got some pointers and will work on it to excel futher.

Yes, things were stressful, but I came out to be stronger.

building upon the love/hate relationship that I am building with web dev . (prev: https://devrant.com/rants/5111653 and https://devrant.com/rants/5112673/)

in the last 3 weeks, I have been trying (in vain) every weekend to get a hang of HTML/CSS/web dev, and the best I was able to do was to list down the various tags used in head and what element is...

and yesterday I said "fuck this shit, I know bootstrap!" and in last 48 hours I have been able to make a homepage, authentication page (login/signup/forget pwd), a course listing page and playlist screen without a video player.

it's the wrong way of doing front-end, but I made progress :D

at least now I can focus on what I really wanna do, the backend. hope I get some good tutorial/video stuff on spring+gradle+kotlin, I don't really like XML-based java beans and stuff in spring boot.

I know tidbits about node too, but the moment am gonna jump into that shit, I will be bombarded by es5, es6, functions/lambdas/classes doing the same things, jquery, elixir, and what the fuck not.
I had learned java from a teacher in a classroom course, so i kinda know how java works and how to dive into it, but web dev is soo much awkward to dive in, I get totally lost.

however, in retrospect, I feel I do have a little bit of knowledge of being a "fake" web dev 😅 . I checked out some of my old repos and I have been trying to get into "making" web projects since 2019. back then I found a brad traversy's video on Bulma CSS, which said "no CSS knowledge required" and that guy literally just wrote everything in an HTML file and was able to make a beautiful-looking website via just 1 file!

since then I have been practicing with bootstrap and bulma and have really got a knack of using those classes. i still don't understand the magic that goes behind flex or grid, hope i am able to have enough knowledge to create a framework of css or js like these awesome bulma/bootstrap!! 😄😄

So the flutter keynote was yesterday, amazing stuff were demoed and amazing stuff were announced, one of them was my speculations which I did in this rant:

https://devrant.com/rants/1883654/...

And that's the Flutter for Web! also known as Hummingbird, I think this is the new era of cross-platform developing! :D

Following my last post, just looked up the Win 11 features....

https://devrant.com/rants/4930011/...

Yawn.... Feels like more trouble upgrading than staying on 10.