Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

Girlfriend got me a fidget cube for Christmas. I have yet to put it down. This is gonna come in handy for some long nights in the future

I have coronavirus. Went to ER because I couldn't breathe Sunday night. Thought I was fucked. I decide to try to work a couple hours today because I'm getting restless. I'm an associate and have been on a project about a month. No prior software job.

Anyway. They ask me to clone a repo and run some tests. Cool, I can do that. They give me another example to look at to make sure I'm running the test right. Except the test files aren't attached to the email nor is the path to them provided.

I ping the other associate developer on Skype and ask for the test files and get a passive aggressive response that they're in the email. No, they're not you fuck stick, hence why I'm fucking asking you, and given that I almost fucking died a couple days ago, you should be fucking grateful I even logged on. Motherfucker.

Ok I feel better now.

And beware to go close to cell during internet outrage..
They become restless and violent.

1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.

2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.

3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!

How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.

Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

<-- Found in my documents, no clue where it's from

I have to confess. I'm a distro hopper. I've been a distro hopper ever since last year, and it got me tired. I spend entire hours checking distrowatch, partitioning, setting up hardware and drivers and passwords... I've tried to stop, I swear, but every time I do, there goes a new Solus release, an Openbox Debian based new branch, a forensic floppy disk that I know that I won't ever use for real. I just love assigning swap, fighting with rEFInd icons, testing modules, navigate trough different configs... Oh God, I even set up a virtual OpenBSD, just to see what it can do.
My friends have been telling me to stop, because I don't take care of our relation, that I'm becoming a monster. It's shameful and embarrassing to me when they ask me about my day and I say "you know, installing Manjaro on my desktop, and Lubuntu to that crappy old Asus I have for backups" I think I'm going to lose my head some day, this sickness is driving me straight down to the Slackware pits. I should stop it before I try Ratpoison environment but truth be told; I mean not to stop. I'm a distro hopper.
I ride my way live, unstable and restless.

The British summer results in restless nights and broken sleep filled with nightmares.

One particular dream last night involved my friends messing around with a ouija board and they begin asking in questions. I remain sceptical and tell them to ask it to reveal the solution to the issues I'm having retrofitting a legacy web app with a new design.

The board disconnected itself. Hell had no answer.

My coworker became super restless and incompetent during the initial 2020 Covid lockdown. Like playing hours of video games during work hours restless.

For one project, my coworker was working on the backend and I was working frontend. Coworker also wanted to be overlord of the epic branch.

My coworker merges the epic to our test branch and our code is broken. Coworker didn’t pull my FE changes before merging. Dude, I shouldn’t have needed to tell you to pull. You changed the api response that your BE code delivers so of course I had to update my FE code so it could work with this change.

I had to resolve the conflicts because coworker left work early to “rescue/pickup” their girlfriend from work.

You bet I leave this person on read when they try to text me on Signal

I feel like a sailor waiting for an upcoming voyage. Restless, yet hopeful, yet a bit anxious about what will happen.

Also, am unemployed now. Lol. Feels awesome... Except for the financial part. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, am making way too many philosophical decisions as I stand at the edge of an important phase of my life. And rediscovering a part of my personality I forgot existed.

Anyways, hopefully future brings more robots, more AI, more fantastic things to build, and more money and success.

Now that I'm home feels like starting a new life.
I had millions of these new life but I have no choice but to start again !

All I can say is that I just wish I was a robot ! Logical ... Restless ... Powerful ... Ever lasting !!
Non sense ! I know I can never be a robot !!

my covid is still not recovered. Today marks the two weeks. I got fever the first day and then fever was gone but body pain and weakness was there. In 2 days, body pain was gone too. Now I couldn't only eat well. So tried light food but after sometime it was harder to eat properly.
Now I'm having the same diet I used to have before covid, but I'm still not feeling well. I feel pain in my shoulders. My heart races almost all the time and that gives restlessness to my days and it's very hard to focus because of that. Family issues, work, excitement of switching companies, even small bit of sound makes me more restless. If someone has the same symptoms when did they last?

Start my days at 6am local to be able to have an entire days’ worth of access to my team because they’re all East Coast and I’m Pacific. And then work until it’s 5pm local regularly because I lose track of time. And then I can’t just turn it off at night, so then I’m restless thinking about the things I could be doing to make the project better.

How the hell do the rest of you stop thinking about work after work?

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

I'm very tired.

That's it. That's all I wanted to say. -v-

Today I tried teaching a 36 years old student about HTML and layout. My inner self is always restless for practice as an excuse for less talking, but in the end I end up doing even more talking and getting kinda embarrassed.

Good thing is that student understood everything well enough in this 1 hour. I also inserted some good stuff: tips and tricks, conventions mentioned, trends... He even craved for more information.

I'm going to prepare to make further studies more fruitful, because the next synopses won't be as theoretical as today's one.

Just "finished" a side project (I know right, unprecedented) to be graced immediately afterward with another approach to vastly improve one of its features. Well shit, now I HAVE to implement it otherwise it'll just bug the shit out of me for the rest of time!

WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME BRAIN! JUST LET ME FINISH MY SHITTY SIDE PROJECTS WITH PEACE AND QUIET!

It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.

Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.

Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.

I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.

I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.

It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.

I shot myself in the foot again!!

These incident usually happen at restless night.

Some night I become too restless so I do what any programmer would do, I program.

The "novel" idea just come up and I code until I become too tired. I usually finish the prototype of the project before I fell asleep.

I usually found out that I have reinvent the wheel the next morning! Great. My "novel" idea is not too "novel" after all.

It is hard to find the novel project these day since it is too hard to beat the decade of collective intelligence of programmer.

for some reason I decided to re-invent async myself ground up for no reason even though I've last month taken up the philosophy "as long as it works, make it as janky as possible" which was actually very invigorating and fruitful in the end

but now I feel overwhelmed, there's no resources, I've never done anything similar, nobody else knows how to do this, the AIs don't know how to do even small basic building blocks of this, there are no similar repos, and I have self-doubts because I went against my new-found and successful principle

and also my brain feels restless and stressed as fuck because brain issues activated maybe due to change of drugs

so I kind of wanna explode and scream
and then maybe cry
and then maybe I'll exhaust myself and be able to focus again

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

My mind and fingers are feeling restless wanting to code but my eyes are too tired and strained to look at anything.

FML

!rant

Not sure if it's appropriate here...
I think I am getting more affected by the "depression"... Lower productivity, restless sleeps, etc.
I quoted "depression" because I think it's a medical term that I need to get diagnosed before confirming it. I am thinking maybe I need to see a doctor on this but don't know where to start.
Any Hong Kongers here, sharing the same feel?...

Captains Log:

It's been over a year,
I don't know if we will ever see it and the hope in my heart grows weak with each sunset,
the crew is restless, they thirst for it and I don't know if I can contain them anymore.

Oh Lord(@dfox) help us find the next episode of Devrant Podcast

Fidget a lot? Most devs do. Restless leg syndrome? Got a favourite fidget toy? Mine are begleri beads. What are yours?