Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.

We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).

Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.

Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.

Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).

Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.

Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.

Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.

Well here's how I see things going:

Intel and AMD ditch their assembly architectures for Scratch, because drag and drop is very popular lately.

The Boolean is renamed to the biggot by SJW leaders for only supporting binary views.

You must first ask consent to add an item to a linked list, because forcing two items together promotes rape culture.

Apple removes the "h" and "7" keys on all laptop models and gives no reason for their actions.

Linus Torvalds grows an extra middle finger, and it still isn't enough.

Nintendo makes Mario gay and Luigi black to be more inclusive.

LG makes a curved monitor that curves away from you rather than towards you. People buy it in confusion.

Everyone makes the same ad revenue on YouTube, and it is rebranded to OurTube. Luckily, they were able to keep the color scheme.

People finally realize that machine learning is just math, and stop using it everywhere. (Just kidding lol)

AMD and Gucci merge. Nobody understands why.

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

Client : Can you make some adblock?
Me : Why? There is a lot of good things already...
C : I mean... Listen carefully.
M : ok
C: i have some google ads and user blocks with adblock
M : yeah, that is normal
C : so i implemented adblock blocker which blocks adblock so that i can show the webpage plus ads when the user disables adblock.
M : i bet users hate that.
C : yeah, so users found out a way to disable adblock blocker which disables adblock blocker which i implemented to show the ads! So i cant earn revenue..
M : so what?
C : Can you make ad block block block block?
M : Sure. How much will you give me ?
C : 20 to 30 dollars
M : great ( the most generous client ever seen)

*couple of years later*

Client : can you make ad block block block block block block block block block block?
Me : i cant understand
C : count the number of block
If there is odd number of block i means to block ads.
If there is even number of block ads, it means to show ads making user to disable ads.
M : so just tldr your request this time
C : even number
M : ok how much will you pay
C : 20 to 30 dollars

*next day*
C : can you..
M : offline

Who in the fucking world made ads, made adblock and made adblock block?

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

I am currently working for a client who have all their data in Google Sheets and Drive. I had to write code to fetch that data and it's painful to query that data.
I can definitely relate with this.

PS: Their last year revenue was over US$2 Bn and one of their sibling company is among Top IT companies in the country.

The 1st of July, it'll be a year ago since my father passed away.

I made him a promise as he explicitly told me; "Please grow our company, I wouldn't have put you in the CTO position if you sucked at what you do" - so I said I would keep pushing the boundaries.

As per now we've officially broken our set target. Our revenue thus far in 6 months of time has reached to last years total revenue. I take great comfort in knowing that he would have been god dang proud.

July the 1st will be a day with both a smile and a tear. Had to get this off my chest!

Today I became the lead developer of a system, which annually generates about 30 million in revenue.

I just finished uni. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I feel like this guy.

Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.

5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)

1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!

zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!

tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

Maybe if Forbes and Business insider would show something like this, they'll get more revenue.

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

Big boss: Last year we had much more revenue and profits than our expectations, and this success is thanks to all of you. Thank you! You made an excellent work! Impressive!
Some employee: Can we all get a raise?
Big boss: Wtf that question again? No way!

Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.

Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.

Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.

Why even bother with article sites now? Try to search for a quick answer to a question and the only resource is some article and the user is met with:

- "Hi, here's where all your data goes. Please unsubscribe from our 937 partners and continue."

- "DO YOU KNOW WE USE COOKIES?" (Covers 60% of the page).

- "It looks like you're using adblocker. Mind whitelisting us for the 2 minutes we're in your life for? "

- "Before we show you the single sentence answer you're looking for let us promote our shitty content that you'll never click on because we hired the guy who makes shady porn links on every z-list site possible."

- "This article is in multiple parts to spread ad revenue. Click next to continue."

There's probably an extension that stops most of this but christ, it shouldn't be this bad.

Once a CEO is 24*7 a CEO. For me it's Chief Experiment Officer

And only dreamers can have that title. One who dreams at night and work it out the following day.
Having a startup is much more than just having an idea
It's about revenue,
It's about value,
It's about team,
It's about impact,
It's about growth,
It's about compliance,
It's about being finance, marketing, HR and tech expert at the same time.
It's about respect the supporters,
At the end it's about the money you earn as an individual.
For playing all the above roles, you need to dream real big.

To me startup is about falling in love with your work first.

-
By an Indian CEO

Dev: So we need around $50-100 a month to activate and use some key services that would greatly reduce our backend complexity. Would this fit into our budget? Actually, we've never really discussed in general what sort of tech budget we have to work with...

Management: UNTIL WE HAVE SUSTAINABLE REVENUE, OUR TECH BUDGET IS 0

FullStackClown: 0? Are you serious? You can't spare a few hundred dollars TOTAL over the next 3 months until our next round of funding clears?

Management: ALSO WE ARE REALLY GOING TO NEED YOUR HELP TO FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT FROM THE TECH SIDE

FullStackClown: Oh no... we've gotten to the classic point where they think tech is the thing that will solve their problems... abandon ship...

Fuck big tech companies. Fuck their surveillance capitalism. Fuck their monopolies and anti-competitive bullshit. Fuck their tax dodging. Fuck their fighting against the right to repair. Fuck their worship of revenue above all else. Fuck their 30% cut on everything. Fuck their world-destroying revenue models built on heartless AI and zero customer service. Fuck their automated banning systems with zero explanation as to why the fuck they've banned you, with zero fucking recourse. Fuck their amoral psychopathic CEOs and their fucking space rockets. Fuck all this shit. When I'm done with this IT project I'm fucking done with tech.

Okay I'm done now.

Boss giving a me a lift to work cause he wants to start work earlier since our ad revenue plunged during the weekends. One fucked up day coming up.

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

After mass layoffs my team went from 10 engineers to 4 with no drop in expectations. This was a ridiculous ask, everyone was burnt out and could not keep up. For some reason the geniuses in management gave me a bad performance review despite me doing 2 to 3 full time workloads.

That day I put in applications and got an offer in less than a month from one of them. Put in my notice and suddenly it was surprised Pikachu face. Now they are down to 3 engineers and admitted it would be months before they had the revenue to even backfill my position.

Good riddance.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

Lots of oof in one image.

I like how they had the audacity to say (and I fucking quote): "this is good news!"

I don't like to complain about sites generating revenue. I understand it is important and I even feel morally obligated not to use an adblocker. But all I will say is that the site has sustained itself for a very long time without the use of poor-quality and unrelated ads, and this feels like a lot more of a money grab than something the site actually requires.

Anyways, happy to see a -400 score on it. And I guess I can't wait to get Amazon ads on SO.

Difference between && and || - 1,7K damages

So last Friday we released a my mistake, which resulted in 1,7 K losses for the company. I feel like total idiot, because I messed up if’s and instead && used ||. Testing did not noticed, pull req was approved, nobody noticed it for four days. But that’s because of complex nature of the function and it’s application, but in the end - it was me who put it there. How do you cope with that? I am leaving next week for a better position in another company and it totally messed things up in my head.

Our company makes 70k in revenue so I doubt it’s gonna put a big dent in finances but I feel completely hopeless and like shit.

This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.

YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.

But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?

YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.

A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.

It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.

TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general

So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)

He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol

So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.

What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst

well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol

btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear..

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.

As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.

We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]

2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]

3. He asks for a meeting

We accept the meeting, we go to their office.

When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".

So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.

FML I guess.

Sorry for the long post.

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

Why the fuck does Apple hate developers so much? I just want to test and play around a bit. Why do I have to own a fucking Mac? Why do I need to pay 99$ a year just to install a debug build on my own device?! It's literally impossible to get into ios development without being rich or having some kind of plan for revenue...

Testing my app on Android:
Install Android studio -> plug in phone -> run code in Android Studio or simply install the resulting apk on your phone.

Trying to test my app on my iPad:
Google how to build app for iPad -> reading that you have to own a Mac to run xcode when you want to build Code for iOS -> searching for a workaround -> find a way to build my app online -> setting the tool and building it -> Trying out 5 different tools to sideload the app, no one works -> finding out that you need a developer account to sign the app for testing purposes on MY OWN DEVICE. I really would appreciate it if I would be able to install personal stuff for testing and LEARNING without being forced into insolvency. Why are people putting up with this kind of bullshit?

How does devRant make revenue?

My only nemesis are sales people.
* They try to sell the impossible to the customer.
* They think even the biggest change takes only some minutes to implement, and tests do not even exist.
* They promise to deliver an app within half the time which means we have to cut out animations or some tests to deliver when due.
* They often get a commission (sometimes not as part of profit but revenue!) for calling their pals and asking them if they wanna buy something new (some say they also take the risk, but they don't, the company does).

There may be exceptions, but my perceived ratio between good and bad sales is about 1/20.
Now I am in a very small company with only one sales guy. Guess what, he is a good one! I hope he stays forever.

Do you know whats worse than someone reach you for an idea " Lets create X existing app, but..." ?
Its "Lets clone that app, we will sell the service cheaper than the cloned app, you do all the job, se urity, hosting, administrating, and we will split the revenue 50/50."
Just happened.

I’m LOLing at the audacity of one of our vendors.

We contract with a vendor to build and maintain a website. Our network security team noticed there was a security breach of the vendor’s website. Our team saw that malicious users gained access to our Google Search console by completing a challenge that was issued to the vendor’s site.

At first, the vendor tried to convince us that their site wasn’t comprised and it was the Google search Console that was compromised. Nah dude. Our Search Console got compromised via the website you maintain for us. Luckily our network team was able to remove the malicious users from our search console.

That vendor site accepts credit card payments and displays the user’s contact info like address, email, and phone. The vendor uses keys that are tied to our payment gateway. So now my employer is demanding a full incident report from the vendor because their dropping the ball could have compromised our users’ data and we might be responsible for PCI issues.

And the vendor tried to shit on us even more. The vendor also generates vanity urls for our users. My employer decided to temporarily redirect users to our main site (non vendor) because users already received those links and in order to not lose revenue. The vendor’s solution is to build a service that will redirect their vanity urls to our main site. And they wanted to charge us $5000 usd for this. We already pay them $1000 a month already.

WTAF we are not stupid. Our network service team said we could make the argument that they do this without extra charge because it falls in the scope of our contract with them. Our network team also said that we could terminate the contract because the security breach means they didn’t render the service they were contracted to do. Guess it’s time for us to get our lawyer’s take on this.

So now it looks like my stakeholders want me to rebuild all of this in house. I already have a lot on my plate, but I’m going to be open to their requests because we are still in the debrief phase.

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.

@dfox whats the revenue model of devrant? if you dont mind me asking

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

This is what you're in for when you go for THE state-of-the-art "React stack". What you see in the screenshot below is the hellofresh.be website (it's the same as .com). It uses Next.js, React, emotion & styled-components (2 CSS-in-JS libraries). It uses 140MB of RAM for a single tab with some product cards and a slider, logs 70 console errors in production, and fails to load 3/4 times on Firefox.

On mobile, opening a meal card to view its recipe literally takes up to 10 seconds (and I have good connection and performant devices) and you can't choose the last meal card because a f*ing overlay hides the "add" button. And this is a global company with millions in revenue.

All this bugginess has already resulted in incorrect or missed deliveries and they're not doing anything about it. F* you Next.js & F* you HelloFresh IT management

Nice to see all my new app's advertisement stats go up :)
Pageviews: 1316 (+41%)
Impressions: 1142 (+24%)
Clicks: 7 (+500%)

Except the only one that matters :(
estimated revenue: €0.03 (-25%)

Fuck you Admob!

You know what fkn sucks? I was so fkn excited to join the company. It was a dream job for me. I loved everything about it. The stack, the concept, the core values, everything.
Fast forward 3 years and I no longer recognize the company I joined. Went from customer first to revenue first. No other vision than increase sales. Heart fkn breaking...

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....

So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...

So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...

It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)

Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs

And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Spent 2+ months this year building two new software courses. They've netted me a total of... $17.00

That's 5 cents per hour at 40/hours a week, not bad!!!!

also please fucking tell me how a $49.99 course with 92 enrollments this month earns me a grand total of $93 (even rounding up here for generosity)

creator: $93
udemy: $4506

udemy: "instructor gets 37% of comissions"

yeah okay then where is my fucking $1000+

I mean what in the literal FUCK is going on here

better put: i average a single fucking dollar for each $50 course I sell?

Please kill me and end it all in this mindless race to the bottom

taking a deep dive on this revenue share and then i'm going to fucking get the money i deserve

On iOS 11, Apple is no longer allowing you to open apps that are 32 bit. Apple should have given all the developers with 32-bit apps free access to the developer program rather than forcing them to pay a $99 fee to publish a 64-bit version of their app.

This would’ve made better business sense for them as publishers would have had an opportunity to create new apps and see more revenue coming in from upgraded apps. Ultimately more money for Apple. Not sure what dumb fool at Apple HQ thought this was a good idea.

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

I'm currently watching the "it was my idea, I should get half the revenue" conversation play out in real time... For someone else.

I had the sense to turn down this "fantastic business opportunity"

I have been commenting a lot recently on linux ranters who rant about windows for stupid reasons.
To all these people who think linux is better and they are smart(er) than windows users, i say:
We use windows in the company I work for. And if you are a linux user, you're just not welcome and your skills are just a waste for the company. And yes it is a successful company with 100s of millions of euros as net revenue.
Our users have windows machines and we offer topnotch Microsoft solutions for them.
When you ask me to switch to linux because of a problem i had in a Windows machine, it makes me feel that you are a stupid person who knows about linux and gives solutions based on his stupidity and on zero knowledge of the scenario.
Please be professional and think about the solution you are offering. It would be best if you did not offer any solution at all in fact.

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

999 dollars = 835,20 euro
Launch price of iPhone X, 1179,00 euros
Maybe it's because Apple pays too much revenue tax in EU , oh, wait...

When your company is sinking, and you keep suggesting to pivot, trying something new or different enough, having some meeting to think about new levers to increase revenue... and the only answer is "we don't have enough time for this. Let's try tweaking <insert random feature here>".

WE ARE LOSING 30.000€+ EACH MONTH!!! WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT CHANGING THIS FEATURE NOW!!!

Today it's been more than 7 months since "we don't have enough time". Still nothing intelligent has been tried. The company could be closed down in 2 month. FUCK YA ALL decision makers!

Now I'll probably lose my job just because you're too fucking stupid to get your finger out of your ass! The company is in the exact same state since 7 months!!! Go burn in hell!

Let me begin by saying I knew the jist of the announcment before even reading the CeO's LeTteR... though it's comically and ironically far worse than I could have even expected

this is absolutely an 100% genuine rant from the bottom of my heart

Just go absolutely fuck yourself, your devs, and your entire org. Imma call it right now and say Udemy as a company won't be around in a mere 10 years. (easy to say this actually; the average lifetime of a company in general on the stock market is 18 years, with a garbage shit pile like Udemy i can guarantee its less than that)

oh, but their stock was up 38% on friday on good earnings... wonder how they did that

"But why!?!?!? Why are all creators going to tiktok and youtube?!?!?" - Udemy CEO mouthbreather

stupid fuck, maybe take a lesson from a 1st grader and get educated

people think devs are bad? Oh, its about to get a whole lot worse. there's no motivation anymore for skilled devs to build valuable courses, more and more junior devs using outdated spit out shit information from IdiotGPT, and a destruction of number of people on stackoverflow, asking the same 10 questions over and over again...

oh how the times have changed...

Don't forget, docker desktop will require paid licenses after 31/1/22

Docker Desktop remains free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.

Just a friendly reminder to fuck docker and migrate to a better solution.

We use a third party paid company to produce a service and give ongoing support for it, which all our revenue streams depend upon. They are shit and their service is shit. Here's how my conversation about testing went today.

Me: 'hey X wrote an integration test project for the service. It shows the service is broken 50% of the time. We should give their team access to it and have them run it as part of CI'

Colleague: 'They are too shit to setup CI'

PM: 'we are stuck with them so there is no point. It is what it is'

Boss: just ignores me. Not even a reply.

Some days later

Head of QA: 'Hey Dev and QA are broken'

Me: 'because their service is broken. I made so and so suggestion before but it was rejected. We will just have to accept Dev and QA are broken 50% of the time'

Head of QA: 'no we cant'

Me: 'ok so we should setup the tests to run by giving them access'

Head of QA: 'No we shouldn't. The tests can only be used by us and if they break it tells us so we can act on it, or choose not to'

Me: 'We would not want to act immediately on all our revenue streams breaking? Yes we can reverse engineer their client and fix errors as they occur, or we could just have them run the tests and a team our company pays for can stop adding breaking changes to their own API every other day. Right now it has been broken for 2 weeks.'

Head of QA: 'in an ideal world we would have an internal team so you're wrong'

Me: :)

I really don't understand how they can come to such a conclusion. Am I missing something or am I surrounded by total fucking idiots?

fuck wordpress... Got a request to improve wordpress site speed + pagespeed score. 20-30 plugins, 15 or more additional ones off. Improved the score and noticed that my adblocker is blocking a lot of urls. Sure enough theres a hidden iframe in the bottom with 10 ad network scripts and bidding get requests. Someone is making ad revenue from this shit.. wtf. I've only had problems with shitty wordpress sites being hacked for some reason. It's always a shitty experience. Any tips on fixing hacked wordpress sites?

Alright so I’m in the final stages of my companies website. I want advice from you all. Instead of ads for extra revenue, I’m asking you all personally; How would you feel if a website (yes, like what the famous pirating company was doing) used your computers processing power to mine while the website was open? There wouldn’t be any annoying ads and I could simply hide it in an iframe?

Negative and positive feedback please.

Apple: "We're justified in taking 30% of all our customer's in-app purchasing revenue because we've implemented an awesome super-secure in-app payment system"
Me, after spending the last week wrestling with Apple's shitty, horrible, unbelievably obtuse, poorly documented system for handling subscription renewals and having to write my own god damn crypto shite for reading receipts: "You're shitting me, right?"

What a complete scam.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

Global Warming Minigames app, Ad revenue to charity

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

Goals for 2019:
Register a company and make 20k revenue while finishing University.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

How much do you earn from your Mobile Apps(from ads)? Whats the best paying Ad network in your opinion? What to do when Admob reduces most of the revenue(at the end of the month) saying "invalid traffic"?

I've worked for 2 firms with billion dollar revenue on contract basis in last years, but I'm still a year away from graduating.
It feels suffocating when after a great night of work I have to go to class among people who don't care about programming at all

I just want to graduate and leave this place...

Ps. Attendance is compulsory in my college and I take computer science classes

Pss. I already make thrice of the highest package in offered in my college for last three years!

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

our company just lost one stream of revenue that was responsible for 40+% of the companies income. I'm hopeful they can get it back, but I think I should start looking at job listings...

If your company(startup) now adding google ad for revenue....

It's time to switch.

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

ah udemy updating their "terms and conditions" on how they do revenue sharing... either the corp or the creator is going to get fucked... can you guess which one?

and no i don't want to read a dumbass letter from your dumbass CEO to find out how your going to fuck me... shame that your org has to hide it that way

just give me the brass tax you robber barons

So we thought we did something wrong and caused our AdX revenue to plunge. But after 'fixing' yesterday, we broke it further. Then we realised there were alot of illogical numbers on AdX report. We are suddenly making 1/3 of our ad revenue! I am running out of ideas. Anyone else is facing same issue?

Arg!

Revenue from ads going downhill and I can't release a new version of a game because it's tied to an event, and I can't even announce it yet.

Sent a proposal for a government grant. Deadline was Aug. 15th, but still no word on it - they didn't even updated the website, which by all means, still have the "send proposal" button active...

Meanwhile also developing another game, but I can't seem to decide on the music and sound fx for it. Can't find some style that will "fit".

Oh the joys of gamedev. :P

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

Around a year ago I launched my first site in rails.

Even though the site didn't took off, I learned from it, and it was an enjoyable experience.
Well, at least some of it.

As a web developer, I enjoyed doing the web development.

Then came hosting and deployment. Pretty stressful since I'm no sysadmin/devops person, but you could say it's still in the realm of software. So I managed.

But the one part I couldn't stomach is marketing.

Partly because I have zero experience and interest in the subject, and also because I don't to be an annoying marketing whore asking people to check my site.

I have never seen a bigger cesspool than the google results of the query "how to get people to know my site".

I have seen the shadiest shit, I have read of people saying you should befriend subreddits mods/admins and then ask them the favour to let you post your stuff.

I know that contacts are important, but taking advantage to get traffic on your product? No thanks, I'll rather have a dead site.

This was pretty much the experience when googling about marketing, unethical shit everywhere.

In fact, even calling it marketing makes me feel kinda sick, but it's a thing and it's pretty much necessary to get people to know your site.

Anyhow, in a company, everyone does their role, but this is just a one man thing.

So the ideal thing would be if a marketing person (hopefully an ethical one) took care of that. How does one find one though?

I guess you either partner with one or you hire on.

The problem with partnering is that I don't know someone like that. Do people partner up with "strangers" on the internet?

I could hire too, but I'm not as affluent as being able to employ a single person for 50k a year. And I don't know how feasible it is to hire someone when your site has no revenue anyways.

Maybe there's some company that offers such servicwe? I dunno...

What are your thoughts on this?
I'll be thankful of any feedback.

Hey, here's an idea. Ethical cryptocurrency mining Adblock.

We've been talking a lot about mining as a revenue source and its ethics here, so that gave me an idea.

I've seen a lot of talk about blocking or boycotting mining websites.
Adblock has the "ethical ads" thing to allow reasonable ads to be displayed.

What if we made the mining equivalent of that: an extension that the user allows to mine with x resources, that prevents websites from doing their own mining, but which redistributes its mining results.

The website could just add a bit of script to tell the extension who they are, and while the page is on the foreground or streaming content, the extension would mine on their behalf.

This could also allow more transparency for the user: "your computer has generated x money for website y".

Wouldn't that be a nice middle ground? Does anyone know of a project like that?

Microsoft you asshole. Why do I have to see an unskipable 30-second ad in your games on Android? Aren't you guys billionaires already to generate ad revenue from Google?

Used chitika ads got $0.01 Revenue 😂

Tried bumble. It was lame. It would not let me make a profile without a photo. Supplied a rough drawing of myself. It felt betrayed so it nagged constantly about a photo even while I was trying to delete the damn app.

I do absolutely hate when apps feel entitled to my info. Like, it's okay to ask, but I also feel better about deleting your app than downloading it. Fair is fair I guess. But also... It's not fair that these lame apps get so much revenue either.

So what other apps should I try for finding friends locally?

Rant!

When senior dev's or successful startup founders ask me to shift from Open-sourcing my Projects and start making revenue, it gets me very awkward and uncomfortable with myself.

Their argument is Opensource won't feed you unless you're linus torvald, I understand their point however it's irritating that public good isn't a mode of income.

Watching Jobs and Social Networks gets me similarly worked up.People disregarding companions of their journey as they choose money over friendship.

It sure is a cruel world. I'm not sure if i ever will be compatible with it.

At a previous job, I worked on a multi-vendor e-commerce website. It used Magento2 as an API and a separate application we built with Node, Express, and React that consumed it to avoid using Magento's frontend.

The whole stack used should be a rant in itself but our checkout process was dependant on work done by some contractors in India. In short, this entire checkout process would break multiple times a day with no way on my end to fix anything, and that's what I had to reply with every time a bug ticket would come in; which is honestly the worst reply ever to a huge issue like that.

After several attempts of pitching the idea and being turned down for building the checkout in-house to remove the dependency and work on even streamlining the process, the product manager of the brand said as quote "Well the checkout isn't really that important".

At first, I was kind of speechless. How is the functionality of actually buying a thing in an online store NOT important? Shouldn't that be the most important?

Then I realized over time that the only thing they cared about was being a Nascar version of a website, essentially being a canvas of ad space that sellers on the marketplace could buy and paying money just to list their items.

I hated working on that project, and that made it so much more soul-crushing. Gotta chase that revenue right?

I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.

I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?

My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.

If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.

A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.

Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.

Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.

Probably that one time we lost to a shitty app that was of no use to the community and literally scammed the opinion of the jury.

Their concept was a webapp that would suggest a room to study to a student on our campus. It was called "is it free/vacant" but should've been called "is it open" since there is no way of knowing how many seats are occupied, etc.

The jury was amazed, the app was worthless, literally 15 minutes of coding, presentation had a shit ton of buzz words like "were using mongodb to store the classrooms", was just fucking horrible

On the same competition a guy tried to enter his company that was developing the Facebook page managing app for Windows phone, already having a working app and making revenue from it for at least a year lol

We still got second place, but it was a really disappointing second place, shit was rigged yo

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

I like being an employee in product development team (rather than a consultant in a project) - we're exempt from reporting hours per project and making sure to stay within budget.

But on the downside it's frustrating to se how the org happily spends development time without considering we cost money. Just found out that one department ordered a campaign site that took 4 days for 2 devs to build.
It's now ended and revenue was only a few hundred bucks.
When I asked "Didn't we lose money on this project? Considering our salaries and the ~60hour dev time"

- "Oh no, we don't count the dev team as a cost! You already work here and would get paid no matter what" 😑

Good thing I'm not in finance.

A few months back, I had this interview with this guy to work at his startup. It was wonderful and he told me that I am hired (during the interview itself!). The position was of an intern as I was to start my co-op. So, to complete all the process with the university, I need offer letter to submit. The guy did not send me one, instead he sent an NDA. I emailed him explaining that I need an offer letter to submit to the university first before I sign any agreement. He stopped replying to my emails.

I had no other option so I contacted my university's co-op committee and explained them the situation. They contacted that guy and after that I get an email saying "We would like to move forward with other candidates".

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH REVENUE TO PAY, DO NOT CONDUCT INTERVIEWS. AND WHY THE FUCK DID YOU SAY "YOU ARE HIRED IN THE FIRST PLACE?!" MORON

One of my uncle is becoming a classic nightmare.

He was kind of getting offended that I never payed much attention to his request of making a website for his impromptu travel agent sidejob.

He claims he gets approached by some people for tour packages. His revenue model is simply taking the payment from them with his commission and passing over responsibilities and everything else to some other travel agent. I don't know how he has the connections to make it happen or build it as a sustainable business but that's none of my business.

Anyway, what irritates me most is that he doesn't seem willing to invest in building the site. I strongly suspect he expects me to build it free ( free as in I cover expense for server and domain ) for him. He didn't have a solid plan on what features he is looking for in the website or even come up with a proper name for the site. He basically told me to buy whatever I think is good.

When I asked him to pay some money for buying the server space, he has gone mum about it.

My best guess is that he is probably looking on internet to do it himself and outsmart me.

Well, good for me.

That feeling, when your changes almost caused a rollback and you hear words like "revenue impact" being discussed 😨

OMG !!!

The CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency) is now operating with freenet in Germany!

If GitHub now supports "unlimited" "free" "private" repos, how will they generate revenue? Does this mean advertising will be an issue with GitHub?

using CSS to detect adblockers (back when I was greedy for that tiny bit of ad revenue)

Business managers not taking ownership for quality of data. If systems are not designed with proper data validation controls at each upstream data entry point them downstream processes and revenue will suffer. You will have a continuous data cleanup black hole.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

#justathought

Since a country is considered to be the strongest definition of a group of unified people, consider the following scenario:

Every country makes it mandatory that any foreign company can only sell their software products as free to use softwares, or one time cost software, or a membership software.

These foreign companies are NOT allowed to generate revenue via Advertisement services or data collection/sharing/analysis AT ALL.

The sole right to share/collect data and use Advertisments as a revenue model remains in the hands of domestic companies born, registered and working in that country only.

This would generate an equal chance for both domestic and international companies to grow(domestic companies getting a chance to grow with a better revenue model, while international companies getting a chance to grow by monetising their tools/algorithms and investing in domestic companies) , resulting in countries getting a chance to grow themselves.
Open source will still win, as open source majorly contains tools and technologies for general public use.
Premium tools and frameworks would become even more valuable, and would he shared among countries like the way they share space researches and resources on nuclear technology today.

Privacy will win, as the data of a particular country stayed within a country. Domestic Companies sharing data with other companies (or even their foreign parent companies) would be held against the respective country's laws only, and government would be more involved in protecting its citizens from data theft.

Is it feasible?

unrealistic dream :

in my 40s, being cto of a market leading product in its v10 stage, whose v1 i created from scratch. me doing nothing except creating the best remote work hustler culture for the company .

i will be making both : the topmost and bottomost engineers/managers give ppts and talks of product that they created, ll system and hl system designs and the decisions that went into it

i also want some powerful management/ ceos as friends, that drive our boat to greater heights and generate tremendous revenue+ fundings + profits

----

realistic dream :

to keep being SE1 (or at worst SE2/tech lead) in a company, do 4-5 hr non impactful work per day and earn 3x the inflation as am doing now. plus somehow get a lottery or something once in a lifetime , that is worth 100x my current income so that i could build a home and 2 cars and a children fund

dev is not a great thing to be dreamt about, but it certainly paves way for a happier and healthier lifestyle if done right

Every project from mlm guys (like amway). They are so confident after the mind trainings but they do not understand shit. They won't stop asking for a favor and they will pay "percentage" of revenue...

The way I understand software licenses.

Cool bro MIT: Free to do whatever you want as long as you include a copy of the license and you can't hold the original accountable.

fair dude Apache 2.0: Like the MIT license but more bureaucratic and few more minor things you need to keep track of.

scumbag GPL: free as in the same way that prison food is free. used by java in gotcha cases as a source of revenue because no one understands java licensing. Often used in the form of a deterrent so you never dare to open up the github page.

scumbag GPL who, realising they have no friends, becomes slightly less of a dick LGPL: But please stop using this and use our more restrictive "freedom" license.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

What platform is better in terms of revenue for the developer?

Android or iOS?

Today i fucked up trying to generate stats from sales and forgetting to check if sale state was completed or cleared.

Causing sales and revenue on the report l to be inflated by sales that’s failed 3DS checks, bails, bank rejects and other failure states.

Go on have a cheap laugh at my silly incompetence 😂

Become profitable without losing my soul.
Someone help me come up with a revenue stream that's not LOOT BOXES! 😂

I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.

It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.

But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .

When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.

But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"

I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .

the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.

ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster

I feel very frustrated about this situation. I'm studying so I haven't many time to work but I worked last two years and now I feel as a bird with clipped wings. I need a side project, something mine, to work on, to put myself in. I don't need to get money from it but the revenue it's only a confirmation about the success provided by hard work and dedication. I can't fill this emptiness with the study. I feel I just need to work on something I believe, see it grows up and came alive. Every project I start and every line of code I write seems meaningless. This situation is a strange existential drama and hurts me. It's like I forgot how to be satisfied programming. I live in this recurrent melancholy and I don't feel realized.
Sorry for the sad rant but I need some suggestions from someone who can understand me.

We devs are installing adblockers. Meanwhile, Google shareholders are clicking all ads to increase Google's revenue...

Your amazing SEO means nothing if that traffic doesn't convert into some form of actual revenue.

Just been casually asked to come up with ways to generate more digital revenue for the company - it’s a newspaper.
As a dev I can map out some solutions and work through most problems, but this is huge! Where do people even start with such a overwhelming challenge???!!!
One things for sure, less bloody display advertising would be my first thought, gotta’ be more innovative!
Any advice?!

Anyone ever thought about teaching or have taught private coding lessons? Seems to be some interest in my area just thinking out loud wondering if it could be an extra revenue stream for me..

It's fuckin midnight, after an exhausting day. Instead of working on a company, why don't each one of us just create a blog site, then add some ads, we share our url here and we'll gonna visit each shared url to generate traffic so we can generate revenue.

Oh if only it could work that way. These what if scenarios sometimes coming to my mind at night. Sorry for the interruption, keep scrolling.

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

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2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

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3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

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so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

Been supporting the marketing department for 9 months. And they didn't make any revenue/traction.

Now I'm missing my pay upgrade because of that :/

I wouldn’t be surprised if 50% of systems at major companies are redundant and/or provide zero contribution to operational efficiency or revenue. So many systems are created because someone had an “idea”, but really just wanted to make themselves look good.

[NSFW]
nH recently shut down their API due to it causing problem with their front-end (paraphrase of their latest tweet (hopefully latest)). Lemme tell ya mate that front-end is **infested** with pop-up ads that will quite literally pop up at every interaction except scrolling. Pretty sure the shutdown is to ensure their ad revenue rather than making sure the apps doesn't over request (although there can be apps that over-request due to poor coding, in which case I'm sorry).

Kinda justified? Since the page doesn't have the paywall nor anything to grab your money so...kinda justified? Still.

And that's the story of how I became pretty much the only one beside the dev that give a shit about an app for nH on Android.

Our pet project rocks, but it get 0 revenue, so we can spent almost no time on it 😢

!rant

This summer, I started interning as a TA in a firm which basically is a job portal but also has its own training courses.
We hit all time high of $1M in revenue this month, and we got an email. A fking EMAIL.

To be honest spent a year of work time on a team of 2 developing a product that 2 people have bought, £1000 revenue... 1 year after release.

At least we didn't waste time writing tests.

Tiktok has indirectly made the market worse for these guys. Now they struggling to stay alive.

Want to upgrade computer for better programming resources in side projects, need $600

Want to start making side projects for dat sweet sweet ad revenue, need stronger computer

Freelance hobbyist catch-22 :(

If you run a website that generates revenue, do you need to be zoned for business?

So I’m tryina put together a resume and I see a lot of dev résumé talking about increased revenue from x to y or user base from z to w.

What I don’t understand is while yes the user base did increase from z to w it wasn’t just you that caused it. The entire company was working hard at it to get there so why are u claiming that it was you. And apparently recruiters love these kpis that u make out of your ass.

Should I give in and just put them in there anyway?

I worked in a startup so my job didn’t really have a definition of what to be told to do and do I had to deal with building front end with vue to figuring out how to automate our deployment flow and it’s really hard to quantify my performance like sure 3000 tickets solved but u don’t know what portion of them were full blown features what portion was just a one liner.

Is there money to be made in android app development via ad revenue? I'm learning more Java for a different purpose related to a job and think it'd be a fun side project. Maybe utility apps, but probably games.

I've put adaway in my android phone. it's the best thing ever. but i feel bad about devs losing revenue. but i also hate ads.

I earned more than CRED's revenue in 8 months

Ya'll on Signal yet? Now that they are on the rise, they'll need funds and a revenue model. You can't depend on donations unless you're Wikimedia. I don't really see how would they scale up both in terms of manpower and number of users. What's the guarantee that Signal won't end up like it's counterpart WhatsApp?

So, I have joined this new company where I used to work few years back. Something happened before I rejoined, so no one is working there now except me. It's web agency run by my boss and I am the only employee working on over 7 projects including front end, back end, mobile, devops, and some marketing also.

Now, I got offers from couple of other series a funded startups who are willing to pay me 30% more salary. I know I will have less responsibility and more work life balance. But I hate the politics in those companies.

My current company is making good revenue but my boss isn't giving me the salary I am expecting.

He said it will take few more months to give me the salary I demanded.

I also want to build my own company and provide services someday. That's why I thought it'll be better to stick with the company so that I cam learn other aspects of the business.

So. If the company is making say over 200k usd a year and its paying me around 23k usd per year, isn't this kinda low salary for my experience, skills and value I bring?

How should I go about asking a raise?

Also, I don't wanna move to another big tech company. I hate coding questions in the interview as its been years I have prepared for a proper tech interview.

Also, how secure do you think my job is? Is there any future working here? Will I ever be able to reach a salary comparable to big tech companies?
Is it a good place be in right now? (i jave over 5 years of experience)

good evening i would like to know how google takes how much percentage of admob revenue and does interstitial ads make money when someone watches them without clicking, thanks

So at my last job we had an AM deployment and a PM deployment. We had code reviews, QA, a slow roll process (deployed to three servers), monitoring process, and once everything checked out we fast rolled to the other servers.

At my current job we have a QA process, and we deploy once every three weeks.

My first job I deployed as needed, with no QA at all (I was the only web dev there).

I'm currently at a major e-commerce site, my last job was more of a click-bait site (though it still made millions in revenue each year).

So my question is: is there a "normal" as far as deployment schedules? I realize that each business type is going to have their own needs, but what's the "average" time between deployments?

so i got offers to work as game developer,i think they are not a company but small indie dev and want me to join their team,the work is remote and they are using revenue share to pay me,my question is how to avoid or sue them if they gonna scam me,like when the project is done and they just dissappears,they give doc to sign and inside all is all abour privacy policy,work details and my signature