Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

Small agency, wants to try out some voice tech. Bought a Google AIY to get started, found some limits, worked round them.

Junior developer thought it would be fun to 'teach' it to swear.

Played around with some nice dialogflow intents, etc and got it all working.

Looking pretty good, loaded it with some quippy answers and case studies to show off our services.

Just got in to find out the boss has taken it to a presentation to a client about some of the new stuff we're doing... Now we are all sitting here waiting to see how many of us have a job tomorrow :-/

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

At job interview.

Interviewer: Have you ever thought about why manhole covers are round?

Me: It's to accommodate different body shapes of sewer workers.

Interviewer: Hahah. It's actually so the covers wouldn't fall in.

Me: It used to be like that, but they changed it.

Interviewer: What? Who changed it?

Me: The lizard people!

Interviewer: What?!

Me: * cowers in corner and hisses *

Warning: This is going to be a long one!

Day 1: Fresh outta grad school. Joined a start-up in silicon valley (50% lower pay than avg salary) . Moved to the bay area and rented a car to travel to work. First day, all excited, drive 35 miles to work.

It's a small company with just 5 people. Greeted by the CEO himself. Asks me to wait outside while he goes speaks with the project manager. In the meantime the office manager asks if I have a copy of my resume.

10 minutes later, the CEO walks out and tell me: "I'm sorry but I don't have a job for you at this time. Please come back after a month". Palms are sweaty, Knees weak, arms are heavy. I feel my heart skipping several beats. As an F1 student I immediately start thinking about my visa status.

I drive back home and try to think what I should do next. Then suddenly the CEO calls me back saying pls come back and we can work something out. I drive back and I'm offered a small spot on a round table with my colleagues. Everyone looks stressed out and sad.

Day 2: Work starts early since we need to collaborate with a team in India. I reach work at 6:00 am hoping my second day is better than the first. Couple minutes into the early morning meeting, the CEO flips out and screams: "I'm going to fucking fire everyone. This fucking thing is taking too long. Just get the fuck out already".

Day 547: I finally quit and joined another start-up :)

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

I was *not* on the list. I was devastated, to the point of depression. I refused to get over it, sulked at home, fell sick, skipped college for next two weeks straight. It took a few more days for me to recover.

After several visits from my friends and a lot of convincing, I decided to go back to college. I felt hopeless and had pretty much resigned to my fate. Being the idiot that I am, I missed several other interview opportunities during that interim when I was despairing-away.

Semester exams were about to start and I get a call from my staff saying I had cleared the coding exam for one of the companies that was coming for recruitment the next day. I had written this exam like several months ago and didn’t even remember having written it. It was such a short notice and I had zero time to prepare and my psyche didn’t want to(remember how I had resigned to my fate?).

I did manage to make it to the interview. I was expecting a tough interview (this company had a reputation for having tough interview rounds) but all I got was a bunch of tree and linked list and search algorithm related questions (internship interview). I had two rounds. It did really go well but I had learnt to not get my hopes up. Then I noticed other interviewees being called for a third round and they asked me to go home. I was like “meh”. I was used to it at that point in time.

Very unexpected to me, (but i’m pretty sure y’all have guessed at this point) I get a call saying, they have recruited me as an intern! 6 months later, I was working as an employee!

When I look back today, I realize that my current job, in every way, is waay better than the one I had so desperately wanted! The pay, the timing, the location, my actual job description, all of it! As a bonus I have an awesome manager who trusts me! I work with remotely with a team with such high standards and I learn something new everyday.

In my two years here, I have built a couple automation systems from scratch, I have mentored an intern and got him a full time offer, I have had two free two-week trips to the US and I have been promoted once! I’m so glad I was rejected that day (:

Thank you for reading!

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Friend asked me, "How does it feel being the CTO of a startup?"

Me: "I feel like the main character in one of those cartoons where train, going full speed, is running out of rail road, so he takes rails from behind the train and puts them in front. And the entire thing is on fire. And everyone you hire is trying to put it out with gasoline."

Friend: "Doesn't your CEO help?"

Me: "Well... He had never seen a train before, and he thought they operate on magic and wishful thinking. And he never realized they need rail track to even run. So... not really"

Friend: "So, it's pretty bad, ha?"

Me: "It's great actually. We just closed our seed round. We're about to launch beta. I might even get 5-6 hours of sleep this weekend 😅"

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

To all you devs still wet behind the ears ranting about css - you have no clue just how good you have it.

Most designs used to be table based (table-ception) and to give something a border with round corners or a "drop shadow" you would literally create a table to hold you content with an border of cells containing a background image of a corner / border.

Now you use border-radius or box-shadow as a 1 liner. Stop bitching about centering things and figure out how to hack it like we did.

If you remember this whats your least missed 20th century hack?

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!

Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.

His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"

Thanks God I'm a freelancer

--- Github unveils another round of pricing changes ---

In a move that slipped under the radar with some surprising ease, Microsoft-owned repo wrangler Github unveiled yesterday (7th January) a new set of changes to their pricing model. Unlike the last round of changes that saw unlimited private repos gracing anybody with $7 in their pocket each month - The new round sees everyone on the platform receiving unlimited private repos in a move that's been met with some serious scepticism from the community.

The company's surprisingly brief PR emission (via their official blog) states that they've made 2 major changes, "Github Free now includes unlimited private repositories" - the catch being that you're limited to adding 3 collaborators, which appears to be a move aimed squarely at businesses attempting to operate without forking over the cash for an organisation.

In addition to this there's many vague statements about the kinds of scenarios that "are now possible" via "Github free", the kind of vague nonsense that makes trousers considerably tighter in the PR department.

It would appear that anyone who was previously paying the $7 a month is now a "Pro" user, The PR emission states that "Github Pro (formerly Github Developer) and Github team are also available for developers and teams who need professional coding and collaboration features".

It doesn't seem like you're being offered a whole lot for your $7 a month anymore - a move that would be considered by almost any other company in tech as a good thing, but given that it's Microsoft has been met with warranted suspicion and concern.

Or we could just be being a set of Donny Downers about it, who knows shrug

Gear up! It's a long story.

The last job aka my current job, which I totally love(see my about-me) was a full time offer after I intern-ed for 6months at the company I'm currently working for.

It was through campus recruitment.
So, there was this particular company that I had had an eye on all through my engineering years. I had been training severely, talking to seniors who have been placed there, trying to find as much as I could about the company, clearing mock interviews online and everything. They had an online round first, I cleared it with the second highest mark. (250 of us wrote it).

Then about a month later, it was Recruitment Day (notice the reference to Judgement Day) and I was super nervous. The recruiters knew me as one of the toppers and knew I was in contact with my seniors and I immediately knew I had a chance. All my friends and staff were rooting for me. They all knew I had a thing for this company and that I had been working hard.

I had five rounds. I was the first person to clear all of them. I was incredibly happy. It was all happening too smoothly to be true. This was what I had wanted for 4 years!

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

#LongRant

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!

Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.

The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)

2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)

3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)

5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!

Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.

PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

I got a crap raise — lowest I’ve ever gotten anywhere, and well below inflation — despite busting my butt, having somewhat better health and therefore productivity, etc.

I complained to my boss about it, and said it was insulting. He said that direct managers have zero say in raises, and instead it’s entirely up to execs and HR. Makes sense, since nothing makes sense at this company.

Anyway, he apparently talked to his boss, who talked with his boss, who talked with the execs and HR, and they decided to give me a raise on my raise, a whole $1k/year more, all the way back up to the usual insultingly-low 3%. Yay.

Their reasoning?
“Money is tight.”

The last all-hands?
“Record profits! Record sales! Record numbers across the board! And most of all: record profits! Give yourselves a round of applause for making this all possible!”

Money is tight, eh?
I hope they get smushed by a meteor, given a snuggle-struggle by a roving Somali gang, or kept warm for the rest of their lives by another Hawaiian/Californian wildfire.

About to walk into a second round job interview. It will take my commute from an hour and a half to 15 minutes, be a much larger scale company and teams, with actual schedules and communication. I might actually cry if I get it.

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

Have you guys heard about blind coding?

I had been to competition, first round was quiz.
That was quite easy, though most of the questions were incomplete and didn't make any sense.

They have provided an app. We use that to check the result.

So first round is over, 1 hour later my friend called me asked whether I'm qualified for the next round . I checked the results and my name wasn't there. I was very disappointed.

I left that place after I saw my result. I got a bus which goes to my place.

After 10 minutes, I got a call from the event head asking why I didn't attend second round 😑. I asked why name wasn't there on the result, for which he replied with "database updatation error".

I got down in the next stop and took a bus again to that place.

I reached there, second round was started, First part was debugging. It was easy, I debugged the given program and got the desired output.
Second part was coding. A guy showed a problem to solve and told me to read it quickly . I did as he told.
He opened Dev C++ and gave me a paper to write the program .

When I was about to start typing, he turned off the monitor and told I should write it on paper first and type the program having monitor turned off. 😨

I wrote and typed the program without seeing.
After 30 minutes a college lecturer came to give marks. He told me to compile the program.

TBH, there were many typing mistakes. As header file spelling was wrong it showed only one error.

Him: Huh, cool only one error, well done. *noted that and walked to a guy next to me*

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

Bipolar disorder means that you can code for 14 hours straight, sleep for 4 hours and feel refreshed ready for another round. You can make art and you can express your thoughts in creative, kinda alien ways.

But here are tradeoffs that make bipolar disorder a disease:
- everyone around you is an enemy
- they’re all acting together to harm you
- nobody understands you
- they all make fun of you
- if I say what I mean, nobody will understand me. I’ll scare them
- I’m extremely aggressive towards everything: people, things, situations, problems. Computer lags so I scream, smash it, throw it out of the window and buy a new overpriced one
- constant uncertainty about whether am I acting right or not

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

I was asked to map a mathematical problem to an algorithm for first round of interview. I did it in 5 lines with O(n) and it worked. was told that was not the correct answer sent me an answer with O(n^2) and about 40 lines. in anger, I sent a five page mathematical proof along with analysis why mine was better. surprisingly, they took me in for second round. tanked it because I continually stuttered and froze. I was able to answer it once I got home. decided against sending it.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

While working on my one of the first project in java i ended up using deprecated Calendar API for the date. Since deadline was near i thought it would be a good idea to use the JCalendar API for as date picker (which is a third party API).BAD IDEA. It was the night before the submission round about 11pm when i realized that there is no way to convert JCal object into Calendar and it turned out it is not working as expected you have to subtract a particular number from the year to get date right.

To convert JCal into Calendar i used the toString function to get the date in string sliced it using substring into year,month,day then had to assign date to Calendar object via constructor.
Had to write 70 lines of code just to convert JCal into Calendar...

And then there were other complications related to this problem. Had tu pull an all nighter just to solve date related problems
LESSONS LEARNED :
NEVER USE A DEPRECATED API
NEVER USE THIRD PARTY APIs WITHOUT RESEARCH

TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I just read two rants with round about 40 fucking inside.

No I feel better after a fucking shit day.

Want to say thank you for your fucking good rants.

👍😁

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

A lot of online games (mainstream) tend to make me kind of angry or stressed. Lots of either blatantly stupid or negative players kill the fun.

A few days ago I've startet to see videos about "Among Us". It's on a big hype right now and their machmaking servers must be glowing.
Well, this game is fucking awesome and it makes me really happy! 😊
Nothing beats a 30 minute game of lying, betrayal, teamwork and good old 30'000 IQ big-brain detective work.
I think it's a great execise for remembering stuff.
You remember colors, who's said what and who faked or did which task. And the hardest part is, even if you fucking saw the killer, you have to present the facts in a way that people believe you.
Each round is unique and full of riddles.

Yeah, I just wanted to say: Fucking great game 😄

I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

My biggest distraction: Working at home. I have a student job at my university and work at home. Just visit my boss every other week to show him the results.
So I always thought it's amazing to work at home. No need to travel to the work space, I can arrange my time as I like, noone's constantly watching what I'm doing.
Sounds great, right? Yeah it is, but is it productive? Lol no.

I'm getting distracted by everything. New mail about some kickstarter stuff, one hour wasted. "Can you help me with that computer problem?" Yeah sure. "Wanna play some League of Legends with us?" Sure, but just one round, I need to work. Ten rounds later I wrote like three lines of code.

I could ignore all that stuff, but I'm at home and can do whatever I want, right?
Results in me working through all night, because then there's noone to distract me.

It happened during my campus placement.

My friend was working in the company and he too had come for the interviews. So when I walked into the interview room and saw him, we both acknowledged that we knew each other so the coordinator had my panel changed. The interview went well enough and the interviewer liked me. However when the results were announced my name wasn't there. I was really depressed. Just thought I could never get a job and all that.

Then my friend calls me a week later and tells me because of the mix up during changing the panel, even though i had cleared the round, was not in the final list.
This really was one of the worst moments.

I must come clean as my friend was able to get me another interview and obviously this time I had to blow it. I literally just went blank. I got my first question wrong and after that it just went down hill.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure which interview would be my worst interview story :p

How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

I was just about to post on here asking for a final round of beta testers for my web app before launch, and just before I hit “post” I thought of a massive issue.

FUCKING CUNTSTICK

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Boss: Use the same template that site [X] is using for this project.
Me: [X] is WordPress. Our project is asp.Net/C#. I can't
Boss: Why?
Me: You can't put a round peg in a square hole!
Boss: Why?
Me: [thinking about mortgage] I'll do it.
Boss: Why didn't you say so in the first place?
Me: [die a little inside]

So one of my clients had a different company do a penetrationtest on one of my older projects.

So before hand I checked the old project and upgraded a few things on the server. And I thought to myself lets leave something open and see if they will find it.

So I left jquery 1.11.3 in it with a known xss vulnerability in it. Even chrome gives a warning about this issue if you open the audit tab.

Well first round they found that the site was not using a csrf token. And yeah when I build it 8 years ago to my knowledge that was not really a thing yet.

And who is going to make a fake version of this questionair with 200 questions about their farm and then send it to our server again. That's not going to help any hacker because everything that is entered gets checked on the farm again by an inspector. But well csrf is indeed considered the norm so I took an hour out of my day to build one. Because all the ones I found where to complicated for my taste. And added a little extra love by banning any ip that fails the csrf check.

Submitted the new version and asked if I could get a report on what they checked on. Now today few weeks later after hearing nothing yet. I send my client an email asking for the status.

I get a reaction. Everything is perfect now, good job!

In Dutch they said "goed gedaan" but that's like what I say to my puppy when he pisses outside and not in the house. But that might just be me. Not knowing what to do with remarks like that. I'm doing what I'm getting paid for. Saying, good job, your so great, keep up the good work. Are not things I need to hear. It's my job to do it right. I think it feels a bit like somebody clapping for you because you can walk. I'm getting off topic xD

But the xss vulnerability is still there unnoticed, and I still have no report on what they checked. So I have like zero trust in this penetration test.

And after the first round I already mentioned to the security guy in my clients company and my daily contact that they missed things. But they do not seem to care.

Another thing to check of their to do list and reducing their workload. Who cares if it's done well it's no longer their responsibility.

2018 disclaimer: if you can't walk not trying to offend you and I would applaud for you if you could suddenly walk again.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

!rant

MASSIVE UPGRADE ROUND 2:

We took it by steps, the DBA did his portion and I did mine, we had waited for the entire thing to be finalized today on Sunday since our users are probably jerking off to their waifus (as they should) and today was my part. MA BOE the DBA was with me the entire time and the whole process took us about 4 hours of both of us getting multiple heart attacks here and there and praying to the elder gods of Asgard for their devine protection as we venture into the calamity of fire and juten ass mfkers that are our fucking servers for this particular process.

Man I really hope for the pandemic to be over and take my dude out for a nice beer, some wings and some relaxation time.

Best DB/Dev team I have ever been with.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Had my first interview for a cyber security gig.

1st round, preliminary questions about ethics in a security related topic, etc.

I wrote a report about that topic, but for some reason brain fogged the answer.

At the end of the interview, I also blurted out that I found the interviewer's presentation at a past conference and really liked it.

Pretty sure they now think I'm a creep.

That being said, it's been a few years since I've interviewed, so it feels great to get the dust off, even if I bombed it

Practice makes perfect, right?!

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Nobody's fault. It's just my naiveness.

Meeting time is at 1pm.
2 guys from 2 different companies and me.
Guy A and Guy B offices are a bit closer.
Meeting venue is Guy B office.
Guy A confirmed and reminded me about the meeting around 12.
I had my lunch early and left my office at 1230.
Got a call from Guy A while I'm on route.
Guy B forgot the appointment, went out and they have rescheduled it to 530pm.
In the end I had to pay a round trip ride for a taxi.

Well at least it's cold inside the taxi while outside temperature is 38°.

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

Ok that's nice and all Google but how about you fix the fucking UI, laggy interfaces, janked and half baked tablet mode and just all round fix what you broke from chromeOS 70 onwards?

You know.. make sure things are stable before pretty?

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

I'll tell you the only time... The only times I'll fuck up.

When something changes. That's it.

Nothing else causes me to fuck anything up.

My code gets more and more messy the more people go oh change that ,😐 can that be a capital .... Hold on that box should be smaller

😤😡 Messy = I fuck up.

Now that might well be something I need to work on !

But if you send me twenty emails all with minor things that take seconds to change 😡 I will care less about your project , that makes me lazy.

If you want your project to be perfect on launch .. one plan a couple round of amends maybe 3 and your golden

But I can not keep checking if your application is all good after these minor changes 😐 (these are not situation you can write tests for)

Yes it makes me an asshole I'm aware , but I've been awake 40 hours fixing these peoples work, and quite frankly I couldn't give a toss

Making a Hackintosh - Round 2

Also, Linux is love, Linux is life. But if I have to choose my secondary OS between Windows or macOS, I would rather have macOS. And I know about Mojave existence, but I'm stuck with High Sierra due to the lack of Nvidia drivers on Mojave

Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.

Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!

Because Yes we can!

Beep boop.

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

My LinkedIn is usually pretty quiet. Recently I've received quite a few messages from recruiters. Some of them put numbers in and I look at them, well, the market looks hot.

I like where I am but doesn't hurt to have a look around eh? So I went through some interviews and shit. No preps, not trying to please anyone, being completely honest. And out of the 3 I tried, 1 got to the final round.

Before the final round, the recruiter kept harassing me (it's their job really) about what my "bottom line" is. She said they really liked me but I'm not up to their expectation as a senior role. So they want to proceed with a non-senior role, then climb my ladder up. I told her, I don't give a shit about the title. The she said for that, the salary will be "adjusted" (reads reduced). I told her, look, I said I wouldn't bother if the offer is anything less than X amount of money. Then she said but this company would offer 10% bonus, which will add up , mind you, "close to" X. She said she wanted to know so we don't waste the director's time (as the final round is to meet the bloody director).

I said, if I need to disclose my bottom line before going to this, which is pretty much my negotiation, then let's call it off. No point wasting my time either.

The next day I received the last call from her. They fucked right off.

I know everyone here already knows. But let me experience be another example of how a plague recruiters is. I don't have any experience like this before but this is probably a fucking lowball case too.

Can someone explain to me what sort of recruitments logic is this?

Me after giving interview: so when can i expect to get a call back about my results?

Recruiter: within a day or two. Definitely before X.

A few weeks after X...

Me: so, any update?
Recruiter: yes. Are you available now for the next round?

Me: .... Couldn't you have said that earlier???!! (in my mind)

Today was my first time being on the other side of the table during an interview! Still felt a bit nervous, to be honest lol. It was the second round, and I got to present our stack and talk about what we're working on etc. Long story short, the candidate left a great impression and received an offer. I hope it works out! 😊

Not the question itself, the attitude was the problem.

I didn't solve the problem that they gave me, and struggled for a while (I ended up solving it an hour after the interview).

Their attitude was that they were both sitting on their computers working and not paying attention to me.

That was disrespectful and stupid. Interviews are also about figuring out whether you can work with the person being interviewed, not just their tech chops. They completely missed the opportunity.

I went to round 2 which was the same. Didn't go for round 3.

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

confession time:
I am php laravel developer with little knowledge about nodejs.
I got selected by one startup as nodejs developer.
frankly I am not better nodejs developer than my competition who were rejected.

I completed oral interview with my nodejs theory knowledge at a time of technical round , they gave us task to create crud with fantastic front end and nodejs mongo as a back end.

I developed front end in bootstrap but at a time of backend, I just copy paste code from github.

and changed everything variable and other proof to hide reality. in mean time other candidates were actually coding everything then I took time to understand this code and I submitted after few candidates.

in last round they ask me to explain code which I explained properly and I get salary 40k/month INR.

I know it is cheating but I wanted this job badly.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

A microwave can cook potatoes in ten minutes!? Why the fuck did nobody tell me?

A lot of workplaces only offer a microwave and no oven, and barley a kitchen to prepare stuff.

Hence, I was rarely bringing in my own food as I worked under the assumption that I had to prepare it at home and just heat it up at work. And potatoes take round about ~40 minutes the way I make them (20 min to cook, 20 min to steep).

Now, I will be using the shit out of those technical wonders and save a lot of money in the progress, as I used to go to restaurants almost daily for lunch time. Heck, I may even buy myself one for home use.

Oh, now I remember why!
This is what I get by being brought up by a somewhat esoteric mother.

"Microwave are no good, the taint the food."

No, they do not. It's science!

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

My current state of mood:

Too many dumb fucktards trying to be clever.

It's everywhere. Even when I close my fucking work apps and just want to have a fucking break, some dumbtards of friends remind me of the insanity outside.

I always laughed about the paranoid people who built bunkers somewhere in nowhere for very obscure and most of the time lunatic reasons.

Now I'm envious.

Winter Depression is also setting in and sleep wasn't good in the last weeks, too.

It's funny how one can be furiously annoyed and pissed 24/7 and at the same time be totally tired.

3 weeks sitting alone over Christmas and new year since paying out vacation and overtime is not possible.

Bleeeeeh.

Don't expect me round for the following weeks, think my mood will get even worse.

Jesus fucking christ how can the latest Macbook be such a piece of crap? I'm currently travelling and wondering why I'm getting such an atrocious 40% packet loss and round-trip time up to 3 seconds.

Then I remember having Wi-Fi issues in the office with certain adapters, one of which I'm currently using, while I'm tethering over Wi-Fi ... disconnecting the adapter yields a perfect 0% packet loss and 30ms RTT. It Just Works® my ass. This is _one_ of the things that suck about the macbook.

As a teacher myself, I will always advice young people to go to school. Though I imagine it differs on the quality of education in your country.

I live in the Netherlands and here it's quite good overall. It's no Ivy League and there are plenty of exceptions but overall any technical study here is a good study.

I also teach at a small school (220 software engineering students) so I actually know my students and what generally need to get ahead.

But my main reasons for actually doing a study instead of going the self-taught route:

1. You spend +/- 4 years in presence of peers that are more or less in the same life phase as you are. You will make friends for life.
2. Companies value a diploma. Good for you that you landed a job on your 19th. Just wait until your 25, wanna switch jobs and don't even get to the second round of any application process because your CV does not list a diploma. This might change in the future but not for the next 5-10 years.
3. You will learn foundational stuff about most thing IT-related. Some things you'll never use. Some thing you'll use unknowingly every single day
4. It teaches discipline without major impact on your life if you fail something. OK, you failed a course. So what? Take it next year and take the time to do a side-project or internship during your study delays. It will teach you some life lessons without it costing you a job or your life savings, and you get some extra time to learn as well!
5. Retirement age by the time you retire will be 75. There's plenty of time to work. Why not spend 4 years with peers in a relatively safe and fun environment first?

TL;DR - small schools are actually fun, attend one

I can't stand Swift's initializers. No other languages have the problem with constructors/initializers that Swift does. It's a complete failure of a feature and to hell with safety if it comes with this cost.

Just to illustrate how ridiculous it gets, I want to have a class where my initialization logic can be split among reusable parts. That is, the logic that initializes the class with no parameters has logic that I want to reuse in my other initializers. Simple DRY stuff. Well, the only way I can do that in Swift is if I use a convenience initializer that calls another one. But convenience initializers have completely different rules from designated initializers (again, something only Swift does).

For example, you can't access "self" until you call a designated initializer. You can't chain designated initializers, and if you want to chain anything in the same class you have to handcuff yourself by using a "convenience" initializer (there's nothing convenient about them, I might add).

So now I want to subclass my class and initialize myself using one of my superclass initializers. Oh but the one I want to call is a *convenience* initializer so I can't, unless I turn my new initializer into a convenience initializer. Except wait, a convenience initializer must delegate with self.init(), so it can't even call a superclass initializer!

And it just goes round and round and round. I don't know if I should try to convert all of my initializers to convenience initializers or the other way around.

Why all this nonsensical madness? Get rid of the distinction and go back to nice clean powerful initializers like Objective-C. I mean what does it have to take? This is a complete nightmare.

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. 
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
 While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Apple Commercial

wow, to think about it , I have not been really 'excited' about stuff for last few years...
Now its like yeah, this is all a rat race...gotta learn this , learn that ,learn everything...but not really excited about it..Maybe feel like a thug-life boss if I get paid or recognised for my work...

However this is a race I am happy to run in,I like coding, like nerdy/smart tech jokes , like learning new stuff, and like my programming life.
A day without opening my laptop is really a day I feel sad but not the other way round.

as I've said in the previous rant, I know nothing about cryptography but I wanna make a tattoo and you guys have to validate how easy it is from samples.

Round 1:

EAPAToAqQMAoAoaAMEaihsIOAkrN

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

Realising that sometimes customers just don't listen...or they don't even bother trying to understand what you are doing.

It's not the first time that a set of requirements have been agreed and then they turn round and go

Cust: "but we wanted it that way"
Us: "did you ask it for us? Cause it would have been in the statement of work..."
Cust: "no but sure, it won't take yous that long. So yous can still fit it in"
Us: fuuuu....

No matter how good things are going, a customer somewhere is going to fuck you over because "you should have known" about their requirements...

You win this round SQL.... but I'll be back... and when I do I'll get this stupid join and concat to work the way I want. YOU'LL SEE SQL!!!!

...If I ever buy an SQL book like I keep talking about...

-deploy not entirely janky but also not ideal solution-

Sat for a company X, aced 2 out of 3 rounds, final round, I come to know that the company deals with Hardware and I was poaching them about my software skills.

Buh bye. We need only Hardware interested personnel.

Just before I was about to go full pro stud, by rejecting the offer, they slammed the door on me pretty soon.

Job hunting is hard!

I have over 10 years experience in software engineering. I do mostly full stack, so I can say I'm a jack of all trades and a language agnostic. I'd say I'm a good software engineer and will be able to tackle any task I've been assigned to. Having said that, my confidence in finding a new role is at an all time low.

I've been job hunting for 3-4 months now and so far I've only had 1 interview and it was unsuccessful. Now have been invited to a first round interview for another company (first of many rounds). It's going to involve many technical challenges like coding, algorithms and data structure and system designs.

In general I've had hardly any interviews (about 6-7 in total in my whole career). Due to my lack of interview experience, I've been getting anxiety especially now that the job market is tougher than it has ever been.

Firstly, how do you guys prepare, if at all? I feel like many of these interviews require you to be good at interviews, almost like an exam. If these questions were presented to me when I first came out of college, I would've had a better chance.

Secondly, how do you take rejections? I didn't know how painful it was to get rejected, regardless of how much I wanted the role.

I've been fortunate enough to still have my current job, but because of that I don't really have much time, nor the mental energy to study for interviews.

Apologies I'm advanced for poor grammar, I'm writing this on the train.

I will create a 1,000-job-application challenge.

The goal is to apply to 1,000 different companies and see if i can make a guineas world record of getting 1,000 rejections in a row.

Each job application i will record and document it on tiktok. I will do this freely to show everyone my achievements skills and knowledge of why i deserve the salary i want to have (which is btw less than $20,000 a year) -- so im not asking for abnormally high salary.

If you're a company spinning millions od dollars PER MONTH but it's hard for you to spend less than $20,000 PER YEAR to pay me for my hard work -- with absolutely no respect, FUCK OFF.

I want to do this in realistically 4 months.

1000 jobs / 4 months = 250 applications a month

Or 8.33 but lets round it to 9 job applications PER DAY that i will make.

I will record 9 fucking tiktoks PER DAY documenting this modern day bullshit where i struggle to get a job EVEN AFTER GRADUATING WITH A FUCKING CS DEGREE.

I want to show the world how college was really a scam and document the proof how no one gives a shit about degree and everyone treats me as if i have no degree.

I will also shitpost here on the status throughout this journey.

Hello Devrant. I really need a second opinion on this one. I work in this promising start-up and our current evaluation is about 10 mill $. I have a vesting opportunity in the company where I earn 2.5% of none dilutable shares in the company over three years. I also get salary of about 500$ a month just to survive. Though it is the plan that I get a decent salary once we have more funding secured.

I'm the CTO of the company where we are 10 employees in total and 5 are in the development team.

I've been programming for about one year now so I'm not that experienced and some of the guys I lead are much more experienced than me. Which is good because I grow my skills quickly, but it is a challenge sometimes.

I'm really in doubt if I have got a good deal in the company. I started working in February and back then the company was valued at around 1.5 mill $. I have always been loose about not demanding money right away and said to the CEO that we will figure that out about the money eventually and I trusted him blindly. When he gave the offer of 2.5% vesting I just accepted it right away, because I was a beginner in coding and I just wanted to learn. Also I was traveling around the world for a few months at the time and it was a great way to get a little money quickly.

I also study together with two colleges who are some of my best friends. We study business development at university and have round 1.5 year left. It's a lot of work
but we've managed to only study about 1 week in advance of the exams and still pass. So we all still working full time on the company.

I've never known how many shares the other guys had, but yesterday me and the other partners had a meeting about some contract and the CEO pointed out how many shares everybody had. I was stunned to hear that the my two other colleges that I study with have 10% each. And the reason for that is that they helped start the company from the beginning and I've only joined when it was around 6 months old. Still I find it difficult to that that it's fair that they should have 4 times as much as me. I would say the amount of value we provide to the company is about the same. One of the guys is only the son of the CEO, which should not change anything.

For me it's not all about the money but I don't want to be taken advantage of. I can't determine if I'm being overdramatic about this and whether it is a good deal or if it sucks and I should find another place to work. Also my studies at the University are pretty much intertwined with the company by now. All our school projects are something that creates value to the company and if I leave I would have to dramatically change the direction of my education.

I know that there is a lot of information here and that I'm not the best at writing, but what would you have done in my situation?

"Tips" are fucking stupid. Any waiter or anyone who expects me to "tip" them is a fucking clown hobo. Full disrespect

You're telling me i should pay you extra money or else you're not gonna do YOUR job right? A job where you already receive stable monthly salary?

Whoever standardized "tipping" is a fucking CLOWN. Must have been a restaurant business paying billions for this marketing scam to normalize as if tipping 2$ is normal

Who the fuck are you? Are you my fucking friend? A relative? A family member? Why the fuck should i pay you extra money just because you want some extra money?

Guess what fucktard. I want some extra money too. Has anyone ever tipped me in my job? No. Has a client or will a client who paid for a software i develop ever tell me "hey youve done such a great job heres some extra $$$"? No. Will a client ever tell me "hey your software earned me 100k$ heres a $100 tip or a $1000 tip"? NO

If i dont get tips Fuck you. Rough world and live with it.

Anyone who wants or expects tips I immediately view him as:
- beggar
- gypsy
- homeless

What the fuck are you gonna do with 2$ 5$ 10$ tip bro? You're broke and your job sucks go and learn some skill and you might earn more if you're so stubborn about a tip

Today i paid for coffee $7 but the price was 6.25$. Expecting a change, the waiter just went off. I told him give me my fucking 0.75$ back you fuck. And so he did. But he gave me back 0.7$. Where the fuck is my 0.05$????? Fucking retard. You want to take extra money from me just for a COFFEE. YOURE HOMELESS BRO TF U GONNA DO WITH 5 CENTs???

Also the reason why i get so pissed off about this is

1) The other day i was at some other coffee shop also paying for coffee. Dont remember the price but i paid. However i miscalculated. I paid 0.10$ less than i was supposed to. She was standing there and telling me I'm missing 10 Fucking cents. Confused, i calculated again and realized i made a mistake. So i round it up to 1$ instead of 0.10$ and she kept everything instead of giving me the change of 0.90$. So its NOT ok that you're a gypsy for not accepting the payment because its missing 10 cents, but its TOTALLY fine that you take 0.90$ extra money just because you want to. GET FUCKED

2) The other day i was in a store buying food. At the cashier i paid $27. However i was missing 0.02$. The cashier told me do you have 0.05$ to coverup the missing funds. In disbelief, i was looking at her could not believe my fucking eyes what she asked. How fucking POOR can you get. I gave her more than 2 fucking cents and proceeded with my shit

Very valuable shit i learned from these stories: NO ONE will give a shit to accept a payment even if its missing 1 FUCKING CENT. But its totally fine that they dont return me however much they dont want to.

How about you sometimes fucking say "hey i know you you come to this store very often heres a discount"???

Or "its fine that you dont have 0.01 fucking dollars, you can take your food"???

Or "hey i seen you buy here often heres a fucking discount just for you today"????

Because of that i have decided to take ALL of my fucking hard earned money and ask for the exact change. I dont give a FUCK just as much as THEY dont give a FUCK.

For reference:
0.01$ = 1 in my currency
0.90$ = 90 in my currency
27$ = 2900 (4 figures) in my currency

My currency is shit. My country is shit. People in my city are shit. The whole vibe here is shit. And perhaps that is why i shit so much because i get stuffed with too much daily BULLSHIT

Web code editors are shit for interviews!!

I was given a timed interview test to code on a hackerearth’s code editor. First of all I have never used hackerearth’s code editor because they suck. The problem was very simple and I cleared the round anyways when an actual human saw my code. But my point is why are programmers creating shit editors for other programmers in a timed environment. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how the fuck I should take an input and output that in this shit editor. The code logic was ready but the test cases failed.

So Should I be learning about hackerearth’s shit code editor in an interview with a timer or should I be judged on the code logic in the specified time?

I seriously find these web code editors most of them annoying. Cause they aint good enough. You need time figuring out the tools first and then code the logic.

Usually in your job you’re gonna use the editor of your choice. Not a fucking shit fucked half arsed hackerearth code editor. My rant is for those of you if you’re taking interviews on such platforms, be there. Don’t rely on those platforms. This automated crap is still crap.

When Monday comes round and all you can think about traveling to work is the giant pull request you were asked to review on Friday 🙈

Who else hates weekly 1:1 meetings with managers? I’m the kind of person where if I have a problem or need to talk about something, I’ll do as much as I can first and then I’ll set up a meeting. No need to force it with a recurring meeting where we just reiterate the stuff we already discussed as needed during the week or, lacking that, engaging in small talk to fill the time. At this company, where I’m at in the hierarchy, and with me being a straight, white, old male in a team full of diversity hires, there is zero point at all to discussing potential promotion opportunities. We both know that’s not happening for anyone like me. If you want to have that discussion to keep up appearances, just put a gun in my hand and a round in the chamber and tell me to point it at my head and pull the trigger. Because we both know that’s what this world wants me to do and that is the only way I’ll be moving “up” anywhere in this universe at my age and with my “privilege”.

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

Split everything into small tasks, no longer than two days of work

Use Fibonacci numbers, 1-2-3-5-8-13

A highly effective developer will produce about 80% of a work day. If you think a task is done within a day add 25% and your estimate is ten. Remember that we use Fibonacci and round up to 13.

Ideas I've had over the years that could pan out and be useful:

SMS-DB: Stands for SMS-Data Burst. Used to allow those with low cell signal or no data plan to transfer data between a phone and some client via the standard SMS text space. Would be slow, but would act kinda like dial-up over SMS (as mobile lines are compressed on all service levels, even LTE, so traditional dial-up wouldn't work!) I have a general idea on how packets would be laid out, but that's about it so far...

everything2PNG: Allows one to transpose any file's data into a PNG with a 3 byte per pixel (full color RGB), which allows for a "compression" of sorts (about 91, 93% on preliminary tests) AND allowing further, more efficient compression of the resulting file. (Plus... it's just kinda cool to see files transposed as PNGs.) I actually have a simple transposer to go to PNG, but can't yet go back. Large files (around 600MB) use upwards of 4GB with efficient paging and other optimizations via NumPy so far, so it's not *viable* yet, but it's coming along nicely.

RPi-GPIO Interconnection Bus: A master/slave or round robin method to allow for Raspberry Pis to communicate using GPIO, which can help free up network bandwidth in RPi cloud computing clusters. At most, this'd allow for 4 bits used for pushing to the GPIO "bus", and 4 bits used for pulling from the "bus". 8 pins total are usually unused minimum, so either 3 or 4 pins for upload, 3 or 4 for download, and potentially 1 or 2 for commands, general non-data communication, etc. I made a version of this concept using Round Robin for a client, but it was horribly slow. (I also don't have distribution rights for the code, so i'm working from scratch.) Definitely doable.

I want to do some kind of simple note-taking web-app, with a Golang-Backend.
I need to choose a database, but don't have any clue about DBs.
Every note will consist of 3 strings, let's call them content, pubkey and privkey and I want to retrieve a saved note by searching for pubkey.
Can you recommend me any particular DB or at least an all-round solution ?

This rant is about a company that I applied for through my college. There were 3 steps for selection
1- Aptitude test
2 -2 Technical Interviews
3 - HR Interview

30 Students cleared the first round and were asked to wait for interview call.
The interviews were planned a week after the test and during that week I fell ill, and still I somehow managed to go to the interview and due to being sick I wasn't able to speak clearly, I coughed whenever I tried to speak.

Still I managed to clear my first Interview because the Interviewer co-operated with me and was patient when I coughed while speaking.
But then came the second Interview, the interviewer here was such a dick that when I coughed I was asked why did I even come for Interview?

Whenever I coughed he was like don't waste my time hurry up.

I am really happy that I wasn't selected in that company because I won't work in a company where people don't even have the etiquettes for speaking with someone.

so at the end all I want to say is FUCK YOU CUNTS from *** labs

So, in my second semester of CS I had a class about OS and the way they work. The professor made us do presentations every two weeks (we were basically giving the class...).

For full points we had to have the presentation, an example (video or pictures), and an activity.

My team was one of the last presentations of the first round (iirc there were 5 rounds). I was in charge of the activity, so I decided to create a program to make it fun (and leaned a new language in the way). Thanks to this the professor gave us extra credit because we were the first team that ever did that.

My classmates decided that it was a good idea to follow my idea and a couple of teams started to code their activities too. At the end of the semester almost every team had a program as their activity...
But the professor didn't gave them extra credit because it wasn't a novelty anymore. :D

In another round, my team got as a topic encryption. By the time I was already a Linux user and I knew a thing or two about encryption, so I decided to do the example in real time showing how to encrypt and decrypt using command line. Once again we received extra credit because of it. :D

At the end of the semester the professor offered me a job as a developer, but I couldn't take it since I moved out of the country the next month :(

1)not thinking too much.
Seriously, my mind is way too stupid to sit idle and relax. In my mind, Somewhere there is a thought about an incomplete project, somewhere there is a startup idea, somewhere there is a fear of an incomplete assignment, while somewhere there is a sad song playing.. and out of nowhere, there comes my beautiful crush and me kissing, and woah, am now doing bhangra and round and rounds of shotz with her, whoops whoops whoops go back, bro , go fucking back to your work :|

(After 5 minutes...)
"whats going on devrant now?, whats goin on insta now, has she repied on whatsapp? what she eating? hey!, i could make an app for....

And this cycle goes on....

Use Maven, they said... it's better, they said... you don't have to manage dependencies yourself, they said...

...only now I've spent three days in hell trying to figure out why Maven keeps insisting on sticking INCOMPATIBLE JARs in my WAR that causes a breakage when deployed. No matter what I do it still sticks stuff in the WAR that shouldn't be there!

Like, I'm not a lazy cunt, I can manage my own dependencies! I know what's supposed to be there, oh, and by the way, everything fucking works when I build with Ant instead and I'm in full control of what winds up in the WAR.

So, basically, instead of the "hassle" of having to download JARs myself, I've now got the hassle of dealing with Maven trying to be more clever than me.

I know which I'd rather have, especially right now. ARGH!

You know, any time someone says "this is an industry-standard and that's why you should use it" my first thought is "hmm, which of these buildings is tallest and will ensure a quick death when I inevitably jump off of it?" MOST ESPECIALLY when the company just decides X is what everyone is going to switch to, regardless of what they're using now and regardless of how many YEARS it's been that way and working perfectly. Nope, doesn't matter, just get onboard the freight train, and if your productivity takes a hit, if you start missing deadlines dealing with shit you didn't have to deal with when using the "worse" tools, well, I guess that doesn't fucking matter, does it?!

And that's not even talking about the fact that the Maven build takes almost four minutes, which is just about 4x as long as the Ant build it replaced, each and every fucking time I make a change.

Look, I'm sure there are solutions and I'm sure I'll find them next week because I always do... and I'm sure there's some tweaking we can do to improve the performance... and it's not like this is my first go-round with Maven, though it's probably the most complex project I've ever tried to do with it... by my fucking dear god this is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare of my choosing.

I'm disgusted, tired and defeated, three things I never get when it comes to technology. Congratulations Maven, you're on the verge of breaking someone who doesn't get broken. Another day like the last three and I'm not gonna need Stackoverflow, I'm gonna need a bus schedule so I can figure out exactly when to step off the fucking sidewalk!

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

Need suggestion
Qualified for second round of a hackathon. Theyre now calling me to another city for the demo. We created a game and it isnt much to talk about. What should I do?

I first started off with a pentium 3 machine in 2004, started gaming on warcraft 3 and maplestory and eventually got addicted to it because nothing else was interesting in my life. Okay extending this story, i eventually got banned, dad smashed 1000 bucks of his money by kicking and throwing it. Years later (i think it was 2011), i got hold of my first Android device. This time round, things were different and I spent 6 months with it problem free and then it started lagging. Google search led me to XDA, started modding the device, eventually startedgetting interested about how people do it and voila, C prog, write some management drivers for malloc and etc. Eventually i dropped kernel development 3 years later and now im in .NET Core.

How do you implement TDD in reality?

Say you have a system that is TDD ready, not too sure what that means exactly but you can go write and run any unit tests.

And for example, you need to generate a report that uses 2 database tables so:

1. Read/Query
2. Processor logic
3. Output to file

So 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward, they don't change much, just mock the inputs.

But what about #2. There's going to be a lot of functions doing calculations, grouping/merging the data. And from my experience the code gets refactored a lot. Changing requirements, optimization (first round is somewhat just make it work) so entire functions and classes maybe deleted. Even the input data may change. So with TDD wouldn't you end up writing a lot of throwaway code?

A lot of times I don't know exactly what I want or need other than I need a class that can do something like this... but then I might end up throwing the whole thing out and writing a new one one I get a clearer idea of what i or the user wants or needs.

Last week I was building a new REST API, the parameters and usage changed like 3 times. And even now the code is in feasibility/POC testing just to figure out what needs to be used. Do I need more, less parameters, what should they be. I've moved and rewritten a lot of code because "oh this way won't work, need to try this way instead"

All I start with is my boss telling me I need an API that lets users to ... (Very general requirements).

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

Oke... I do NOT want to start a war about PHP because i am usually a big fan, but this just blew my mind.

round(null) = 0

HOW DO YOU ROUND NON EXISTENT?

For the round points exit, array start at 1.

😐 Who inventend this.

So I interviewed with Yahoo for SDET position, hr said he would get back to me in couple of days and never responded. He knew that I had multiple offers, why the fuck would he not respond.

Finally, after couple of weeks I was able to get hold of him after calling like a million times and then he says that my profile is still under review. WTF?

why do they treat candidates like this? Facebook was so better, even though I couldn't go past the final round I found their interview process very open and felt they actually cared about me.

yahoo get your shit together. #yahoofail

Got in contact with a company in July about a job. Had an email this morning about arranging a call with the CTO next week, so I've progressed to round 2 of interviews in... 4 months? I had just started my current role in July, so no rush. Have had a few chats on and off, but silent for a month.

I don't mind, I've had health stuff dominating my time, and might be a straight data scientist job title, which would be awesome, but... 4 months? There's at least a couple more rounds after this, so may well have been at my current role a year by the time I get an offer!

So here it is. Apple release, second round.

This time, uploads to AppStoreConnect took 3 hours and 40 minutes. Submission of the app was at 0.04, just after the planned launch day. Android submission tomorrow.

Tomorrow, and Friday are public holidays.
I'll have to work those, at best being able to not work on the weekend. The client has already told me he's calling me tomorrow morning to talk about things.

I don't want praise, but I'd like him to respect that while I may just be a lowly developer, I would like to have a life.

When are the happy times coming?

Discus always before how much ur client have to pay! Worked round 3hrs each day on a range of 6 weeks (6d each week) on a gameproject. After i did my work i requested my money - all i got were 50€! Just fifty fucking euros for so many time! Good that the retards never got it launched because my client (is even a dev) never finished his work or whatever.

PS: Didnt got paid in BTC 🤐
PPS: it was about 2,5yrs ago 😎

So I applied for this company that was a perfect fit for me, I cleared the take home assignment and did the round with CEO and CTO.

When it came to CTO round, he handn't even gone through the take home assignment task that I submitted, instead he asked me about hackathon experiences . Now I have 6 years of experience and during the technical round, he was out not even on the call for most of the interview.

It makes me more angry than sad . Hopefully I can channel this anger into motivation for a better company
Today I got the rejection email and it makes me so angry , how can you go through multiple rounds until the end and reject without giving any reason ?

Their whole tech team consist of people during internships and just out of college.

2nd round,

For those of you who don't know .... I'm making a tattoo... I know nothing about cryptography, you guys have to validate how strong my messages are(this one should be weak as well).

hidden message:

'\\O=_HATGwUfEdhZX]uPO=?HATGwUfEdhZX]uLRL=O=rvOUmGHAq]ubLTGwUfEdhZXsVub=PO=rvOUmGHA`]ubTGwUfEdhZXsVu@O=rvOUmGHAq]PO=rvOUmGHA`]ubTGwUfEdhZXsqRTGwUfEdhZXsqbTGwUfEdhZXsq@TGwUfEdhZXu\\'

Hah! overclocked gd has made his first mod menu without pc! please give him a round of applause!
after his first rant on being a baby about coding xd
im planning to make this js dungeon game pure js.
after i know alot about js im reverting to typescript then java then C== ! i think this platform and other platforms have helped me on my journey of creating apps and im happy that im making progress =))

It really depends on what time of the year it is. During the fall and spring semesters, my dev life and social life are about as balanced as they're going to get. From working on things in the CS class to socializing with the people I've met in those classes, this part of the year is pretty balanced in my opinion. During breaks and the summer, however, I don't really have a dev life. I don't have a dev job, so really the only times I do have a dev life is when I willingly decide to work on a side project, or have to update some major stuff on one of my three personal websites. Other than that, the only life I have during those breaks is my social life with the buddies I play PC games with on Discord.

I will say this, though. The day will come when I will be having to balance a dev life and a social life year-round. To be honest, I'm not really looking forward to that day.

I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.

So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.

But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.

Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.

So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.

I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.

I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.

Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?

As part of mentoring folks was having a round table. All wanted tech help. lists of things to do, learning syllabus, techs to bet on, projects, promotion mantras etc etc.

I asked them how's the work. All started rating about overload and overworked. How difficult it is to find time to do anything else. It became noisy.

So asked how they will find time to do all the above without time. Do they really need mentoring on time management and prioritisation ?

Felt like my invisible tws anc headset turned ON at that moment

React is so flawed in the sense that it forces you to go a very round about way to implement interaction b/w sibling components..which just gets worse in large scale projects
I had to implement my own event management system for React that worked well in conjunction with Redux.

Just got of a call with a recruiter... Got mixed feelings about it. I may advance to the round or maybe not. I will hear it in the next few days.