While everyone else is working, I took vacation for the whole December. Turns out, that was a brilliant move!

I stroll 20+km every day in this beautiful, puffy scenery.

A Monday morning poem

I enter the bureau, feeling all relaxed and well,
my colleague looks up:
"Abandon all hope, welcome to hell."

This indeed, he doesn't say,
his face only twists a little in dismay:
"I need that schematic, did you finish it yet?
And there also some tests I'd like to get -
how was your week-end by the way?"
I start my computer, don't remember what I say ...

I grab some coffee, half a day is gone,
the PM pressures: "I want that asap done!"
I am cluttered in tasks and bullshit, too:
"Go fuck you right now - yes, I meant you!"

I don't say what I like to, I mentally punch a wall,
I crank some more code out and git-commit it all.
Some devRant on the lunch-break, some shallow talk,
I leave the building and take a short walk.

My mind rotates, I cannot enjoy the scenery now,
I return to my desk, and figure out what to handle and how.
But my plans are crashed by a colleague dashing in:
"I need you to do a test setup! I need to begin -"

I do the setup, I do some other stuff,
At the end of the day I feel totally rough,
Work is piling up even more -
"Tomorrow", I think and close the door.

At home, I just flop on on my bed -
I should be learning instead ... -
with some pizza and chill.
I think about sleeping, I hope that I will.

...

It is now Friday,
my brain is fried, too.
I am finished with this poem - how about you? :)

I am mentally burned out from web development.

Physically I'm fine, but it's getting more difficult each day to open my laptop and write code, documentation or do code reviews.

Web development just seems so meaningless, where my day to day job has me trudging through one web form after another. I'm sick of implementing business logic on the backend and tired of listening to the product owner bitch about users who are demanding.

My productivity has fallen to the level where I'm feeling guilty for spending my time on nothing!

Don't give me advice, I know I need a change of scenery.

I just need to find the motivation to work on another hiring test which has nothing to do with the actual job.

This was my first real programming bible. I remember reading it chapter after chapter in the car on long car trips as a youngster and being so excited about the stuff I was learning I would explain it to my mom in the front seat as I was learning it. I'm sure she didn't understand a word of it.

Funny thing is I still do that today, 25 years later. And I'm sure she still understands not a word!

So, what was the book that really got you into programming?

Whatever was going on in the weekdays ... I forget about it right here, in my garden.

Have a nice weekend you all.

This morning, I felt pretty good. I had a healthy breakfast and I took the longer U-bahn journey into work so as to enjoy the Autumn scenery. I get to my desk after greeting my colleagues with the customary "Guten Morgen" and I began to plan my work for the day. I see there is a new ticket assigned to me which relates to a HTML issue. The customer support team are able to use a HTML editor to made changes to a section of a user's dashboard and from time to time, I get asked to fix their mistakes. Usually, it is something small, but it makes me cringe every time I see the markup. "Tables...tables everywhere!!!", sighed the once happy dev.

Time for a coffee break and a sit-down with the support team

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

purpose=RantTypes.Advice;
preferredReaderNationality="American";

Hey! Here's my problem: I am a german guy with pretty fluent english. When I will be done with my bachelor's (or master's, depending on my preference in 3 years) degree, I've decided I'd like to live/work in america; if that is at least somewhat easily possible. Ofc I'd have to get someone to hire me first, but I'll probably find at least something (what kind of company would be best? something like google? a start up?)

I tried googling how to become a citizen, how to work, how to live in america etc. but it's just so many different requirements and statuses and rules and forms that I would have to spend a very large amount of time, which might be wasted. So I thought I'd ask you guy's whether it's possible. /r/america (or similar, it was quite some time ago) didn't respond to my questions.

What do I need to know? What do I need to own? What do I need in terms of skills? What would help my chances? How long does this normally take? Is being a white male german a benefit? How much? Could I stay there permanently or would it be a stay-as-long-as-you-have-a-job sort of scenario?What kinds of precautions can I take?
Is it advisable to go there? If not, what are good english-speaking alternatives? What are non-english alternatives (e.g. I thought about sweden; they seem to have great laws, people, internet, scenery)?