KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Worst part of being a dev?

For me it's putting myself into infinite loops wrestling with my own self doubt. Is this really how I want to solve this problem? Could this code be cleaner? Surely there's a better way to do this? Am I adding unnecessary complexity? Is this going to come back and bite me in x months? And so on...

In fact, most days I just feel like an imposter.

Doing exams at the moment. Finished phase one out of four successfully at Monday but now stuff is going bad again as usual. Seriously, with me, everything goes perfectly fine until stuff gets official, then code starts failing, self doubt comes up and fair of failure and low self esteem hit me like a bomb.

I'm using my own framework which I actually also use in production and it works fine! But then it has to start to fucking fail at the moment I need it to work the fucking most.

I've worked towards this for five years now, I don't want to fail this! I don't want to disappoint either myself or my friends or my parents.

Fuck.

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.

So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.

Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.

I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs.

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

Was approached by a (serious) recruiter and the project they're looking to hire for is a 3 year contract, remote and actually sounds really interesting and right up my alley.

Cue the self doubt.

Scared shitless I won't pass the bog standard PHP skill assessment test.

SHUT UP BRAIN.

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

!dev

I had semi-jokingly changed my username from dextel2 to nothappy, because of that one bad day.

But, it is now when I realized that I am actually NOT HAPPY, things are lately rough, I am constantly scared for no reason, I doubt my skills, I doubt myself for no reason, and top of that there's always a chance for another epileptic attack.

I tried and keep trying to distract myself from negative thoughts but the more I try the more I fail, I've become distant with my younger brother, for the record I'm very overprotective about him. I don't even know if he feels the same, as this year ends or every day passes by I feel changed from my past self (not in a good way).

Switched my first job to get another good job, turns out they don't even have any projects and I'm just a guy they are showcasing like they have ONE amateur developer and we are looking for an entire project and it did work for one client which I'm gonna deny personally because the client is not clear about the project itself, I do not care about the consequences, my heart lies in academics and I'll put my 100% in academics, shall I'm kicked.

A lot has happened in this year, but this one is/was unique and very hard to process. I've always been joyful, sarcastic, funny, you name it, but all of it has just vanished, don't know why. I'm also becoming distant from my ONLY 3 friends and parents.

I was given 6 whole months to rewrite some old monolithic web app exactly 5 months ago today. Now I have to show my boss the progress I've made. How do I explain him that I wasted my time in this order:
1.- heavy procrastination
2.- try new frameworks to work with, pick one, start writing the app, regret and start over again using a different framework.
3.- devrant
4.- existencial crisis and self doubt.

Now all I have are a bunch of incomplete buggy modules and a mental breakdown.

!rant
What use is all my theoretical knowledge of patterns, structures and paradigms when I am too lazy and unconcentrated to actually sit down and get my ideas running?

VirtualBox is fucking evil
It wants the humanity to disappear due to self doubt, random errors and depression

AAARRRGGGHHH

KILL VBox BEFORE IT KILLS ALL

Not imposter syndrome but definitely a moment of self doubt.

Am I good enough?

Been applying for jobs and couldn't get through.

Most of my applications are in neighbouring continent and visa is the primary filter to get rejected. Thanks to COVID-19, it is even more difficult than ever.

And for those applications where I land interviews, I am being ghosted in final rounds.

Quite strange that teams don't even care to reject anymore. Just leave me hanging to assume the worst, the truth, the reality which I don't want to face.

And self doubt creeps in where I see people with average/below average capabilities and skillset are able to find better jobs.

I am not comparing myself, undermining their struggles, or playing the blame game.

All I am saying that luck plays a huge role in how things work out.

You can still fail even after doing everything right. Or am I just dumb enough to not know where I am going wrong to improve?

At this point, if I reflect on past, seems like all the offers I have got in past were purely based on luck.

I am aware that this is temporary and things shall change for good but boy, this feeling sucks.

i find comforting hearing good villain AI videogame dialogues.

for example, morpheus in deus ex.

one obvious reason is that the voice representation has an unrushed pace and low tone.

another more significant reason is that there are no emotions affecting the course of thought of an AI

because of that, villain AI characters can describe brutal but possibly actual aspects of humans without flinching.

as a developer or person, that is a commodity because you want to be as objective as possible.

if you had no feelings of self doubt, fear, laziness, shallowness, then you'd become an exceptional free man

Imposter syndrome is such a bitch

It feels so good to finally be able to achieve something without constant self doubt (okay I lied, but atleast I am actually programming)

But fuck me it's hard to keep reminding myself that it's okay, it's fine if it's not perfect, just evaluate all the possible solutions and pick the best one, it's fine

I've started working at one of the biggest names in tech (think Microsoft) for a while now, and I gotta say, it feels surprising very corporate, robotic and I haven't been able to connect with my team much. I worked at a start-up a while ago and my experience there was better in every way (except for pay). At the start-up, my boss was amazed at the amount of work I put out. Now here my performance is listed as "needs improvement.

Ever since I took this job, I have lost my self-confidence and I'm starting to doubt if I'm even that good anymore. My dad made remarks that maybe I shouldn't be in dev, and go into other fields of engineering. It was always my dream to work one of the big 5 like Google and Facebook, but now I'm still not happy.

What do I do? Should I try to adapt to that company, so I can make a few bucks? Should I go back to the start-up and ask for a job again? Will I be happy there?

Did I suffer through 2023? Hell yes! Fuck 2023! A LOT of doubt, anxiety, thinking that I live wrong somehow.

Yet, I’m completely satisfied with the results of 2023, with what I was able to accomplish. It means I do, in fact, live my life right. If I carry on doing what I do, I’ll be getting what I get. Here’s what happened to me in 2023:
- Cat!
- No more sugar
- No more smoking
- First time reading paper books in 15 years
- Made me a new website (miloi.am/engine) that, for the first time in my life, isn’t about me as a job candidate, but about me as a person.
- SENT MY DEVRANT LINK to my CEO! Dreaded this coming out for YEARS. Finally did it. He read my posts, told me I’m free to be who I am, told me he already knows me well, that he wasn’t surprised, and overall didn’t care much.
- New name, new pronouns
- Learned how to cook: soups, pancakes, falafel, other popular dishes. Most importantly, now when I go through the store, I’m not afraid of thinking about cooking. I look at something, and I know how to cook it, more or less.
- Found a good psychiatrist, got properly diagnosed, got properly prescribed
- Made a FIRE architecture at my work
- Conceived (and partly implemented) four monetizable side projects (that I can’t monetize yet because of my passport situation)
- Several VERY important insights that completely changed who I am. Several super crucial self-therapy skills.

Let’s see what happens in 2024 😛

I've been fighting with my xmlrant.com hosting provider for a good several days now regarding enabling web deploy for my account.

According to their screenshot it all works, according to my various attempts still getting either 404 or 401 with the same login / server details!

So frustrating... It almost looks as though same authentication works differently for them locally and for me externally... Maybe domain name needs to be in FQDN format... Or smth else... Either way this will probably end up with them saying fuck off, all is working on our end.

And as well it might - it just might be my incompetence... *self-doubt creeping in*

But it's still frustrating nevertheless.

So far I need to settle for unreliable FTP deploy, which introduces big overhead as always copies entire deployment folder, even is only a few files are actually changed.

*Le sigh*

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

"I swear I'm not a potato! I'm actually a capable dev.." I just have some serious self doubt and much less self confidence after this past year and feeling super mediocre due to lack of experience... And now that someone stepped up to help, my brain is just mush and I'm not doing half of what I know I can.... This sucks... 😞. Hope I get over myself soon...

This is one of the weird moments that I have seen.

The company management decided to have a presentation session where they wanted to answer some questions and present some new ways of working (they emphasize about communication aspect).

I joined a couple of minutes before the meeting schedule and I was surprised to see a presentation going on and the meeting ended in 5 mn.
I get into self-doubt mode and I was checking if I have an issue with my calendar and discovered that the meeting schedule was updated but I didn't receive an update.

And the fun part, most of the new joiners didn't receive that update as well, so it's was a nice sign to show how inclusive the environment is, and how do they care about communication :D

Drupal 8 fractured the community, dead ended projects that had years of being built up and supported, started a downward trend in overall number of websites using Drupal when it was still increasing market share, homogenized Drupal with other less successful frameworks that had already attempted it and failed by using composer to replace drush, twig to replace PHPtemplate, and Symfony to butcher Drupal and hang parts of it on.

The mission statement was to "bring Drupal to the modern era" and "be more enterprise friendly". All I've seen them do is make it worse. I have stopped using Drupal now, I still maintain some Drupal 7 sites but now that they killed the Drupal 7 community it's basically dead. Some small attempt was made to salvage it with Backdrop but it will likely never be as big as Drupal was and is mostly dead itself, for one thing it's not directly compatible with the huge library of modules either.

Another thing I loved killed by those without vision and giving into the "industry standards" that make one question the intellect of everyone who subscribes to them being a good idea. But hey that evil procedural programming that worked so long for so many was finally defeated. It's surely better now right... right?

At least this movement was supported by people that can't even tell the difference between the use cases in real projects between Drupal and Wordpress. Software Development is in such a good place and has no hypocrisy. One would never suggest it has lost sight of its original purpose of solving real world problems with computing and become self absorbed with its own navel gazing.

If still in doubt check attached image, it tells a very clear story about how to ruin the life of a CMS. It honestly feels like a hitjob attempted to sabotage it rather than an earnest attempt to improve something that has been doing well since 2001.

After weeks of interviewing, I just got an incredible offer to be a Junior Full Stack Developer at an amazing company. Great benefits, awesome pay, but instead of being excited I'm nervous to the point of self doubt. Can I really do this? Am I good enough to be part of this team? Did I misrepresent myself at the interview? Shit... Fucking self doubt

self doubt
keeps me up
at night

Its 6 in the morning. I've been unmotivated to program since my highschool graduation. And I just felt some inspiration flow to me but at the same time crippling self doubt followed. I have projects planned but my lack of skill stops me and its passing me off because I'm already wasting my life. And I'm thinking of getting an IT job to start off since I have the experience from school but I'm deathly afraid I'll lose the touch I've started to get. Idk thanks if anyone bothered clicking and reading this rant.. theres no one else I can talk to about this stuff..

I am not sure how to feel about myself anymore.

How are you dealing with imposter syndrom and general self doubt?

More specifically on technical interviews, how do I know if what I am saying is reasonable and not just some gibberish of keywords I picked up over the years...

The Git Blame add-on in VS Code is why I struggle with self doubt :/

A lot of us get imposter syndrome in this industry. I still get it on a regular basis.

You can't wait until things are perfect. You have to launch imperfectly, but with confidence that you'll get where you need to be. But then imposter syndrome sets in. Self doubt tells us we don't belong.

I found this quote in my email pile this morning:

"Isn't doing your best all you can do? Dropping the narrative of the impostor isn't arrogant, it's merely a useful way to get your work done without giving into Resistance. Time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading and from doing work that matters." - Seth Godin

Is it common to freak out frustrated to the core when you fuck up a project or dependency you've been working on for with full dedication, leading to question your decision of selecting the field, your achievements yet, the whole point of existence. Then suddenly fix it after two hours of pulling hair out and looking back feeling stupid?
This episode has repeated over and over recently.