!rant

Sad to make my first post here a depressing one, but I really hope that some of you have some tips to help in this line of work.

If anyone of you suffer from depression, how do you cope with it? How do you keep yourself motivated and don't start this self-loathing that I'm currently in? Other than antidepressants or therapy (already have meds).

Why I'm asking is because I have a very tough time getting motivated these days and right now I really need to be most active. I need to do a lot of small and big stuff at my work and at the same time try to graduate from school. The deadline for my thesis is at the start of May, which surely seems far away now, but it does not feel like enough.

The more I understand the systems that I'm working with, the more I can see how much I may have f*cked everything up and I build this never-ending list of tasks for myself in my head to try and fix everything. Which leads to a complete lockup with anxiety and I can't get anything done.

I don't believe in myself or my code anymore. I'm afraid of pushing anything to production. I also don't have anyone else to help me with my work, as I'm the only developer in the company (we have a service provider where most of the big stuff happens).

To add to all this, I have been sick for the last 4 days.

I truly am in a bad place right now.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

Sometimes I wish I was driven by positive reasons, and not by self-loathing and sense of worthlessness. I didn't have an actual vacation for over 3 years.
I am now in Thailand with my parents, and I am working my ass off to meet IROS/RAL deadline instead of chilling. The urge to continue working is really compulsive. I am very tired.
On a brighter note, the early experiments I ran look promising

There's this little, self-loathing sigh I do every time my program locks up because I forgot to iterate inside a while loop

It's embarassing and you guys will find it either rude or annoying but I have readied myself and here goes my confession;

Whenever I see the abbreviation for Command line interface I cringe. You know because cli ? And I read it in my head as 'Kli' which is like the shortened form of a female part ?
I can't just read it as "See, el, ai" or think 'Command line interface' directly.
My brain's first thought is it must be an acronym so you should read it like how you would read NASA which is also an acronym and not like 'cmd' which is not an acronym but just an abbreviation.
Thus whenever I see it I feel a mixture of embarassment, self-loathing and physical discomfort.

I wonder how can I not be embarassed and cringing whenever I see Something-CLI.
I just noticed when it's in uppercase I don't cringe as much. I should code a chrome extension to change all CLI abbreviations to upper case.

First commit today
Too bad it's so shitty i should probably never have uploaded it 'cause now I feel like I wasted precious bytes of the Internet
Those days when you just feel like rolling in your own self loathing

Ever tried to do something “simple” and it ended up taking several days and a piece of your sanity?

Trying to connect my website to a blog site made with Hexo has been that for me.

I am actively trying to not think about the fact that my live website is so horrendously broken.

Dying inside.

I have this thing where I really want to code something, but I don't know where to start. So I end up alt-tabbing through vs code, r/nosleep, facebook, and r/mechanicalkeyboards and then cursing my 'lack of time' as the reason I can not make any cool stuff.

You know that feel where you're looking for a solution and don't find one. And go down this rabbit hole of self loathing? And everything is sad and depressing. You can't think straight. You feel like an idiot. You kinda don't know/ forget things you knew a couple days earlier.

Well, that ended yesterday. For now.

Dear Passionate Programmer,

Do you ever wish you chose a different career?

I’m a self taught dev & wanted to make something of what I learned. So I moved from a small town, landed my first tech job (!dev), but the closer I get to my goal the more worried I get.

I’m worried that making my hobby a career will eventually lead me to loathing the one thing I love. And I’m not really sure if I should stay the course or turn around in hopes to save the ship.

Procrastinates, wastes time not working; hates himself

Works on a regular schedule, putting in effort and feeling sleep deprived;
Hates himself even more.

Inner self hatred realises something.

Who said my self-loathing was bad for me???

The confusion, regret and self loathing I feel looking through old code is only comparable to how I feel seeing pictures of a gangly, 15 year old me on Facebook.

I don’t, I just throw my self in a perpetual motion of bullshitery and self-loathing.