My girlfriend keeps getting review requests from restaurants we visited.

Then there's a list of all the visited ones on her phone.

Location services is off.

Fucking annoying.

Google sucks.

Absolutely no respect for privacy.

None whatsoever.

Privacy is a myth.

😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

For the love of god, I spent 2,5 hours debugging why Minecraft from the windows store doesn't work...

The game just shows a red message telling you it didn't work.

I checked the logs, nothing just warnings

I re-installed the game, nothing, same error

Updated java and all parts of the store, nothing....

Obviously I had to install Something called the "xbox identity Provider"... You know... On a PC... For a distinctly PC game to work... Installed by the store... And the provider is also on the store... But it doesn't auto-install with the game

Ever since you migrated to the Microsoft Auth the login experience is awful (I ranted about that already)

How about you do the bare fucking Minimum of an User experience and Install the fucking dependencies when I re-installed something your fucking store??!!!

The fucking bare minimum that every package manager ever created fucking has as a basic requirement?! Are you kidding me?

Rename your fucking services so they make sense and please don't waste everyone's time by having both shitty logs and no dep management for your own apps... Fucks sake

Stakeholder: In user profiles, I want users to be able to renew gift memberships for their giftee.

Me: ???

SH: For example, if I buy a gift membership for you and it expires or is about to expire, then I want to be able to renew it for you.

Me: Typically, gifts aren’t the gifter’s responsibility to manage. There’s no reason for you to be able to manage my membership from your account, even if just to renew. You’re opening up Pandora’s box here. If you let users renew for giftees, you’ll eventually have a user ask if they can cancel the giftee’s membership because they got into a fight and want to stick it to the giftee.

SH: But our users aren’t using the gift membership sales flow correctly. That results in all sorts of data issues for our reporting services and we spend so much time fixing it by hand.

Me: Your sales flow is confusing. The website asks users to verify membership for a giftee in case the giftee has or had a membership. How it the gifter supposed to know that? You’re trying to make things easier for you, but you’re expecting the user to know that and comply. That’s unrealistic.

SH: But there must be a something you can do.

Me: No.

I'm so fucking sick of this world! Money is almost 90% of all your problems. It's never enough! I work my ass off to provide for my family and I'm really good at what I do, but everyone just wants more money! Fucking government wants more taxes, the city wants more money for day care services, insurance payments (not a US citizen atleast), banks, companies.. and now we got the fucking inflation raising prices for basic groceries! Bitch of a wife has no sense of our household economy because she doesn't fucking work! She just wants more stuff more stuff more stuff to fill the void that is her fucking life!

When ever I think I've finally gotten a bit of stress release, no! Some fucking cunt sends me an email or a letter 'You've made more money than you should! Pay us this amount more!' I'm so fucking stressed every time I get a message that somehow relates to money! I almost get panic attacks now. I'm way more well off than most people and I still feel like I'm poor as shit most of the time having no savings or anything. This is fucking driving me nuts! I fucking hate money!

Atleast I don't have a mortgage for a house to pay off because that's gonna be a bitch for some people, so I got that going for me.

Yesterday Xbox Live services went offline on a Friday evening which while annoying you can play offline right? Right! Nope you have go be connected to the internet to Microsoft servers to play an offline game.

DNS is everywhere.

I hate DNS.

I hate DNS migrations.

I hate having a hundred plus DNS names inside my brain.

I hate resolving issues.

I hate DNSSEC.

I hate CNAMES.

I hate services which cannot be persuaded to stop trying AAAA resolves first.

I hate the fucking stupid braindead idea to use TXT as a configuration store inside DNS... And thus the necessity to blow up DNS query size aka EDNS.

I really really really really really want to burn this whole mfucking shit down...

Holy crap, I can't take it anymore.
I know that user acceptance testing is supposed to be done by the end user but it's as if they entirely skipped UNIT TESTING and QUALITY ENGINEERING.
Does their API work? Yes. It does.
Are their endpoints working? Sort of... why are query parameters required again?
Is it good overall? No, there are CORNER CASES ALL OVER THE PLACE (are they even still corner cases at this point?). It feels like it was made by amateurs!
Why am I doing quality testing on their services??? holy crap, they should pay ME for doing this

Employer: Hey, we are moving an API update live tomorrow morning that could affect our apps. Can you regression test the apps to make sure they all work?

Me: The API team is pushing code overtop of live endpoints that can break them?

Employer: Yes, we need the updates to work with a new product we are developing.

Me: And nobody thought about versioning these endpoints so we guarantee uptime on all existing services using them now?

Employer: We looked at that but it cost extra and required us to use the cloud solution so we don’t use versioning.

Me: Okkk… I also take it that the API’s don’t have integration tests written?

Employer: What are integration tests? Are unit tests the same thing?

Me: No, so when do I need to regression test all 7 production apps?

Employer: The API’s are moving to production at 4am and we need it signed off by 7am.

Me: I only have 3 hours to regression test 7 production apps at 4am? Each app, if I just skim over them, would take me 2 hours each. I will do my best but that’s a very short time to ensure complete functionality.

Employer: Don’t you have unit tests?

Do one thing... That's where the trouble starts.

Yeah. Architecture and separation, these are the foundation.

If you don't do these two in a proper and sane way, you most likely end up with the rotten pile of shit most companies call micro services.

Hot glued unmaintainable mess of deprecated shit stapled together by a custom framework abomination cause no one gave a flying fuck to properly design it.

I see these things daily.

I write the reminders every week.

"Hey, lil retarded dev, you don't need that dependency, you can just use languages feature XY added in version XY"

"But that's how I always did it"

Moments where you want to apply violence from the category "inhumane".

Or even more retarded: Yeah it does everything that was written in that one epic that took 6 months with 30 devs to finish.

I sometimes really wonder how some people managed to survive till they got the job. Parents must have been pretty vigilant 24/7...

In reply to atheist in another rant ;)

I used to do some freelance work for a nonprofit. I’d do some website stuff and gallery sitting.

My friend was the gallery director. When she left, I decided to stop freelancing there and I dropped off the keys with the new director. I told them they could contact me later if they have questions about some things I implemented on the website. The new director thinks I’m a random freelancer and starts to BADMOUTH MY FRIEND, the former director.

Over a year later, the gallery assistant emails me asking about SSL warnings and cc’s the new director. WTF.

1) Those warnings were happening long before I left and long before I even started. 2) I am not your website support. I only invited contact for things I worked on. 3) The assistant already contacted Squarespace and Go Daddy for help and they gave her instructions.

I told her I didn’t set up their website and it sounds like she has the resources to resolve this on her own and she should contact Squarespace and Go Daddy if she needs more help. After all, you pay those companies for their services support and my time isn’t free.

Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.

Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".

Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.

They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.

Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...

Now....

I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...

Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.

It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....

Never change a fucking running system....

Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I messaged the CEO ...

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

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

Me: and how does one maximize value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Can people stop using Kubernetes and over engineering shit for services which get like, 10 users at most ? Thank you.

The amount of energy spent to just write ‘Hi’ and click a send button is so big that we should consider banning of sending hi messages.

Instead of just saying “Hi!” we are now using analog to digital preprocessors that convert it to bunch of 0 and 1 to send it over communication layer and deliver it to other human being that will convert it from digital to analog by reading it but that is simple.

By sending message using phone we also:
- save it to local phone
- convert it to couple protocols
- transmit it over air so make connection to internet provider services that would generate logs on this provider as well as whole routing table before it gets to the target person
- save it on messaging provider disk
- probably be processed by filters by provider, sometimes be reviewed or listened by third parties and also processed in bulk by artificial intelligence algorithms
- finally delivered to target phone and saved there where that person would just change this text to their inner voice and save it
- sometimes encrypted and decrypted
- sometimes saved on provider
- sometimes saved on phone manufacturer cloud backup
- don’t get me started on people involved to keep this infrastructure in place for you just to say hi

There are also some indirect infinite possibilities of actions for example:
- emit sound and light that can lead to walking from one room to other
- the floor in your house is destroyed cause of it so you need to renovate your floor
- sound can expose your position and kill you if you’re hiding from attacker
- sound can wake you up so you wake up in different hours
- it can stop you from having sex or even lead to divorce as a result simple hi can destroy your life
- can get you fired
- can prevent from suicide and as a result you can make technology to destroy humans

and I can write about sound and light all day but that’s not the point, the point is that every invention makes life more complicated, maybe it saves time but does it really matter ?

I can say that every invention we made didn’t make world simpler. The world is growing with complexity instead.

It’s just because most of those inventions lead to computer that didn’t make our world simpler but made it more complicated.

I bloody love when a UI is so unintuitive that it's easier for me to go snoop through the services' on-disk configuration files... Than keep clicking through form after form after form...

At least I've finally managed to connect to that stupid NAS' SMB service...

we want you to be
- full stack developer (you do everything front end, back end)
- dev ops/SRE (you can sort out the deployment CI/CD pipeline, cloud platform services AWS/GC/Azure whatever)
- architect (you can design the software as well)
all in 1, you gotta be multiple roles/departments
good luck getting this experience on the job (hell in a startup is not for everybody and certainly not for me)

also why the fuck companies who aren’t startups ask for this idk

not sure if i missed any roles/competencies so far , don’t forget you need like >=3 years of experience possibly in every field for entry roles and more for anything higher than that

Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.

Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.

I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"

Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.

Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.

AND YET

It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.

"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".

Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.

I've had a lot of jobs, and they've all employed some form of single sign-on. But all of them have required enough individual logins for various services that I had to maintain a full category for that employer in my keepass. Until now.

This company has, by far, the most comprehensive SSO I have ever seen. Perhaps it should not be surprising that it works so well, as it is 100% made in-house. But for a company of this size, that's an amazing achievement. It speaks to excellent planning, it seems to me.

Anybody else ever worked for a large company that had a truly unified SSO?

I can now appreciate some design decisions behind react-redux after witnessing some angular OOP clusterfuck.

I am sure there is some clean/correct way to code in angular, but everyone is treating angular as java.

Some angular application (the one I have to work with) is littered with network calls. It's difficult to spot duplicates. People usually resolve promises everywhere. In services, in a top-level component, or in for loops. In react, people use apollo/redux-query or redux-saga to handle network calls. Since these libraries prevent duplicate network calls internally and reassigning apollo network call function or redux action function is always useless, it's easy to spot all network calls in a component tree.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data mutations when data can be updated everywhere. In react, you can easily find UI state updates by tracing state hooks/dispatch/apollo usages.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data pipeline. Since everything is imperative by default, people need to add update functions in data subscriptions. With all the littered mutations. Soon you will lose track of what the fuck is going on.

I hope angular get the agonizing death it deserves and fuck everyone who codes JS OOP clusterfuck UI.

Imagine you're in a company, one year in now. You've tried your best to amass as much knowledge of legacy services as you can (specially given no documentation) and you think you've done the best you can.

Now imagine your manager is upset that you haven't gotten as much domain knowledge as an engineer who's been in the team for five years now. Then also imagine that your manager whenever asked about specific product or tech or any knowledge on a service just keep tagging the 5 year engineer. If he ever gives an update in slack on any incident, he doesn't read what everyone has written in the channel so far, but invites the team on a call, and asks them to verbally tell him what to write as an update so as to show he actually understands it all and is showing leadership. What do you do?

Also I've read a good manager let's his team self function without any micromanaging but I feel this is literally hypocritical (lack of knowledge comparison) and useless of him to essentially making no decisions or understanding anything without pointing fingers. What would you all do about this kind of manager, or am I just inexperienced and maybe not seeing what he's actually doing and contributing.

If you implement microservice architecture with feature branch development process: hop onto a volcano and die. Jesus fucking christ this shit is slow! Need to do a very small feature? First open the common library/package repo, do a change there to a new branch, open a PR and wait 2 days for someone to review and merge it it and then do changes in another repo that uses that library and again, wait 2 days for a PR to get accepted and then they're only in the development branch waiting to be merged a month later into production. Oh and behold! We now have tightly coupled services! We're developing a distributed monolith! Fuck me.. Fucking people go developing microservices who can't even understand the reasoning for it: LOOSE COUPLING AND SCALABILITY!

Today has been a weird day. AWS us-east-1 region has been having huge issues for hours now, with the console and multiple services down or erroring out. My day has been an odd mix of twiddling my thumbs with nothing to do and trying to calm down angry people who are also twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do.

I'm tempted to just log off Slack and leave an auto-reply of "Can't fix it, no workaround, leave me alone" so I can go back to bed.

Was working on a high priority security feature. We had an unreasonable timeline to get all of the work done. If we didn’t get the changes onto production before our deadline we faced the possibility of our entire suit being taken offline. Other parts of the company had already been shut down until the remediations could be made -so we knew the company execs weren’t bluffing.

I was the sole developer on the project. I designed it, implemented it, and organized the efforts to get it through the rest of the dev cycle. After about 3 month of work it was all up and bug free (after a few bugs had been found and squashed). I was exhausted, and ended up taking about a week and a half off to recharge.

The project consisted of restructuring our customized frontend control binding (asp.net -custom content controls), integrations with several services to replace portions of our data consumption and storage logic, and an enormous lift and shift that touched over 6k files.

When you touch this much code in such a short period of time it’s difficult to code review, to not introduce bugs, and _to not stop thinking about what potential problems your changes may be causing in the background_.

Do you think your job is fun?

So many boring jobs out there.. Examples:
- .Net services for some financial institution
- Java business applications for invoice record processing

Yeah, bore me more. Thanks. I prefer something more fun.

I hate CRUD operations so much.

I'm so tired of programming CRUD demo applications and then filling it with some logic only in services. It's so ugly. No domain model. Just entity, repository, service, controller.

I hope I'll be able to work on something better soon, but cmon, why are we forced to work like this.

I've recently started reading book about DDD and it's at least a bit more interesting than just writing some fancy API for database

How do you guys monitor programs on your servers?

For example, I have a raspberry pi zero w running raspbian (headless). On this pi, I have a bunch of discord bots and web scrapers running at the same time. My solution was to run them all from a bash file:

Python3 discordbot1.py &
Python3 discordbot2.py &
Python3 webscraper1.py &
Node webscraper2.js & etc.

Is there a better way I could be running these services? How is stuff like this usually done?

Being the tech guy in a professional services group be like

Imagine filling 50 files full of garbage unreadable code to build what is essentially a cron job microservice...

Oh we have a console program
then a module to pull in all the services
then a manager to manage the actual jobs
then if they fail it all cascades back up

My god, this isn't NASA.

The amount of overengineering I have seen in the past few hours is insane.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!!!

- looking for a specific device in a single e-shop
- browse the listings of available SKUs
- find the one I want, buy it

And after I buy it, for some reason ad services think I need another one (or perhaps several other ones) from the same shop, as they keep showing me ads with the part I've purchased. And this goes on for weeks...

Talk about AI and clever advertising algorithms........

honest question: if I know ReactJS, Golang, Python, Typescript, and a bit of Postgres and living in Costa Rica, what sort of freelance services could I promote on the net?

I used to freelance on sites like PeoplePerHour, doing projects of 1 month in 3 weeks or less, but I would like to do that again in my own website under my own terms, sort of speak.

any recommendations?

We checked a rather important part in our communication services because it was throwing errors from time to time.

Asked our former technical project lead if he could help us since he developed it.

"I don't really know why it's doing that, I got it from a online example so I know as much as you do"

Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit, it seems I can be a senior developer too!

I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.

So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.

Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.

So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.

And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.

Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

My most upsetting rejection come from before I got into tech.

I was working in visitor services at a a cultural institution and I was trying to transfer to a different department. A big show was about to open and we were anticipating large crowds. I was tired of the stickup rich people that made of most of our guests. Now, there would plebs would be coming in droves and they would be even more ill behaved.

I didn’t get the job and had to continue on visitor services. It was upsetting because I was trying to save myself from mental stress. I went through months of being verbally demeaned by gross visitors and had physical injuries from working the incessant crowds. Only the seasonal hires were given special gifts when the show ended and I received nothing.

I did reapply for the transfer again when the position reopened a year later. I got the job. The hiring manager admitted that he should have hired me the last time. The girl they hired left after a year because she wanted to go to grad school. They wanted someone who was going to stay longer because training and hiring takes time.

How do you pick a new language to learn?

I am a C# developer and at work I work on desktop apps and legacy web services etc.

I fancy learning something else so I can have a bit of variety when working on personal projects etc.

I am doing a distance learning degree which has used Java and Python so far, with some PHP and JS etc to come later.

I’m drawn to Ruby as I already have experience there, but I was also thinking about looking at Node as that covers back end and front end all using JS which is definitely useful in general as I look at moving to a more web based role.

Client would say we do not want to be billed on per manpower basis, but on entire managed service basis

However, the pricing for managed services they would agree on, can only pay for a team of 4, and the project requires a team of 8

So I’ve spent the last 20 minutes waiting for an Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Pro and another Amazon Web Services WordPress plugin to delete from a server via FileZilla. How’s your day going so far?

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

Ok so, another post got me thinking…

Every browser I’ve tried sucks one way or another. Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi etc…

Safari on my work Mac is so far the least annoying one, although it seems to have an issue with Google’s services…

On my personal computer (Linux) I use mainly Vivaldi, tho I have Firefox installed as well since apparently Vivaldi doesn’t quite support everything on the interwebs…

So, fellow ranters, what are your favoured browsers (all platforms go!) and most importantly, why?

It’s a huge nightmare to develop a React front-end when:
- you have to adapt Bootstrap 3/jQuery based components to React
- the “back-end” is a sparse collection of micro services with cryptic URLs and finding the correct name means searching on a laggy WSO2 API manager
- the documentation of said micro services can be outdated and that means wasting a lot of time trying requests on cURL rather than in doing actual development and continuously breaking your concentration
- sometimes the micro services just become unavailable altogether
- the back-end shuts down at
6PM everyday, usually when after I finally achieved a flow and I’m doing meaningful progress

I'm not involved in the policy management, but my office uses Google account management. I also have to free trial one of the services I use, because my account got pwned in an attack long ago.

Turns out, my office gives us 6 different emails to choose from. Two different usernames (old, from 8 years ago, and the new one) as well as three website names (.net, .com, and another website).

Literal gold for 30-day trials.

I got both fundamental Azure and AWS certifications, need to choose one to stick to for the future, I'm leaning more towards AWS since it has over 50% more market share than Azure and a much bigger and more robust platform, I also really like how they constantly add new features and services and integration with third party software. Azure developers seem to get paid more though and I found its UI to be more user friendly so....opinions? 🤔

A small child and a remote job did their job - no time to write my term paper catastrophically. I decided to order a term paper on economics. There were a couple of options for online help services, but I can not decide. . But I am very afraid to order. What do you think?

I just submitted "a lower price found" on GrubHub for an order I just made. Haven't gotten back to me yet but apparently if they agree, they'll give a $15 credit.

I think other services have this gaurantee too... So wondering...

How hard is it to write an app coloring menu prices between all these services...

Could get a lot of credits... And why haven't they done it themselves.

I'm not really up for the task at the moment but basically you just generate a table with all the prices from each service and highlight the ones that are different...

Then profit!!!

Does a basic Kubernetes ClusterIP Service run on OSI Layer 4? There's musings of calling a Service Mesh 4.5, but out-of-the-box Kubernetes services... What OSI layer would you put them on?