Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.

"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"

"Uh... look at my beard"

"What"

"Just look at this beard!"

"Uh.... OK"

"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"

"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"

"You don't have to lie"

She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.

"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"

"Yeah"

"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."

She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"

Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."

Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.

Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"

"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"

Joanna: "No I already took care of it"

"How?"

"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"

Me: "I do miss shaving though"

1. You don't code to add a feature or whatever. You do it to solve Users' problems. It's a User-centric system.
2. You read more code than you write. So help yourself and write code intended to be read.
3. If people don't know you did something, you did nothing!
4. Never answer a call at 3 am if you're not paid to be on night call-duty. You'll become the guy who answers at 3 am.
5. Remember the big difference between you and me is that I failed to do stuff more times than you have tried to do.
6. When you start shaving the yak, stop!

Shaving with an old-style safety razor just rocks - that metal thing consisting of three pieces where a slotted, double edged razor blade fits in. With the good Russian Astra Platinum blades at 10 cent per piece where a hundred piece pack lasts for years. The whole thing can be fully dismantled and cleaned.

I can't understand why people use this modern overpriced Gillette shit at 2 EUR per piece that you can't even clean, with debris stuck in-between that starts to rot if you use the blade block more than once. Must be brainwashing by ads. Even worse for women who pay 50% extra for the pink version of that unhygienic shit.

Oh, and real shaving soap with a real shaving brush and not the canned aerosol garbage that doesn't really work anyway.

Shaving with one of these babies is really awesome, never want to go back to cartridge again <3

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

"shaving a yak shaped peg to fit into a moose shaped hole" 😅 What a strange commit message.

!dev

Long time, no rant. Why is facial hair so difficult to control? How do people even grow beards without looking like hobos all the time? Do I have to make some sort of sacrifice to a dark and malevolent entity?

Believe me, it's so much easier to keep on top of shaving body hair than taming face fur. Especially because your facial hair is, you know, on your *face* which means it's very visible. You can't hide it if you mess up. Unless you decide that wearing a balaclava is a good idea when going outside, like when going grocery shopping. Generally that isn't received too well though.

I have so many questions in my head…

Should I focus doing front-end or back-end?

For mobile dev, flutter or react native?

Kanban or Agile?

Google cloud or AWS?

Switch to Linux or stick to WSL2?

Solidity or Rust for blockchain apps?

Best low-code that my dev peers won’t hate me for using?

If starting a project,
Bootstrapping or chase after VCs?

Do you guys use conditioner when you run out of shaving cream?

Keto or vegan?

Is milk really that bad for our body??

It’s amazing how much work goes into shaving off just a few ms of website load time

Some avatar around here just reminded me of the bazillion Europeans living the hipster life in India (I interned there).

context : In India fair skin is a very desired feature, every face washing product has "whitening" on it, god damn it even the shaving foam!
So they tend to treat white people very distinctively : free entry and alcohol in clubs, lots of money in media gigs and the like, strangers inviting you to their marriages just because you're white..
So some white folks would abuse this. And they develop some kind of clothing taste that's weird to say the least.
Maaan they must be trashier than the fucking original hipster God.
I just can't fathom their ways..

Sorry I had to lash out 🙄

I don’t recall why but a project was in need of an all-nighter and I was the only programmer available to do it. I even brought a sleeping bag and, about 2 hours before people started arriving for work the next morning, I slept in a gap between my cubicle and a wall. I brought a shaving kit and everything. For some reason I didn’t want people to know I had pulled the all-nighter so I had to make sure to get up and look presentable before the first person got there.

When my kids get the mistaken notion that they’ll be able to be like me right out of school and be able to make the money I make and have the flexible schedule I have and work from home and choose projects I like, I tell them my war stories about how I had to work 23 years of some hellish stuff to gain that privilege.

Working with a group on a startup idea. We have weekly Google chat meetings with the full team and sometimes me and the other two founders have side calls. Our group is getting bigger so the weekly is getting longer so the 3 of us were talking about ways to make them more efficient. One was, background distractions like TV, random people talking in bg, kids...

So then yesterday the 3 of us went over a different topic and the guy who had brought up the distraction issue was in the bathroom shaving and trimming nose hairs the whole time. He kept asking questions about the agenda which we all had access to. I shouldn't even care much. I drink through the meetings anyways.

Who else is shaving a hella boring Christmas? 🤖

Since I became involved in backend dev, I do miss shaving.
Edit: which reminds me, I need to update my avatar.

Brand new day, time to have a new mindset.
I need to finish the big project for the big boss, and fix things with my wife. Wish me luck fellas

Thinking of shaving my beard to remind my wife of when we first met so she will be tricked into loving me for the time being.

RabbitMQ's claim "RabbitMQ is the most widely deployed open source message broker."

They should amend that line to read "..unless you are trying to install on Windows, then you're screwed .ha ha ha ha"

Two hours fighting permissions, missing (and wrong) paths, having to modify *their* batch files, and still can't access the management UI (and yes, the mgmt plugin is enabled).

I hate this 'shaving the yak' exercise.

Yak shaving...

Getting really pissed off with modern Mow-vember. I was there at the start when it was just about going the whole month without shaving. Now you need a worthy cause and well hewned face-fuzz. F*ck this noise.

Its kind of funny to me that the same things that were beneficial could have been accomplished by everyone splitting duties in the less enjoyable chores around the country, fixating more on sending construction resources to maintennace, shaving away bad buildings, and waste structures, and in general just being more active and having more free time WITHOUT all the pointless hardship, and the creation of monsters.

Do they take a single thing seriously or tell the truth even once ? Or is everything about trying to get something they have no right to ?

Ah Monday. Time for another whole week of meetings, Yak Shaving, Bike Shedding and Can Kicking.

I have an idea for a fun little web game... A small little learning project.

So of course the first thing I do is write a CLI database change management tool.

After spending time trying to work in frameworks and new popular environments on my Windows machine(😵), I now don't hate ASP.NET.

After one too many Yak shaving experiences, I am just so happy that it doesn't break the moment I change something. 😭

Let's Shave that Yak!