Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).

libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)

If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.

PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :

Shibe drill ready in N/a seconds

When I first joined the profession, I had a mentor who refused to give me straight-forward answers to my questions / queries. He always had the same answer, "Google it. Find the solution yourself." I hated him for that. Sometimes he used to explain that it was for my own good (blah, blah, the usual stuff) and not because he didn't know or couldn't give me the answer straight-away. I still thought it was just that I was too smart to ask all the right (complicated) questions and he didn't have the answers.
(Of course, that is a bit too exaggerated; he used to help me out with complicated stuff when he knew I was blocked and couldn't move further; he wasn't a sore mentor; he was a good one, in his own way.)

Several years later, I find myself giving the same answers and advice to juniors I mentor. It turns out that push to figure things out on my own did me a lot of good. I'm able to approach any problem head-on and not freak out even if the specs or the deadlines seem surreal. I know how to "figure" answers to problems that I come across for the first time. In the process you learn a lot of stuff that "keep you ahead of the curve and not grow old".

I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.

Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"

2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

When you find this on an open-source project's git log -> :facepalm:

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

Wife ( working from home; to husband ) : how many whistles did the pressure cooker blow?

Husband : How am I supposed to know? I don't know!

Manager ( on Skype ) : Three! I heard three whistles!

Junior dev requests for sudo access on a server instance for some package installation, gets it, figures out how to open the root shell - never goes back. They do everything on root.

Fast forward to production deployment time, their application won't run without elevated privileges. Sysadmin asks why does the application require elevated privileges. Dev answers, "Because I set it up with root" :facepalm:

Well, at least give me another option. Well played Google. Good Game.

I've never ever fully completed a side-project like I envisioned it to be. If I had, I'd have my own company already. It's mostly because I didn't have the time (no, that's a lie; or just an excuse). It's mainly because I haven't been motivated enough to see it through to the end. My motivation life-span ends when I get distracted by something else and in the end ends up like the Commit Strip.

when you have 6GB worth of unused kernels on your machine and your machine is desperately crying for MOAR storage space!

Damn it! today I learnt that GitHub has a tool called Hub - "an extension to command-line git that helps you do everyday GitHub tasks without ever leaving the terminal".

It's been around for 10 years.

And here I was clicking on the link that was sent by the remote after every push to open a pull request 🤦‍♂️
It even comes with vim syntax support for pull requests.

I'm never leaving the terminal to do things on the GitHub web interface anymore

I'm just going to drop this here and run away 🏃

Big-time Microsoft fan who claims they've been using licensed versions of Windows since Windows 3.0. Still has all old versions of Windows on different machines / hard-disks. They use only Microsoft Surface devices. They still use Nokia Lumia (with Windows Phone 10). They were working with an organization that used Office365 for enterprise email and collaboration. They used Microsoft Teams for team collaboration when the rest of the organization was comfortable with Atlassian tools like jira, confluence and bitbucket.

One fine day, news spreads that the organization is moving into GSuite for enterprise email and collaboration. They are devastated. They quit citing personal and family reasons, but we knew the real reason.

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

I have multiple (in no particular order) :

Nextcloud : It was an idea that I had in my head as well - to take on corporations like Google in the space of personal cloud. Be free, open-source and put the users in charge.

Gitlab : The most open and transparent company that I've ever come across. And they work 99% remote. They've got features that no other players in the space have. All while putting users in control.

Fediverse social media - Mastodon, GNU Social, Diaspora (soon) : For taking a major step in the direction of putting the users in control of their data; all while enabling a decentralized social network.

Ruby : An open community and building a programming language that runs a lot of software of the world.

Python : The oldest thriving community that has a special place in the development community (and my heart)

Javascript / ECMAScript : The scripting language that grew to be a beast of it's own.

My terminal (Tilix) didn't have a header bar for a quite a while now. I had grown to live without it even though I missed looking at the terminal title to figure where I was.

Today I my hand accidentally hit F11 and I was in for a surprise. I actually exclaimed aloud in the office.

I waited to test, confirm and verify that the header bar itself was not a bug before I facepalmed myself

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

#1 Don't go looking to clear your doubts with your mentor. Instead, try and figure everything on your own. Trust me, that'll teach you a lot more than you think rather than by getting the answers directly spoon-fed to you from your mentor.

#2 Always keep a curious mind if you want to achieve something in what you do. You can't learn anything if you don't have the curiosity to ask the right questions - why? (mostly). Especially if you're just starting your career.

maybe, that's a minor update to your policy, but it's a major update to my privacy. No, thanks.

I used to love mozilla as a community. The mozilla foundation loved the community and always listened to their voice. Of recent, they've started to turn a deaf ear to the community's voices and have started moving the agenda for a corporate culture. They slowly killed many amazing projects that was mostly run by the community (RIP Firefox OS) and started focusing on more corporate-oriented lobbying and agenda (*cough* Pocket *cough*). I feel that the company is slowly moving toward becoming less of a (community-oriented) foundation and more of a corporation. That path is dangerous and not one that I expected mozilla to take.

Another company worth mentioning was OwnCloud which got forked into Nextcloud because they didn't care about the community enough and put the enterprise customers and their needs ahead of the community's. The disappointed founder of the OwnCloud quit and forked it into NextCloud with the right controls for the community and the users to always be put in the first position.

I'm a terminal-guy. I prefer to live inside my terminal. When my family sees me with the green-on-black, they think I'm up to some nasty stuff like hacking / cracking emails, facebook, bank accounts, etc. Only people who understand to look at the terminal realize it's just a few monitors and log tails running. Sometimes, maybe elinks or vi running as well.

Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.

Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.

Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.

the "advantages" of being ignorant about version control

Not really coding, but debugging complex problems. I love it when I have to dive in head-first and dig (very) deep to find answers to super-complex problems. I once went into the internals of a programming language to understand why a library was acting up in a particular scenario. Another time I had to optimize and re-compile from source (after modifying it) so that the application would not leak its memory. (Of course, I contributed it back to the language).

The inner satisfaction that you get after all that hard-work when it finally works, pays off! Bliss!

I found out that apache had built-in support ( via a module - mod_md ) for automatic TLS certificate management with Let's Encrypt since October 2017.

Bloody Hell! Why didn't I hear of this sooner?

So, I ran off into my cloud to set up this so-called ManagedDomain ( mod_md ).

Found the module in the package repositories, installed it and started testing it out.
I started writing IfModule conditions under mod_ssl so that I wouldn't have to overwrite my existing TLS configurations ( which was already issued by Let's Encrypt via certbot, by the way ).

After a whole night of twisting and turning with the configurations, it turns out that the module in the package repositories were built for ACMEv1 and that API has been dead for as long as the module has been around.

I had noticed that the module was 'experimental', but I still hoped that they had the packaged the module.

Finally, I cozied back up with certbot. At least, until this so-called mod_md becomes stable and mainstream.
I hope certbot doesn't make a fuss. I'm sure, it got offended that I was trying to cheat it with mod_md.

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

While teaching theory is actually good, it doesn't mean that there is no room for any practical education either. Students needs to be exposed to modern programming languages like Python, Ruby while at the same time be trained in the pioneers of programming like C, C++, Java. It is only then would they be able to make informed decisions on who they really want to be. If you had one practical lab session on C and Java and then the rest of the semester about HTML, students would end up moving away from programming.

Concepts like programming and networking concepts should be included whereas ancient technologies like programming micro-processors (x386, x486, etc) should be excluded. Who programs x386 and x486 micro-processors anymore? While the understanding of how micro-processors and other low-level components in the computer systems work is very essential, doing practicals on them isn't really a good use of students' time, energy or effort.

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

when CSS fails you...

I'm pretty sure, that's where the request was generated from.

To have a professional job that lets you work remotely from the comfort of your home in your own office; which pays you well enough but doesn't pressurize you into unachievable deadlines. One that gives you ample time to relax and do some part-time projects for yourself. One that lets you spend time and contribute to the communities you're part of and help you grow both professionally and within the community.

Oh, and best of all, work in the open - open source, open culture and transparency.

Production goes down because there's a memory leak due to scale.

When you say it in one sentence, it sounds too easy. Being developers we know how it all goes. It starts with an alert ping, then one server instance goes down, then the next. First you start debugging from your code, then the application servers, then the web servers and by that time, you're already on the tips of your toes. Then you realize that the application and application servers have been gradually losing memory over a period of time. If the application is one that don't get re-deployed ever so often, the complexity grows faster. No anomaly / change detection monitor can detect a gradual decrease of memory over a period of months.

That feeling when you mess up and you need to add a new commit and mention in the commit message that the previous commit ( that you created ) was a mistake.

I'd be happy to do the same thing if it was someone else's mess up.

why am I feeling so guilty about this? should I be feeling guilty about this?

PS : this is not a support request. I genuinely feel bad about writing that piece of code and sense something is wrong somewhere, but I cannot figure out what. I stared at the screen for quite a while before giving up.

maybe it might reveal itself to me when I continue staring at it tomorrow.

almost end of working day... jobless...

me : *running `uptime` on a server*
*for no reason* : runs `uptime --pretty`

interesting output... ( that I have seen so many times on my personal machine because I have `uptime` aliased to `uptime --pretty` )

*thinks to self* : didn't we create that program that computed a similar output? Wonder if the code is similar...

*brain gets excited about the source code of `uptime`*

goes hunting for the source code of `uptime`... finds it... ( wasn't too hard anyway )

now here I am comparing my code with the source code of `uptime`

what a way to end the day... 🤦‍ FML!

A developer couldn't get a application performance monitoring (APM) tool to trace his application. They claimed that their libraries and their configurations were alright and that the APM tool was non-performant.

The developer then argues with sysadmin that the APM tool can't trace the application and that there's nothing wrong with the application or the configurations. When sysadmin questions whether the developer got the tool to work anywhere, they say, "No" and head off to make it work at least in one place. They come back saying that it works on their development environment (which is their local machine). Sysadmin claims that the system configurations on the server instances cannot be matched by the development environment and there could be a lot more factors to be considered for the problem. The sysadmin asks to prove it on a server instance on one of the test environments and then they'd agree that it is a problem with the tool. They also argue that this is not the only application that uses the APM tool and the tool happily traces other applications with no issues.

The developer tries the same configuration on a staging instance and fails. In order to make it work, they silently uninstall the existing version of the APM tool and then compiles an unstable branch of the tool. It finally works with this version.

They go back to the sysadmin and show that it works on the staging environment, but does not on production. After banging their head on the wall for a while, the sysadmin figure that the tool had been swapped out for the unstable branch that was manually compiled. When questioned, the developer responds, "It works with this version on staging, so deploy the same version on production"

WTF? You don't deploy an unstable branch to production. Just because you can't make it work on the stable branch doesn't mean that it is the problem with the tool itself. There's a big difference between a stable branch and a non-stable branch. How would you feel if the sysadmin retorted by asking you to deploy the staging branch of your application to production?

junior developer raises an issue saying that there's an application deployment error on one of their dev clusters.

sysadmin asks them to go back and look at the error logs and come back with the problem.

they come back saying, "No space left on device"

sysadmin takes a look at server. finds this :

Delegate!

'nuff said!

( PS : This is my first rant and I like the Weekly Group Rant. I'm starting all the way from the beginning of history )

In my university days, when I used to spend time elsewhere than curriculum classes : "You're not getting anywhere if you don't get a degree in whatever you want to work with in your life."

Today I earn more than all the cousins of my age combined. No more rants from anyone, anymore.
I might not have a professional degree, but my family still sees me as a responsible person.

Is 'Ikea Programming' a thing?

If it isn't yet, we should make it a thing - for those people who call themselves "programmers" after copy-pasting a few lines of code from stack-overflow ( or elsewhere ) and gets it working.

And then claims, "It works right? Don't touch it."

I'm going to start using it already.

( but it wouldn't be any fun to call someone names over video conferencing. that's the fun of going to an 'office'. I guess I'm missing it now. )

PS : the long conversation screenshot is only for context, but the highlighted part should be sufficient to get what I'm talking about.

Traveling and seeing new places, meeting new people.

Oh, I've pulled a lot of all-nighters. I love doing hackathons. I find myself most productive when I work on something in a single stretch. I have ADD that way. If I leave a project mid-way, that's probably the last time I'll be working on it; unless someone comes to me and reminds me about it.

Other than attending organized hackathons, I go on personal hackathons. When I'm in the mood to code something up in my free time, I just find some stupid, random idea to code and code it up overnight. (Oh, I have a very long list of projects that I can complete over the weekend)

Other times, I'll just be in the mood as I'm working on something and then lose track of time (and other bodily calls like hunger) as I finish it.

If my weekend looks very peaceful without any distractions, I put my hand in my project bowl and pull something up to finish it off over the weekend.

#1 clean up the internet of domains, use those beautiful and fancy TLDs - blog, photography, gallery, cloud, house, gov, xxx
#2 more fanatical - clean the internet of cat / dog / [supposedly cute animal] pictures, and later - npm packages

I don't want to start a war here, but I love the power of vim.

I prefer vim.tiny because I can find it on practically any UNIX-based machine - out of the box. Copy over my .exrc and I'm already rolling.

well, I wouldn't want something that would 'eat my data' to be pre-loaded anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Slack.

I don't think I need to explain any further.

To not be too emotionally attached to stuff. At the end of the day, all good things come to an end. Also, not to be 100% loyal. That could squeeze more effort out of you at the cost of your efficiency. Have a life, live it.

such releases, much wow! 😅 :doge:

Team Lead (not my team, thankfully) sends outs a team-wide message (in their exact words):
"please DM me with the task link if you are adding any new tasks in Jira. This is to make sure that i am aware of any ad-hoc task coming up in the jira queue and also to make sure that all the task are following a common template."

Interpretation : "I'm just too lazy to look at each jira issue after the last one that I followed up on (which is my job BTW). So I'll add some extra work for you to explain everything to me on DM"

Way to go for killing productivity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thankfully, this is not my team. If they were my team lead, I'd be super furious. I'd even report it to upper management. I'd even offer to do their job and let them do mine. I think their job just got so easy if everyone was to go report to him like that.

I had to import some resources into infrastructure-as-code ( IaC ) for a new project. I found the right tool for the job and started working on it.

But I had a lot of resources to import. I decided to use the API of the source provider and transform them into the configuration format required for the IaC tool.

After spending a good half of a day scripting with a combination of `jq` and `yq` and another bunch of tools, I finally completed the import yesterday.

Today, I had to refer to the documentation of the IaC tool for something else and I found that there was a built-in command for pulling resources from the target to the source ( basically what I did with my script ). 🤦‍

( I hope my manager doesn't find out that I 'wasted' half a day when I could have completed the job within around an hour )

Lesson learnt the hard way ( again ) : READ THE F**KING MANUAL even if it may seem trivial.

*thought to self* : YTF won't you learn this simple thing after so many incidents? RTFM!

How do you transfer text from one machine ( laptop ) to another ( phone ) with no common tools ( Firefox Send spat out a long string of characters that I had no way of transferring either ) on either? Basically a clipboard sync.

There used to be this online notepad at notepad.cc, but that tool is gone away now.

How do you do it hacker-style? `wall`!

- SSH into the same same server from both machines ( this also assumes you have Termux or some equivalent tool for your phone )
- use `wall` to broadcast message from source
- copy broadcast at destination
- done

Colleague put this up on their team's channel today :

" I'll be working from home today, ad hoc task is in review, will be opening a PR for backend changes [ ... ], yesterday was mainly spent on setting up gcp on my local and fixes towards gcp deployment. "

Wait, what? did you just set up the entire GCP on your local [machine]? I wouldn't mind giving you a whole week off if you needed it; if I were your manager.

- Dictate the user experience of the product
- Get it built automatically by IDE - backend, frontend, whatever, everything.
- Customizability options - make changes to UI, backend structures, database schemas and models

- all of this by just talking in normal human language.

Why does devRant show I have 6 unread notifications?

I cleared the cache. Even downloaded the mobile app to check whether it was only a problem with the web-app.

No, that number is still there. The mobile app claims it is the comments section. I scrolled down to 2019 ( no, I haven't been all that active ) and still no unread notifications.

Why didn't you think of putting up an 'unread tab' when you were creating all those tabs on the mobile app? Please add an unread tab 🙏
Also, the read and unread markers in the dark mode could have a little more darker contrast difference in the dark mode. I don't know about light mode, because I don't use it ( but I could check once I get notifications from this rant; I'm turning light mode on for a brief while to check this )

I haven't had unread-anxiety before, but I guess I have it now ( not really though )

3 days when I had to complete documentation for an audit. I only returned to my room to shower and change clothes for the next day. That too I left at 8AM and returned at 09:30AM.
2 days when I had to complete setting up the office network over the weekend. Note that this was over a weekend.

And this is without counting the many hours I've spent semi-working at hackathons. I've gone up to 60 hours without sleep, coding the shit out of my brains.

People around you (especially non-engineers) coming over just to know whether you saw their instant message ping / email to send them a value of a configuration. Or others who just comes in at the right time - when you just got into your utopian magical zone - "just to say hi and catch up". There goes the rest of my day.

Complement that to the instant messaging application of choice of the organization and it's a no-no for productivity. I find myself being invited to random channels only because they want to mention that I did something. I set myself to Away whenever I'm in the mood, but that still doesn't stop people from pinging and sending me notifications anyway.

Oh, there are hundreds that I've started categorizing them. They outgrew the storage capacity of my head / brain. I've tried a lot of productivity tools to organize them, but in the end, all my project ideas just remain ideas scattered somewhere unless I see it action and go like, "Hey, I had that same idea. I wonder when they got the idea. Was it before or after I had it?" In the end, I just console myself saying that for me it was only an idea in my head when those people saw it through execution and has a working product. The next step for me is to get along with them and collaborate and make that idea better rather than re-invent the same wheel again according to my idea.

Nextcloud is the biggest example of an idea that came to me and remained in my head and is still on a todo list somewhere.

I finally got around to setting up my own cloud with nextcloud on my own dedicated server.

Just setting up Nextcloud alone was not really the challenge ( I've set up at least 2 Nextcloud instances in the past ).
The actual challenge was to install /e/ OS on my mobile phone and get it to work with my Nextcloud instance.

It's not all performant, buttery-smooth or super-fast yet, but for a one-person / user-cloud, I think it should be just fine.

There's still room for improvement in terms of server-side performance, but it's working fine with the basics at least.
I need to figure / iron out some issues like social federation via ActivityPub not working, Nextcloud SMS not syncing up my SMS, Mail app crashing because I used a self-hosted Nextcloud instance, etc; but those are things I could work on slowly, in the course of time.

No, the server is not physically controlled by me, yet ( it's a dedicated box server though. Still, hosted and physically controlled by a provider ).

I intend on setting up another 'replica' on a RaspberryPi which I will then make primary, connecting to the internet via DynamicDNS.
I'll probably keep the server as a fallback / backup server just in case my home server loses connectivity.

Taking back control from Big Tech is something I intend on pursuing actively this year. I've had the idea in my head for too long that it has started to fester.

This is only a first step, of many, that needs to follow, in order for me to take control back from Big Tech.

Yes, there still is some room for improvement, but I think for now ‒
Mission Accomplished!🤘