Providing work estimation:

Dev: This should take about 2 weeks

Non dev: Really? But it's so simple. Shouldn't be that long right? I think it can be done in one week.

*After one week*

Non dev: Why is it still not done? I thought you only need one week?

Manager: "How long do you think this will take?"

My brain:
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it

Me: "Shouldn't take too long"

"Today I won't code, I'll just play some games or watch TV and relax!"

"Hmmm... I'll just fix this one small thing here... shouldn't take long. And then its time for some gaming!"

* 3 hours later *

Still coding, wtf is wrong with me

Manager: I just think you are being too negative. Like sometimes other people have opinions too and we should hear them out before saying no.

Me: Well your opinion is the devs shouldn't be able to estimate their own tasks and you should decide on our behalf how long something should take.

You also want to decide what tech stack we use, because you followed a "Hello World" tutorial last night and it worked out for you.

Just because you got a simple webpage up and running in 2 hours doesn't mean all websites take 2 hours with the tech. Were not sitting in the corner laughing that you think its taking us 3 weeks to build this.

I'm not being negative simply because I don't agree with you. I'm not being unreasonable if I say I can do 6 weeks work in 2 weeks. And although it sounds offensive, i'm actually doing you a favour by telling you to get your head out of your ass

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

Me: Great iOS app is only 20MB shouldn't take long to upload!

XCode laughed
AppLoader laughed
Apple laughed

I cried T_T

Me: I have been doing really similar tasks I'm going to spend some time making a template for it.

Supervisor: ok just don't spend to much time on it we have a lot to do.

Me: shouldn't take too long

1 hour later.

Supervisor : how's the work going.

Me: almost done with the template.

Supervisor: this is taking you way to long I need you to just get back to work.

Me: ok

He leaves and I continue work on the template.

30 mins later.

Show him the template.

Me: I cut my time on this specific task by 80%

Supervisor: good job glad I knew you should do it.

WTF YOU WERE TELLING ME NOT TO.

Day 1 at internship:

Manager: Can you get this RFID tracking system working? We have the full source we just need it installed.
Me: Sure thing, shouldn't take too long if it's a working system.
Me: (opens VS project)

Code is a sprawling abyss devoid of any intelligible structure, commented with broken one-liners which serve only to annotate method names.

In Mandarin.

For the record the system was broken, took me several weeks to track down all the issues.

Me: This shouldn't take too long.
NPM: Hold my beer. 🍺

@dfox I don't know if this has already been mentioned, but...

Feature request: Autocomplete suggestions for user-name mentions when we type @. Shouldn't take long, right?😋😋

I've tried to stay out of the fray regarding replacing long-standing terminology to use "safe" inclusive wording instead because it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me to just use the new wording. If the old wording wasn't hurting people (this is an argument that a of a lot of people use regarding this mass naming change movement) then the new wording shouldn't hurt anyone either...

that was just my 2 cents on the topic, until today!

Some dumb motherfuckers are trying to replace the word 'execute' with 'start'/'run'.

That's just some fucking ignorant plebian shit right there. The literal definition of execute is:

"The act or process to carry out fully or put completely into effect"

"to do what is provided or required by..."

"to perform what is required to give validity to..."

start and run don't grammatically encapsulate what execute does. And now I sound like a fucking grammar nazi because this shit is getting under my skin more than it should.

Execute's primary definition is grammatically correct for the context in which it is used.

Change Master/Slave for databases and I couldn't give a single solitary fuck about it. Primary/Secondary works just fine too. The grammatical context isn't blown away here.

But take away my execute and sudden I get all hot and bothered with the desire to punch a nun over how stupid this "offensive words" crusade is.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

I've been working on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work--

**Sorry. I should rephrase that**

I've been *trying* to work on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work.

It's slightly complicated because I'm not as "in the know" with the project as I should be. I get tossed around projects a lot as the only designer+developer so I've got my hands in a lot of buckets... Or git repos I should say... My source tree has a lot of tabs open and each project is run by someone with their own ideologies on how stuff should be done and laid out and what not. Basically jumping between these projects leaves you mildly capable on all of them but not amazing at any of individual one them--

--I digress.

There's a bug I've been trying to fix.
--Stupid simple bug, literally just a casting issue or something but there's so much data in this one object that it's taking a few solid minutes of concentration to figure out which variable is busting it all up. It shouldn't take long to fix...

But it has. It has taken 4 days.

FOUR. DAYS.

...To fix what is basically a null reference exception.

Every time I sit down to work on this bug real quick I get pulled away to do a wireframe or change a flow chart or diagram or colour or print styling.

Every. God. Damn. Time.
4 days. Soon to be 5.

My commits are real low at this point guys.

Please boss man, just let me code...

I hate working with egoistic noobshit hotshot "developers". But sadly, they tend to get ahead because they talk like they know everything in front of tech idiot management.

***

management: I need this swanky feature X in our product within the month.

me: That literally requires a huge refactor because our current codebase was never meant to support this type of service. We need to think about this.

noobshit: I disagree. This is easy. We're already doing something similar that is Z, this shouldn't take very long.

me: Z seems similar, but it actually quite different.

me (in my head): ... and you would know it's *completely* different if you fucking understood our own codebase vs what X needs you moron.

noobshit: Nah, it's similar. We can accomplish X if we polish up Z a bit.

*** 1 week later ***

noobshit: Omg X is horrifying and complex. We can't do it without a huge refactor.

me: yes

me (in my head): Fuck you

***

But guess who's got better career prospects because they're all shiny and positive in front of management?

Oh yeah that shouldn't take too long right? I mean it's just the front end.

No shut your fucking dumb ass mouth up. It will take long. The front end is very complicated, and your stupid fucking ass who couldn't learn to code is in no position to estimate how long it will take. Do us all a favor and stick to the "business" side. Fucking incompetent idiot.

If you're not a programmer, when it comes to estimating how long a task will take. Just shut the fuck up. Just cause you work in this industry does not qualify you to estimate a task. Just shut the fuck up.

I hate hearing people say that it shouldn't take you that long. As if they know how long it takes to do your job.

Easy fix or change my ass!

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

When your company uses an awesome online software and your bosses want you to rebuild it internally to save money.

Me "OK, but, product A had a team of engineers and probably took a year to build."

Them: "well, they have the bugs worked out then. Shouldn't take you as long. Just copy what they did."

I fucking hate it when customer changes things in the last minute.

"It's a small change", they say. "It shouldn't take you too long", they say.

You know what? Fuck you.

Client: A thing I know abso-fucking-lute-ly nothing about shouldn't take you long to implement.

Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.

We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.

First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.

First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?

Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)

The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..

I have an Android app suggestion:

A different alarm clock.
- wakes you up by increasing ring tone, from least to most, each step taking at least two seconds.
- you can give it a stream url (e.g. online radio or yt) and it uses that to wake you up.
- you give it an offline ringtone as well, in case the stream doesn't play.
- has repeated snooze. You hit the off button once and it goes to snooze. You hit it twice or trice and it is off. Otherwise, it rings again in 2-60 minutes. (User preference)
- is free. 😛

Shouldn't take long to make. I'd make it myself if I had the technical capabilities right now. Do link me if you make it or if you know of one already existing. (The existing ones I've found so far, I have issues with unnecessary permissions they ask mostly.)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Okay, I'm feeling a bit better now.
How to stop being a lil bitch? Why does it seem like everyone got the "don't give a shit" patch except me? I'm working hard on getting my shit together, I've made MASSIVE progress, but everytime I'm feeling good and confident and ready to take the world head-on, I just kinda crumble again with the slightest mishap. This needs to stop. I'm really trying SO hard not to snap. Fucking hell, being aware of all this makes it even worse! It's like I'm two people, one is a downer and REALLY good in draining my brain power, the other is the guy who's typing this and knows that life shouldn't be taken this seriously, but doesn't stay in the cockpit for too long. I'm extremely tired and mad. I just fucking hate this.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

I am currently under a desperate crunch at work, trying to get things wrapped up before my honeymoon.

Of course, this is when My Greatest User decides he will come to my office no fewer than five times today. Not once was it for an actual, legitimate issue that he had not created himself. Here were the top three for today:

#3
MGU: "The scroll wheel on my mouse isn't working. I used to be able to scroll stuff with it but now I can't."
ME: *Looks at his mouse. All looks well.*
ME: "Show me what you're trying to do."
MGU: "I'm trying to scroll this Word document. See? It won't scroll!"
ME: ..."That's because there is nothing to scroll... The entire document is on your screen..."

#2
MGU: "I can't move my mouse off the edge of my screen! I used to be able to move it from my monitor to my laptop screen and I can't do it anymore!"
ME: "Did you move your laptop?"
MGU: "Yeah I moved it to the other side of the monitor. That shouldn't make a difference, should it?"

#1
MGU: "You know the DOS commands?"
ME: *Does a triple take.* ... ... "Huh?"
MGU: "The DOS commands. You know how you can use DOS commands to make the computer do stuff. Like Ctrl+M."
ME: "Ah. You're talking about keyboard shortcuts."
MGU (ignoring me): *Goes on a long, confusing explanation of something he's trying to do in Outlook and wants to know a keyboard shortcut for instead of clicking.*
ME: "I don't know what the shortcut for that would be and honestly I don't have time to look right now. I really need to keep working on this project."
MGU: "You don't know?"
ME: "Nope."
MGU: "Oh... I'd have thought that with being a programmer you'd have gotten into the DOS commands."

I have never been so tempted to quit.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

Finally getting off my proverbial ass and doing something about the lack of games I like. Going to focus on making an engine for the kind of games I want to play.

No, I am not starting from scratch. Going to base my engine on Godot and use it for my own titles. I am not insane. Making it from scratch is too much work these days. But the indies are shifting from Unity to other engines right now. So a lot of wanted attention will be placed on better alternatives. This means more content and plugin choices will be available to Godot devs.

I kept making excuses as to how hard it will be or it will take forever. It only ended up taking me further away from what I wanted. I have my wishlist of features and I will focus on modularizing them so they can be used as needed. If it makes sense I will make these modules available to the community at Godot. This will help get feedback on what can be improved and generalized further. It will also reduce development costs in the long run. I want to take the approach that No Man's Sky has taken for content and generate as much as I can. I am fascinated by generating objects using algorithms. This seems to be a trend in games.

The struggle I have with games: I want to build things like structures in game (aka Minecraft), I want to build characters in game (aka RPGs), I also want to deform terrain (aka organic voxels), and I want a mixed genre (guns and dragons). Nothing like this exists in a form I want to pay for. I also want to be able to mod the game and for other people to be able to mod the game. That really narrows the list of games down to nothing. Sure there are few games that hit these bullet points, but not all in the same game.

I am finding I struggle to be engaged intellectually at work. I do what I have to for a paycheck. I think having a side project will help with this. One that is radically different than what I do at work is going to be helpful. I need to be realistic about expectations. I probably shouldn't expect any real progress for at least 2 to 3 years and probably more likely 5 years. I have some experience with the tool chains from other engines I have worked with. I also want something that I own and is mine. Even if it sucks.

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

Client: How long will it take you to build this?

Me: Maximum of 7days

Day 1 to Day 5, To myself: I have so much time, lemme build a Js engine in Rust and open-source it. It shouldn't take that long.

Day 6, After many failed attempts at debugging RegExp:

Starts working on the client's product, scraps off sleeping hour (why do I sleep in the first place)

Day 7: At 23:59...calls clients, he doesn't answer, probably sleeping... Sends message "Product ready to be tested at your call, I've not slept in 7 straight days because I like you"

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

Bloody scammers and bloody Paypal.
So I bought echo spot just to see how good it's voice recognition is and also wanted to see what the spot does different. So I found out that it was like hello world for AI. So I wanted to sell it on ebay-kleinanzeigen.de. It's a website from Ebay here in Germany where you can easily sell your stuff that you don't need anymore. I put it there and someone just wanted it so badly and he said that he broke his friends spot and he has no money and he need it very badly cheaper. My price was 98€ and I believed him and sold it for 85€. Now he got the device and wants the refund because the device doesn't match the description and the things he mentioned weren't even in the description. The message you see in the pic it says: It doesn't do skype and it is impossible on that device. First It is his responsibility to inform himself about the device features I'm not Amazon to write something like that in the description I've to just say how the device looks. Second it does skype and it is possible but both partners must have the same device and they should connect it to their smartphones.
But that is not the bad part that my money is ceased and got ownd by a scammer. The bad part is that I wanted to reply his message but the bloody paypal design won't let me do that. Remind me how old is paypal now? It's been there for ages and the footer is just stuck in the middle of the page and won't allow me to click on reply button. Of course I later managed to write a reply but paypal shouldn't have these kind of problems.
I'm so upset right now because these things are wasting my time. I've my final exame in a week and I've to develop a parameter based multilingual CMS, just imagine how long would just data structure take.

Manager: These estimates are wrong
Me: Why?
M: These shouldn't take too long
Me: Well you asked me to make those while I was busy with the mess design did.
Jr frontend: Manager is right. They shouldn't take too long.

*me knowing jr doesn't know the system nor coding standards*

Jr: I'll fix mine to get a more accurate estimation. Do you want me to do yours?

* Me thinking f*ck no*
Me: Just do yours.

M: Ok. Then we are settled.

He just wanted me to fit a 10 week project into 6 weeks while I carry the Jr and was complaining I didnt do it well.

Fml

Ok, so many people rant about windows update. It can fuck up things, starts unexpectedly (after 100 warnings and messages letting you choose when but ok) and it takes too long to update.

I use Windows daily so I update regularly and never takes more than 5 mins. 20 when its a major update twice a year. So let's talk about Linux.

Yesterday I wanted to try out .net core on Linux so I booted my antergos vm to do it. TLDR: Didn't do shut because, surprise, Linux updates.

So apparently I downloaded the wrong version of visual studio code. Uninstall and install the right one then. Nope, can't do that. Some dependency must be updated. That dependency is on the highest version on the AUR, I have to get a different one. Ok, no problem. But I can install the other because uninstalling the original breaks more dependencies. Well fuck then.

So I decided I'd do a full system update with pacman, shouldn't take long. 1.6gb worth of update. I have 200mb download so it should be fast right? Well, I had to wait a couple of hours.

So I couldn't do anything on my afternoon because of Linux updates. That's an original rant isn't it?

And before the comments get here, yeah I know it's arch, it's difficult and all that. This isn't about being hard to do. It's just annoying and making me lose time.

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

"Hey can you make this excel report for me real quick? Here are the columns, you gotta get them from this table in the database. Shouldn't take long."

Alright, sounds easy enough wait where is the data. I have to join how many tables? What is this bullshit data? I want to strangle the guy who modeled this piece of garbage.

I don't have a "most painful error".

The real pain for me is the

WHY ISN'T THIS WORKING

I'VE DONE THIS 1000 TIMES BEFORE

THIS ISN'T HARD

THIS SHOULDN'T TAKE THIS LONG...

It's just the worst combo of events / feelings / leads to the hopeless depths of imposter syndrome and etc.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Been struggling with a performance issue for weeks, been writing a search engine (or sorts) for internal company use only. Discovered the locations that are being indexed contain a directory used for back up purposes that contain archives of everything inside it.

Wrote a means to exclude these directories, performance improves up to 1600% (top end, sadly, not across the board) feel freaking awesome.

Boss acts like I've just pull Atlantis off the floor with my teeth.

It was a two line change, I wish the really difficult tasks were treated this way and not with "oh it shouldn't take you long!"

Hi, everyone!

I was struggling to write this rant (it's been a while since I've posted anything here) and was trying to put in enough details, but it was getting too long and heavy, so I thought I should try to keep it concise.
I get frequent headaches and feel physically and mentally exhausted all the time. Here's a little list of what I think lead to all this -
- Leading a team for the first time
- Not-so-great junior teammates
- Working with backend for the first time (doing it on top of my frontend work)
- Long working hours (unpaid overtime)
- Being underpaid (for all the things I now have to do)
So, I overworked myself (and still fell short in delivering my sprint goals) and after some time, considering all of the above things, I decided that the best course of action would be to give my notice and take a break for a month or two.

I talked to my boss about my struggles and my intention to leave, and after some discussion, he basically said that the difficult part of the project was over and things would get smoother from the next sprint, and so I should stay on and discuss on the matter again after the sprint. That sprint has passed now and I have still somewhat struggled to work each day with diminishing motivation.
I'm not sure if this is the right time to leave, and I just don't have enough energy to look for another job and go for interviews. So, I guess it is a bit of risk not having something lined up before I quit my (first ever) job, but I think I shouldn't have much difficulty finding something for myself.
At this moment, I don't know what to do, but maybe, if things continue to be dour, I may hand in my notice soon.

So I removed all the Eclipse crap from the repository (.settings, .project, etc), add those to the .gitignore, commit and push. The next thing happened is my co-worker found that broken his copy of the code as on Eclipse. That's expected. I told him it's justified to get rid of IDE specific stuff from the repo. All he needed is to set up the project again on his Eclipse.
...
...
...
And he didn't know how to do it.
...
...
...
I helped him out. Wasted 15 min. It shouldn't take that long if I did not try to explain along the way.

I feel like fixing printer.

I don't know if our QA is good enough. We were developing an app for both ios and android. I, an ios developer, told the QA guy that it will take long before uploading the app in the testflight (convert swift2 to swift3). After a week the app is now uploaded in the test flight and at the same time my partner, an android developer, uploaded the android version of the app in the play store beta. The QA guy started to raise bug issues about the android version. He wanted to fix the bugs immediately since our boss needed to upload it in the play store and appstore. The QA guy kept on complaining to my partner why the android version is buggy. Then he said something we, me and my partner, facepalm.

The QA guy said " You shouldn't convert the app to swift 3. The ios version is fine when converted why the android version is buggy. You need to revert it back to swift 2"

We sit there in silence, thinking if we pity the QA guy or laugh at him.

I was a university student. The it company, I was interviewed at, required everyone to pass English test. I passed it with quite a good result (90 of 100, know no one with such result). So next day I had an actual interview with a head of some department.
He didn't had his own office, instead he shared it with 5 other employees. One of them was taking with someone on Skype. He told he had some work to finish, but it shouldn't take long. It took an hour.
And then he returned to me, starting asking questions about my knowledge. I am a java backend guy, but he asked me about php stuff and front-end stuff like ‘moving a button to a new position’.
Basically, this is it.

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

"This shouldn't take long"

"Can you make this quick change?"

"Yeah, but I'll need to change every page this thing is on and you told me this other project I'm working on is high-priority. Are you sure you want me to do this?" (Also this is a change you're capable of making yourself...)

"It shouldn't take too long, we need this done."

...if I thought it wouldn't take long, I wouldn't have brought it up.

I think I just realized the relationships between toons in Looney Toons: World of Mayhem is basically a graph... And so the optimal teams can be found by solving Pick 4 Vertices (toons) that maximize the # of Edges (positive relationships) between them...

Is there an algorithm that finds that or I just bring force it by testing all combos? Given the # of toons shouldn't take too long.

Started adding new MVC project to main solution at work. Started getting assembly reference errors across the projects during testing. Figured I might as while update the few assemblies that are complaining instead of trying to downgrade to maintain the current state of things. Shouldn't take too long right?....8 hours of staring at configs and running and rerunning nuget commands to get all the versions lined up across 120 projects....thank God we have extensive unit and integration tests...

"Shouldn't take to long" -client

Internal team changing specs because they don't understand how much work went into the project.

This is generally accompanied by the statement "that shouldn't take you very long."

Hey, been long time without ranting, but here I am.

So nowadays the schedule on my project is really tight, and nothing is ready on every party, including mine.

Worse is, since this week, I've had to contact another team that learned on what we were working on like a month ago, and they really have a bad habit to ask us to see them on Skype. Yeah, sure, Skype is no use if it's just to tell me something to use that actually won't work (they don't know about that I guess, but still, just for less than 5 minutes while I have things on short time....)

So today, I arrived, I have a bugfix to do, but short after I arrived, I got a new task of providing access to our work to another team, which implied some minors modifications, wouldn't take so much time.

But right when I was doing it, I had someone from that team that I mentionned earlier that asked me to see some specific code. I actually don't have that code since I am using remote call, so calling their code directly and not using some placeholder code. The guy told me "but that shouldn't work." Okay, but I've been entering in your application several times and giving you errors that I got from trying to entering it, so you KNOW that it works. And then, he asked me to go see them again. No way, I have plenties of things to do, use a fucking email.

Now that I released that rant from my mind, I'm gonna get a hot beverage, calm down and go back to those tasks.

!dev

Personal rant, but as one shouldn't bottle up emotions, probably not so bad idea....

Started with diet and exercise in the vacation, as finally a certain thing starting with C calmed down...

Its maddening how fucked up the world is. Now as a lil private info (that might not be so unknown, shared multiple times here) - my body is a train wreck.

Lungs are fucked, muscle distrophy, some other things are fucked.

I'm the kind of thing every gym trainer dreads - the client that needs not only a lot of ass whooping, but also has a lot of problems that need to be taken care of.

Which is why I rather do exercise at home, cause... My experiences with humans in gyms are bad. Most trainers behave like fucking chimpanzees screaming commands while not listening what one tells them...

First challenge: Find a low impact cardio training.

What one mostly finds is a female chick (which is sad cause I like men more for obvious reasons), that should gain some weight, screaming at ya how great sport is while jumping around like a bunny on ecstasy.
Low impact isn't really low impact when you jump around, lil bunny... And it isn't low impact when you just let yourself fall to the floor and start doing push ups.

If an obese person like me did that, it would end in pain, frustration and an empty fridge TM.

So one has to painfully look and skip through 20 min vids of "Non low impact low impact YouTube / ... vids" to find one that is doable without wrecking the body even further... Yaaaay. That makes one totally not feel depressed :-)

The other thing that I always hate is dieting. Note that I don't have to change much - I'm basically on a diet since years, holding weight the whole time.

The jolly fun is that I can't take off with just an diet. If you never heard that such thing is possible, a lil advice: It is possible. Nothing hurts more than being told that eating less solves all problems magically - cause it doesn't.

What I usually need is added protein, as I suffer from muscle dystrophy in my left side. (hence the low impact vids).

If you go to a grocery store, you most likely find *tons* of protein stuff.

The fun thing is that roughly 80 % of that are - like all things in a supermarket - completely bullshit.

I know one could avoid using protein powder / ... - but that makes dieting a very very very hard task, as one has to not only do a lot of planning, but cooking and eating becomes a depression palooza... It just doesn't make fun when you have to scale components for every meal or force yourself to eat e.g. 250 g of low fat curd cheese to gain the necessary proteins.

Why is supermarket stuff so shitty....

Added sugar / saccharides . When one has been dieting for long for health reasons, one finds out pretty quick that most products (especially those labeled as healthy / fat reduced / "weight loss") are perfectly made to lead to a sugar crisis and binge eating.

I've found protein drinks containing up to 25 g of sugar per drink (330 ml).

A coke has 27 g of sugar per 250 ml...

:) Now isn't that jolly...

I've found my stuff of joy not so long ago (not advertising here, but depending on flavor it has only up to 3 g (!)) of sugar per drink)...

It just annoys me and pisses me off how much money is made - in my opinion deliberately - on the suffering of other people...

Most laws by the way end up being blocked by lobbyists - most nutrient scores etc are just "wrong" or better to unspecific... Making exploitation pretty easy.

It's funny how everyone has an opinion on obese people, everybody is pointing fingers and explaining how stupidly easy it is to take off... And at the same time no one gives a damn about shit like that.

That's all folks. Feeling better now.

By the way, I'm doing fine. I lost 7 kg already, though the train wreck of body was pretty pissed the last two weeks as everything hurts.

Another reason why motivational speeches are dumb in videos: Pain isn't fun. :)

** few years ago **
Other team: "There's a lot of overlap and misclassification between issue categories A and B; We want to merge them into one in our taxonomy"
Me: These are very different issues and have very different root causes. Shouldn't we fix the definitions instead? We don’t have major drivers for B now but if we remove it, it might bite us in year or two.
** loads of back and forth, and eventually B gets killed

** year and a quarter passes
Executive meeting: “So you’re telling us we can’t properly quantify the impact of B because we can’t distinguish A from B. It looks very clear cut to me why don’t we have split for these already and how long will it take to implement it?”
Me: Biting my tongue not to throw anyone under a bus.

I'm starting to gain a dislike for OOP.

I think classes make it easy for me to think of the entities of a problem and translate them into code.

But when you to attempt to test classes, that's when shit hits the fan.

In my opinion, it is pointless to test classes. If you ever seen test code for a class, you'll notice that it's usually horrible and long.

The reason for this is that usually some methods depend on other methods to be called first.

This results in the usual monolithic test that calls every goddamn method on the class.

You might say "ok, break the test into smaller parts". Ok. But the result of that attempt is even worse, because you end up with several big tests cases and a lot of duplicate code, because of the dependency of some methods on others.

The real solution to this is to make the classes be just glue: they should delegate arguments onto functions that reside on its own file, and, maybe afterwards emit events if you are using events.

But they shouldn't have too much test code classes though. The test code for classes should be running a simple example flow, but never doing any assertions other than expecting no exceptions.

For the most part, you'd be relying on the unit testing that is done for each delegated function.

If you take any single function you'll see that it's extremely easy to write tests for it. In fact, you can have the test right next to the fuction, like <module>.xyz <module>.test.xyz

So I don't think classes shouldn't be used at all, they should just be glue.

As you do normal usage of this software this way, when a bug is discovered you'll notice that the fix and testing code for this bug is very usually applied to the delegated functions instead of being a problem of classes.

I think classes by themselves sound sane in paper, but in practice they turn into a huge fucking messes that become impossible to understand or test.

How can something like traditional classes not get chaotic when a single class can have x attributes and y methods. The complexity grows exponentially. And sometimes more attributes and methods are added.

Someone might say "well, it's just the nature of problems. Problems can have a lot of variables".

Yeah, but cramming all of that complexity into a single 200 lines class is insanity.

My first year of a 2 year course our teacher had only taught us 2 theory topics of 6 and hadn't begun to teach us the other 2/3 of the course which was programming. The only reason he took so long was because he wanted everyone to understand the topic before he moved on which meant waiting for the people who shouldn't of been allowed to take the subject because they never paid attention and showed no interest in the subject. But he refused to move on without them.

To drag those 2 topics out more one of them was algorithms. At the time he had sprained his wrist shadow boxing and instead of preparing them before hand to give us some help he would type them out while we sat and watched wasting half the lesson. Then a month or so into our second year he left leaving the other teachers to make up for everything he failed to cover with us.

What's the most annoying thing you hear from a client ?

Mine is "It shouldn't take too long" referring to changing how the users see data

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff