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CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".
So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.
At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.
A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:
"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.
"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!
I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!
It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.8 -
I met my girlfriend via online dating and she is often checking out recipes on social media, so I came up with the idea to combine cooking and Tinder as a tiny side project.
I built an app that lets you swipe recipes to add them to your cookbook and called it "Daily Cook" and it is available on both Android and iOS. :)
13 -
I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.
Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.
Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.
Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.
I decided to take a week break from work.
The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.
I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.
Now I can't relax myself completely.
Re-thinking of my life choices atm.
I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.
If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.18 -
!rant
This might be the most ambitious project I've ever started up till now, teaching my girlfriend everything college isn't.
As some of you may know my uni isn't the greatest and lacks in professor quality, my girlfriend (who's taking the same bachelor) knows this and when she knew I was starting a new little side project she wanted in.
At first I was skeptical, this could be just an excuse to spend more time with me, so I told her:
"if you really want to then I'm all for it, it'll be done my way and the first few weeks will be tough, however I promise by the end of it you will know 10x what you do now"
She agreed and so our journey began 3 weeks ago, my goal: make a kick ass project, do it in record time and teach her enough to cope with a IRL job.
I've setup the project so by the end of it she is well versed in the following: scrum, Django, MVC, python, HTML + CSS3, git, GitHub, PostgreSQL and Docker. In about 4 to 6 months.
We are into our third sprint this week, she had two small breakdowns because she couldn't believe how much she was missing out and felt she lacked talent, this is our third week and I'm glad to see that she's actually enjoying herself.
2 -
If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong ~ House MD
Tl;Dr : I'm pissing the right people off and my God I like it
That's what I've known and have confirmed doing my current side project with my gf, we are working on a ratemyprofessors clone with extra spicy features, one in particular is so spicy some teachers will be put in a position in which they would rather grind hot peppers with their butt cheeks.
Don't get me wrong, there are good teachers (some of which actually showed support) but some are not good teachers and some aren't good people either; I've decided it's time to stop complaining and take action.
We recently released an alpha and I presented it to a teacher I had this semester (one of the "not so great" kind) as a DB proyect cuz fuck it I'm not doing 2 projects.
This teacher is your run of the mill "I'm lazy and I don't care" teacher and she ran the classroom like a shitty kindergarten, so much so, one of the teams was presenting a buggy admin site as their project and she started talking on the phone! Right up on their faces!!
My turn, I go up and handle her a 30 page printed thesis of my project and said that unlike my mates, I was going to start presenting the idea and then the actual software...why is it printed?, She said; Because I won't be projecting the PDF ma'am, I actually made a professional presentation and that way you can read more technical details while I give a broad overview...
I started talking about the huge issues students face and my research about it, undisciplined teachers, no class structure ~ abrupt interruption ~ "yeah I know like, you are giving so much statistics and numbahs but where is the database?"
I got pissed off because the whole purpose of printing and giving her the docs was for her to ask specific questions AT THE END! So I told her I was getting there and to ask questions at the end...I start showing off the system's sweetest features... everyone got quiet...a girl on the front row kept looking at the teacher and then back to the board with her eyes wide open, the teacher was visibly upset.
I asked someone to please help me by using the site being projected for everyone to see, he searched the teacher's name and it obviously popped up cuz I scrapped the whole teacher index site... some people gasp and others start murmuring.
She freaked and started arguing saying that frontend can't be just HTML and CSS, where did you mentioned x and y feature? admit it's just teacher evaluations! where did you get the teacher names? I want the scripts!....it went on even 10 minutes after class and the next class with a police like interrogation.
So yeah, something tells me I'm not getting an A, but I'm happy after all because that's the kind of reaction I want from those types of professors.
Worth it 😎
8 -
meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)
of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...11 -
Harsh truth:
My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)
...is it time to rage quit?
Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.
Give me biased views, devRant!6 -
Had a mental breakdown a few days ago. Crying like it's the end of the world when computer stopped working. I was a Picasso drawing of the hysteria, basically.
My exams are getting near, I'm really not ready; yet this chick keeps asking me about ten euros I borrowed from her a year and something back when we were going to a club they asked me to go to with them... Given her persistence that I should wire her the money (no PayPal tho) I assume she's up to something super shady. Why does she need my account info for?
Anyways, being annoyed by only ten euros (in our currency, it's not much, btw. It's less than two bags of expensive chips, or 5 dozen of the cheapest eggs on the market) and not studying enough, there is also my work. I feel so incompetent that I may just resign. Like... I'm not smart enough for this project. 😢 And I'm aware of it.
Put that on the side with this uni's project, which is very "Urghhhhh" because of too many people working on the same project, some of who need to be sent back to kindergarten to learn how to cooperate with others.
And in the middle of all of that, I'm trying to stay as zen as possible until the next mental breakdown. 😑😑😐
Thank you for reading this rant.7 -
I started a side project: a small app for my gf and me.
In the end it should consist of different features I call modules. Right now there is only one module that suggests a movie to watch from our watchlist.
7 -
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. -
Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)
2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)
3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)
So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.
For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.
Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.
Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.
The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.
But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.
Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.
From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.
Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.
After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.
Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:
Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.
Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.
Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.
The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.
So instances it is.
Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.
All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present
* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.
* great lakes need refinement and corrections
* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.
* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on
* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.
* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too
* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.
This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.
Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.
Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.
Take that gators!
5 -
It has been a long long time since I posted, a lot has happened the past couple of months.
I lost my grandfather, I got a nice dev job and God I miss ranting here. I finally published my side project and all I have to say is
AWS is a b*tch! But beautiful at the same time, had to learn a lot the old way (trial and error).
I don't have any anime pictures as I've changed phones recently but I find this picture just as awesome.
Hope you are having a great day ranters.
1 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.
There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.
I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.
He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..
So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...
What do I do?10 -
I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.
We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.
How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.
I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.
Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...
Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.
Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.
Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.4 -
I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.
So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.
As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.
On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose
I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.
The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.
The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.
Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.
I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.
Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.
What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?23 -
i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...
Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.
I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..
so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.
if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face
stay tune to find out !15 -
Hey! This is a followup to my last story.
TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.
First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.
Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.
One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.
The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.
I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.
Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.
Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...
Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.
One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.
I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...2 -
TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.
They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.
I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.
The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.
In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.
The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.
My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.
I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!
Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?
The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium
In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.
I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that. -
Finally have some side project in mind but now I don't have the time. When I had time I was not well mentally to do anything. When is the cycle going to break? Work - burnout - recover - repeat 😣2
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I don't think it could be more .net core than this: Several parts of the application ended up failing because of a too long URL. For example we used a List to store selected items in an array and they each looked like this:
&model.selectedIds[n]=true
The server side made more sense but we were running late with the project so we just went with it and hoped no one would use this feature. -
As a teacher myself, I will always advice young people to go to school. Though I imagine it differs on the quality of education in your country.
I live in the Netherlands and here it's quite good overall. It's no Ivy League and there are plenty of exceptions but overall any technical study here is a good study.
I also teach at a small school (220 software engineering students) so I actually know my students and what generally need to get ahead.
But my main reasons for actually doing a study instead of going the self-taught route:
1. You spend +/- 4 years in presence of peers that are more or less in the same life phase as you are. You will make friends for life.
2. Companies value a diploma. Good for you that you landed a job on your 19th. Just wait until your 25, wanna switch jobs and don't even get to the second round of any application process because your CV does not list a diploma. This might change in the future but not for the next 5-10 years.
3. You will learn foundational stuff about most thing IT-related. Some things you'll never use. Some thing you'll use unknowingly every single day
4. It teaches discipline without major impact on your life if you fail something. OK, you failed a course. So what? Take it next year and take the time to do a side-project or internship during your study delays. It will teach you some life lessons without it costing you a job or your life savings, and you get some extra time to learn as well!
5. Retirement age by the time you retire will be 75. There's plenty of time to work. Why not spend 4 years with peers in a relatively safe and fun environment first?
TL;DR - small schools are actually fun, attend one -
It feels so good to be well rested and wake up between 1 and 5 am to be productive while most people in your country are sleeping while inhaling the cool night breeze from outside whilst staring at your monitor fantasizing how this side project will make you rich one day.
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8 months ago, me and my teammate developed an API and a web application for one of our client. The API was supposed to be consumed by mobile app which another team was working upon. Now my suggestion for the mobile team was to use something like ionic or react-native. This was purely to keep technical debt on lower side since hybrid apps don't deviate too far for both Android and iOS platforms. But mobile team went with the native apps and developed two separate apps which both have some differences.
The client didn't even use the iOS app since past 6 months. Now all of a sudden she reported several bugs and the person managing the mobile devs put that all on us. I tested some of the bugs and seems like the same feature is working on Android but not on iOS.
Came to know later that the iOS developer who was working on the app had resigned and left the company exactly 6 months ago. Right after the apps first launch. And since then mobile team hasn't put any replacement person for the project. That fucker was trying to buy some time by putting it all on us.
And now here I am, experimenting again with Flutter. So far it seems quite decent.3 -
Project with partner company, during the meeting I asked them how can we secure the communication between two services. I suggested api keys, tokens. They were like nope, no need. But I asked them for their IPs to do whitelisting on our side in Nginx.
But their side, nah not even whitelisting, no tokens, no validations. If one has address, can send anything from anywhere.
How hard would it be to do at least, AT LEAST simple token validation. And they are using the very old IIS server. I think for them as long as data flows in as expected, it is fine.3 -
Code on own side project the whole night without sleeping til 6-7am right before going to work because today is half day only in office.
I thought I could manage it but haha totally wrong, First 2 hours were good, during last 2 hours I was trying my best not to fell asleep.
Worst decision ever.2 -
Started a side project.
Learnt flutter and firebase.
Started coding app.
Four months pass by.
App is mostly ready.
Wakes up on Saturday morning.
Updates Android Studio and SDK because, why not?
Build failed!
Dependency depreciation warnings!
Java errors!
Firebase errors!
Emulator stopped running!
Wify is angry with me as we planned shopping but now this. Fortunately, she's also in IT, so she understands..
FML! Spent the entire day stackoverflowing and fixing errors!
8PM evening, I am back to Friday's status. My shoulder and neck hurts but my mind is chilled.6 -
I have a few side project ideas. I started one of them a few months ago (project setup, dependencies, git repo, index page, very basic API and client functionality). But I cannot get myself to work on it or even think about it (for months now). The reason? I do not want to work on the client/frontend! I do not want to deal with React or Vue or Svelte or fuckjs or even jquery. It's a fucking mess.
For the backend, the requests are stateless: you get a request, handle it, and respond back. Need to update state? Database. That's it!
For the frontend, there's just tooo many states I can't keep up with! When the user checks or unchecks this checkbox, I need to maintain the state of the checkbox and maintain the all effects of changing the checkbox while syncing with the backend and making sure the elements are still styled correctly with the applied effects. Multiply that with all the expected interactive elements on the page. It's exhausting!4 -
Getting some bullshit from the project manager about how the team needs to spend a week in the office out of every month for "collaboration", to "know your teammates", and "feel the project culture". Never mind that half the team is on the other side of the continent and most of them are subcontractors so their travel expenses aren't covered.
Basically, tell us you don't trust us to do our jobs without actually saying it.
I've been collaborating just fine without being in the office since before COVID. I don't need to know my teammates, and I sure as hell don't need them to know me. And every time I try to give a shit about the project culture it only makes my hemorrhoids worse.
I'm pretty sure this guy just wants to get us in the building so he can browbeat us into working unpaid overtime while being micromanaged.
Reason number 32768 to unionize...13 -
The thing with youtube videos and online programming courses is that they don't show you the production way of doing stuff, this is one of the reasons why new developers think they aren't good enough or that they just don't know what they're doing. If I someday become an educator, when I'm teaching I'll be sure to make my students know how to build solid production applications and not some lousy side project that can't even handle considerable traffic.3
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I love being a consultant, and I love my job. However, I’ve been working with this client for the past few months and the past few weeks have been so draining. 90% of the people at the client’s side are super nice people, and then there’s this one person that just barks orders at us whenever a tiny thing is broken. Everything is urgent, everything is top priority, and we need to drop whatever we’re doing to fix what they deem urgent. I am currently pretty much the only dev doing both support and feature development at the same time and I am getting mentally very tired.
Whenever something is broken we get shit feedback, but for all our efforts there’s never any positive feedback. Mind you, the project isn’t even publicly accessible yet, it’s in a “alpha” phase where there are only a handful of users testing the program.
How do you guys deal with people like this?3 -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
After contemplating on it so long, I finally made a blog for code snippets:
https://txstc55.github.io/But-how-d...
Completely written by myself, except, I mean, the vuejs and tailwind css part.
It’s so beautiful
Open to suggestions for code snippets to add!11 -
I just started a new job where in my onboarding, I’m supposed to learn typescript and react. I am also supposed to gain some knowledge of databases. Since I am so new, I don’t really have any meetings. I see my manager maybe 2x a day. I’ve been using my time at work to learn these technologies.
I learn best by doing projects. I recently built a bot that scrapes media off of one site and posts it on another site. I was thinking I could create a react front end in typescript for the bit. I would also add a database to my project (the model for the front end) which contains the post history of the bot.
Would that be appropriate for work? I thought it would be good project to help me learn react. However, I am new to the “corporate” world and I feel like my manager won’t want me to waste company time on my side project.
The only other responsibilities I have are reviewing the source code and watching some onboarding videos6 -
I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.
So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.
Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.
So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.
And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.
Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?2 -
Salesforce document template auto generation.
I only recently got promoted from junior, but on this project I am basically the go to person for work on our templates.
I pull a bunch of mangers and our client rep into a meeting to discuss the issues surrounding this and offer solutions.
One of the things I said was "If we changed this process to this, which would take about a week to develop / convert, we could reduce development time on adding new products from hours to minutes."
The client was intrigued but said I'd need more data about direct improvements customer side to get the green light.
My manager and supervisor said, in front of the client, "Nobody really gives a shit about developer time. They're never going to let us spend time to make your job easier or faster."
I know it's true but it still hurts 🤕🤕🤕4 -
Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?
Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.
Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.
Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.
Worst developer experiences:
Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.
"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.2 -
now... Im just tired and bored of what i do. i had a very hectic year rewriting a core functionality in my company, it was full of optimizations, logic improvements and learning new things.
I took 10 days off hoping id come hating my job less. I learned kotlin and worked on a personal server side project with it during the vacation and honestly i loved it. I missed learning new languages and concepts.
so i thought, well if i enjoyed coding during the vacation then my burnout is cured right ? well once i went back to work today I felt like shit and couldn't do a thing. disgusted of the idea coding for my employer. Too tired to continue my personal project after 8 hours of my job
I guess im back to square one2 -
I spent the whole damn day trying to setup grpc-web, but this protocol is documented so damn poorly!
You manage to set grpc up for one language and it’s all cool, then you stupidly think that you are free to reuse the compiler you used for the nodejs version for your frontend part but nope! Our web module is now deprecated, please use this module instead!
“Ah yes just clone the repo and check out (…) and you can also check this link whic is in no way highlighted in the middle of a wall of text (…)”
*checking the other page*
Ah yes you need to install a package available only on your unix machine (great! Screw the devs in my team who use windows I guess, they’ll be happy to hear this!) and don’t forget to clone this repo to build your own plugin! And by that I ofc mean to compile it on your own!
- compiler error
After digging for an hour you find a requirement in an obscure issue opened and closed cause “ah yes we have a dependency not stated anywhere” *close issue and never add it to the project*
Fine, fine I can survive this bs
- another compiler error, no solution found after 2 hours
Honestly? Why the fuck do I need to compile this stuff? Just give me a damn npm package I can use? Goddamn it’s just transpiling, you don’t need access to my OS! (Aside for fs to save the files, and which btw is accessible via nodejs)
Now, I COULD download the latest realease as a precompiled, but… honestly?
I give up, I’ll do some shitty rest apis cause the customer’s not paying me enough for even THINKING to go trough this shit again when they’ll ask an iOS app. Or having colleagues asking me to help them understand how to do it.
Side note: also add typescript support to the web-code-generation ffs! Why does node have it and web don’t?5 -
I've been asked to release a project which has been written by someone else, then rewritten by another developer, and both have left the company.
I can't release it yet because there is an inconsistent bug throwing some values out.
We've got it running side by side with an older legacy system which it's going to replace. Before the 2nd developer left they added some logging to our live system to record both values so that they could be monitored to make sure there was no inconsistency.
There are some inconsistencies... however, when I run the same data through the new system and the legacy system in a test environment they both come out correct.
FML
I've considered quitting...2 -
For a side project I identified the need for RPC (originally over Websocket but can be extended to WebRTC/DTLS) that supports
- JSON-serializable values
- Promises
- MessagePorts (including shortcut detection for ports that are passed back on a different route)
- async functions
I have ideas for all of these and this is an exciting prospective library, but it's also major scope bloat that will prevent me from ever finishing the project that depends on it.
Would you be interested in such a library if it ever got built?4 -
When the client arranges a short-term project for you to do during the summer weeks and also assume that there’d be someone available from their side for feedback, but there is not a single fucking soul to talk to so you just wing it.
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I found someone to make some project with!
I thought finding side project partner is harder then being fullstack myself. Stupid me.1 -
I’ve been thinking of making a magic Mirror lately as a side project. I know that they are traditionally made with TVs or computer monitors but I don’t have the space to make a mirror that big. I have a bunch of old Amazon kindles and android phones that I thought would be good to use instead (even though they all have cracked screens). I want the reflective aspect and the touch screen aspect. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get whatever device that is behind the glass to register touch events on the glass. Any ideas or recommendations? Anybody done anything similar?
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I have a side project which contains very simple data (a URL and a list of strings associated with that URL). I would like a way to automatically generate a webpage for each of those links (I believe the right term is template ?). Does anyone have any suggestions? Is this something like Next.js or Gatsby would be used for? I can provide more info if I’m not clear enough8
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Last question for today, I promise…
For my side project, I plan on saving a URL and an array of strings associated with that URL. I want to be able to search and sort the resulting DB from a frontend without needing complicated queries. Is this the use case for a key-value pair DB? Let me know if I’m not clear and thanks!14 -
So I wanted to learn rust, and I was thinking: practice is the best way so naturally I went on to leetcode
After spending 4 hours to solve two questions I was like: fuck it, why do I need to go back and forth to the discussion page, why not just show it to me.
So now I spent 4 days to develop a chrome extension that shows the top 10 solutions in the discussion page for a specific question with specific language.
I showed to friend and she was like: you look at the discussion?
The moment I realized that I developed a hot pile of garbage3
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