toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

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On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

You utter &@£#s. You give rediclious promises to clients without consulting Devs how long items will take, when issues with project are clarified with client months in advance you turn around week before last and do a massive U turn. Expect junior developers to be masters of Photoshop, flash, server side technologies and to get around and code the front end. Then developers who are putting in the over time already you demand a massive load of overtime extra and threaten us if we don't meet the deadline?! Sat here blood boiling. last guy here litrually rage quit because of issues like this and #&## I think I'm going to too, so hard to try stay professional! ##&##&# I have had it!

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

Feeling pretty accomplished for someone who did no "work" today lol. I needed to work on side gigs but instead I:

1) Factory reset a 2011 Macbook Pro I'm selling and reinstalled Mojave using a patch (this laptop is officially unsupported by Mojave as of June).

2) Migrated all personal files from my windows desktop to my NAS. I'm turning this computer into a gaming rig now that I exclusively use my 2017 Macbook Pro for development.

3) Setup RDP from my macbook to my desktop.

4) Fixed registry errors and deleted junk apps off my desktop.

5) Erased and formatted all USB drives I had lying around.

6) Packaged up an old Xbox One for my brother-in-law which will get mailed tomorrow (included a few USBs for him since I rarely use'em).

7) Tested streaming my Xbox One X from my PC but it's laggy as F (both are wired, have static internal IPs, and use my router for DNS...it's just the app I guess).

8) Scored a like-new Scuf Vantage for my PS4 for $140 (the guy who was selling it paid $214 a month ago lol). I traded my spare Xbox One S for a PS4 slim and in an attempt to get used to it, I got this controller with thumbsticks in the same position as Xbox's.

9) Fixed and updated my Synergy app (mouse/keyboard sharing - I can use PBP on my 38" LG ultrawide and it's fairly seamless going between them).

10) Cloned a buddy's repo and set the project up to work locally.

11) Starting to get some work done while watching the Vikings game.

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

Agreed to help out these 2 guys on a minecraft mod pack idea they had... stipulated this is a side project for me and I'm not going to dedicate too much time to it. They were fine with that

Fast forward a few months main 'idea guy' loses his job so spends more time on the pack and starts hounding me for progress and updates and throwing more and more things for me to do. He's also getting progressively angrier at my lack of substantial progress

Like fuck dude i told you this is s fucking side project to me. I'll work on it when I fucking want to. Hell I'm one more shouting match away from telling him to fuck off and find some other dumbass to be the only programmer in this group and get ignored when it comes to fucking anything else

Their idea of 'source control' is a fucking multi Mc instance that gets shared by the main guy every time HE changes anything. Any scripts or configuration edits I do I need to walk him through so he can update that instance

No clue why I put up with it so long. Maybe because other guy was a cool friend back in college. But at this point they both can fuck off

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

Starting my work day:

* fire up the build script wrapper script wrapping the Docker compose scripts, which starts I dunno 20 different microservices, frontend build processes, watchers, blah, blah, blah, chews my laptop's battery like a muthafukka, wait for 15 minutes, for maybe a 40% chance that maybe it'll work, or maybe I'll have to fix some random thing that's wrong out of the 20 million things that could possibly go wrong and then restart... and if I'm lucky at the end of all this, I get to work on, I dunno, adding some field to a modal?

Firing up my weekend side project:

* php -S and immediately start working productively every time

Fuck the "modern web"

Project ideas come to me in wicked idea form. I even make an evil laugh.

[Question]
What type of amplifier circuit would I need to power a 60w 8ohm speaker or can you recommend any prebuilt amplifier boards ?

[TLDR;]
I spotted the below stuff while cleaning out my junk cupboard and thought it might be a fun side project to convert them into a portable bluetooth speaker since the earphones are shit anyway and I've always wanted to learn more about amplifiers.

The only question remaining is how to amplify the headphone output signal enough to power the speaker. I plan on either using cells from old laptop batteries or a motorbike battery as a power supply so input voltage would be roughly 10-12v.

The speaker is from a set I salvaged from an old 80's hifi and has excellent sound quality, would mounting the components inside it have a large negative effect on it's sound?

Also although I would prefer to make my own amplifier board as a learning experience the goal is to have a portable speaker with good sound quality... is this something I'm likely to get from my first attempt at an amplifier or should I rather get a ready made board?

From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby

Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.

Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .

Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.

And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.

Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

What do you use for your side-projects regarding Anti-DDoS protection?

I have a community with 1-2k daily users hosted in Siteground. Currently, I am not experiencing any DDoS issues (mainly L4) but I used to when I was using another service provider. The trade-off is that the machine and the service I'm paying here is way more expensive.

I don't care about managing the server, but I was looking for a cheaper option to get my project with.

The stack is LAMP and it is an Invision Power Board forum.

What do you recommend? Which service(s) do you use for your projects and how do you prevent DDoS on your side?

TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?

How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?

What I feel is not necessarily important

> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.

What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)

> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.

So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.

Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.

What are your thoughts and views?

P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.

!rant

I am building a side project to build a recommendation system for research papers. Since it's my first attempt, any tips? Also, my plan is to get it in the cloud, build a separate webpage to summon data from it. Honestly, most of it is three-fourths imagination, one-fourth google queries. The cloud idea is solely to provide it means to train real time.

I plan on using Python for this, other than the html/css frontend.

As someone who is very new to such a project, what should I know before I start?

Thanks,
S.

I am lately working on a Wordpress website (ouch, pain) for a friend as a side project and it is supposed to be multilingual. No problem, there are some plugins for it and thanks to one of my previous rants I found out the _e() function (still a stupid af name).

But I was wondering: given that I’ll have a lot of translations in some template pages in the theme, what is the standard way to do it? I have a couple of solutions in mind:

- single Po/mo files for every page
- as above, but with a script to merge the Po(s) before making the mo

Am I missing something obvious?
I was told to just use one po, but it sounds like hell to organise