> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Don't you just love it when upper Management people that never wrote a line of code in their life tell you, the software engineer peasant, to refactor all of your projects with Inclusive Terminology?

I mean I'll do it, the company is just protecting their image and money... But I blame the sick mind that came up with this in the first place.... It's implying that all sofware engineers are somehow racist and sexist and I'm somewhat offended by that notion. Whoever started this trend should seriously burn in hell.

P. S.
Apparently "the elderly" is also non-inclusive and should be referred to as "older adult"... What the fuck?

Do you not realize that you're just disassembling words and nothing else? Also "AIDS patient" should be referred to as "person living with AIDS"... Ok? Same fucking thing? If not even worse? At least "patient" kinda invokes that professional help is given... A person living with AIDS just implies you're infected and seeking no help...

You help no one with this non-issue bullshit. All your replacements will be deemed outdated and non-inclusive in the next 5 years again... Fucking hell... Waste of time and money

Holy shit. Didn't know I had to vent this out before I had revisited this shit.

Storytime!

Back in May last year, I started working on a dream project (call project X) of mine. Surprisingly it's still a novel idea and shit like this doesn't exist. Made some huge incremental changes. Added all the necessary automation pipeline stuff. Added some sick ass readme with screenshots/badges/glitz/glam.

Worked my ass of for about a month or so until I got distracted by other pending projects in need of clearances. Somewhere partway in that clearance period, I receive a mail from this "GitHub user" asking me why the development of project X had suddenly stopped.

I was a bit taken aback. Firstly because my project had ZERO stars and NO user interaction. Secondly because I hadn't encountered someone with confrontation like this since my middle-school teacher asking me for my homework.

Being the good, responsible child I am, I informed them on my situation and asked them to contribute according to the guidelines and I'd be more than happy to see this becoming a joint effort by the community.

Apparently, they were quite ecstatic to learn that my development was halted. They didn't have plans to contribute. Instead they wanted me to take down the project and stop working on it entirely.

Tough luck fucko.

Their organization had been working on something similar for longer than a couple of years. A similar open-sourced project will *apparently* ruin their market impact and I can *apparently* be sued for it.

I don't know much about open-source "laws" (and I've seen laws fuck people over) but this just seems retarded. At the moment, I'm not quite sure how to continue with the project. I'll still work on it but the fact being that I started receiving threats before stars makes me question the gatekeeping capacity of toxic market conditions (I still don't blame the person entirely. It's just really hard to keep your head above the water)

This is a one off thing but somehow it has definitely hampered my drive to work on the project (combined with the sheer amount of pending project that I've dug my grave with).

On the brighter side I've got 10 anonymous stars with zero promotion. 2 new message threads with productive insights and a person who says "I'm relying on this to work out". So not everything has gone to shit.

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

Self documenting code is a fucking myth you bloody sheep.

Write “self documenting code” then add a fucking comment or two explaining why the fuck the code deserves should be there because nobody can see what the fuck it is doing or understands how the whole collection of microservices works. I’m sick of spaghetti code bullshit full of accidental redundancy because it is impossible for anyone to realize why something is there at a glance.

I renamed different “Contract” classes today by adding numbers before code review.
Contract
Contract1
Contract2
Contract3
All of these classes are supposed to be the same but somehow they aren’t and you self documenting dumbasses missed it. Don’t gripe about the numbered classes in the repo… fix the fucking code and collapse the classes so we don’t have four sections of code describing the same fucking structure from a http get with different interfaces because four people couldn’t read the whole like some fucking computer.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

I'm just FUCKING DONE. Everyone around me looks at me like a fucking paycheck they either don't want to pay me or like one they want from me but that I can't make enough of. Every time I open my stupid cakehole something stupid flies out of it that offends someone or makes me look incompetent or sets me back somehow. I'm not suicidal but I don't want to be on this planet anymore. I'm stranded here with nobody who wants to hire me and people around me who are tapping their feet waiting for people to hire me. I have nothing in my bank accounts to cover enormous and increasing monthly expenses coming up on the horizon and no way to pay for them. I have a stupid president who just keeps making it worse and worse with every stupid thing that comes out of his geriatric mouth or that he signs with his shaking dementia-ridden hand. He just keeps taxing me and taxing me and now has an army the size of the FUCKING NATIONAL GUARD of IRS agents ready to FUCK ME UP THE ASS if I have just one business expense out of order. I have all of this responsibility for my family and none of the power to do anything for them. And now that most of my kids are adults, none of them can afford to move out for the long-term future and also they're not able to get much money to help out so it's still incumbent on me to carry them until they're like FUCKING 35 YEARS OLD OR SOMETHING! The wife is pretty much sick of me and my shitty attitude about it all and she says she thinks that I think it's all her fault. We don't have any kind of romantic relationship anymore (well, I have all the interest and she has all the avoidance).

Also, I'm a man, and white, and straight, and "privileged" (oh, so privileged) so I'm the _worst person on the planet_.

I was born on this earth to be a FUCKING WARNING, not the lesson. When that meteor comes, let it take me out first.

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

How often have you heard/read "Hello World" today?

Today I had the pleasure of adding a feature to our intranet service written by two of my colleagues since they suffer from severe unix dyslexia. One of them was sick so I sat down with the other one and somehow he didn't know how to interpret the output, how to correctly call it from the terminal or even which parameters are needed for it to work so I had to try and decipher their code.
How can one work on something for a month and not know anything about it?

So i had two jobinterviews at a company and i was basically through for a test. It just so happens that the person who should give the test is sick for a couple of weeks. So instead they asked me to send them some code to evaluate.

Today i got an email telling me that the level of my code doesn’t match my years of experience so the process stops here.

Somehow i can’t help myself but to wish that the guy who evaluated my code now just is sick for at least
another moth!

Funfact: in one of the interviews i was told that they don’t work with junior people. I personally think everyones view on jobtitle/rank is different so i’m not a big fan of it in any case.

However this company LITERALLY has a blog describing how they hired someone without any working experience and thus being a junior.

Guess i’ll be stuck in my current deadend job for a while.

Not really most painful, but definitely most painful of the recent bunch..
// yup, a bunch.. I've managed to fuck up a little on every thing I did that day :/ little friday the 13th for me, especially as I went on sick leave the next day and had to fixup my fuckups with a friggin migrane..

Anyways, I was fixing fallback to some default value in plsql.. before it didn't check what the input format was and simply relied on certain format, parsed that and converted to number..threw an error, duh!

I fixed it somehow elegantly to check with regex if the format is as expected and if not default to xy value..and if format is as expected to parse out the number..except that when I copied (or typed?! for the sake of me, I cannot recall how the fuck I managed to fuck this up) over the code to the package I didn't see additional [ at the begining, so everything went to the default.. Most embarrassing part is I commented everything, how it should work, use cases, what the input was and what was expected output..and failed to see the friggin extra [..
It was fixed easily, the extra [ stood out later when I saw the code, but it bothers me how I managed to overlook that in the first place. I think I need a vacation.. but have to fix other fuckups first.. :/