A note on devRant community etiquette. I've seen some behavior lately that I want to just mention since it goes against the rules of our community. We've specifically built moderation tools into upvoting and downvoting, and that is how all content should be moderated.

Commenting on rants that you don't think should be posted only gives them more exposure and unfortunately at times people trying to moderate content via comments and rants have gotten abusive towards other members. On the contrary, I've yet to see any of the people these select few members accuse of "ruining the community" act hostile towards anyone.

So with that said, I wanted to make sure this policy is visible, because commenting on other people's rants, especially in a hostile way to stop them from posting, is bannable and we really don't want to see it. Like mentioned before, that's what downvoting is for and it's much more effective since it doesn't boost the content like adding a comment does.

We take content quality seriously and while we haven't been able to eliminate reposts completely, we've made a lot of progress. For directly reposted content, we added the repost detector (https://devrant.io/rants/425054/...) and are still working to improve that and appreciate any feedback/ideas for it.

Like any community on the internet, devRant will always have some reposts and it will always have some content you really don't like. That's what comes along with being an open platform with very little moderation. We get requests to moderate more heavily, but we don't like censoring recent rants and don't plan to do that.

Most of the times people who repost content or an image didn't realize it was already posted. Not everyone uses recent sort and almost always they have no ill intent.

Anyway, feel free to let me know if you have any questions and feedback is always welcome.

For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.

*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*

I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".

R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".

I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...

I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.

Some of the other highlights of R include:

- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.

- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.

- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.

- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"

Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715

The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.

So I snitched first.

The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.

Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.

I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.

On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.

"Damn, if only he just... did the work."

Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).

And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.

Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1551635

I think that I've found the reason for this Acer motherboard's refusal to boot up now. Apparently this featureful piece of shit expects "something" on its ID pin as well.. and why ID pin you may ask? I reckon that it's because of "certified replacements". Because you know, if it doesn't come from our shitty factorias it's gotta be shit, right?!

How about no?!! You Acer really aren't the only ones capable of producing a fucking lithium battery! And did you ever think of the edge cases where you may want to feed a lab bench power supply's voltage into the phone to mimic the battery and troubleshoot the bloody thing? Because that's what I initially wanted to do, instead of that Doogee battery. The only reason why I didn't is because the supply is currently charging up another lithium cell that I salvaged from a donated (broken) Samsung tablet, and is taking longer than expected.

Point is, if you receive the appropriate fucking level of angry pixies, YOU SHOULD FUCKING USE THEM AND BOOT UP ALREADY!!! Regardless of whether it's some sort of certified fucking Acer component or not! Somewhere between 4.2 and 2.7V stable should be good enough regardless of what produces it!

At least AliExpress sells these batteries for about €4.5, and another €2 for shipping. Considering that I can buy batteries with this capacity for €2 a pop and free shipping, this would better fucking work. Especially since I'm buying an overpriced battery of which almost half the cost is fucking shipping, just for a stupid "certified" controller that' I'll also have to put between the board and any pixie wrangler or angry pixie containment device that I use to power this shitty board. Acer, you motherfuckers!!!

Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...

Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!

Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.

I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.

Prior post on this story: https://devrant.com/rants/1635258/...

Apparently my dad decided to adopt the Windows file system hierarchy for his business.

He has managed to store his video, picture, and music folder INSIDE the DOCUMENTS folder. And there are seperate video, picture, and music folders outside of this folder. The business information is in all of these folders adding up to about 600GB of data in 10 different folders and 4 trees. Nothing has been deleted since 2010. WHAT IN THE EVER LOVING CHRIST ON A FUCKING POGO-STICK IS THIS ABOMINATION. I AM GOING TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF NAKED AND ON FIRE BEFORE I TRY TO SORT THIS SHIT.

Sort of follow up to: https://devrant.com/rants/1351833/...

Now I can turn on/off my PC over the Internet. A little hacky but it works like a charm.

I'm using an Arduino IDE compatible ESP-12E with on board WiFi and a homemade optocoupler (LED + photoresistor).

Hopefully more projects like these are coming 🤗

I was reading a post over at https://devrant.com/rants/2262140/...

..and on the topic of using 3d printers to print a 3d printer, I wrote that has gotta be some sort of measure or ratio of "manufacturing automation."

Sort of like moores law or something.

"How many tools and materials does it now take to replicate THIS ONE TOOL."

Tools & Materials = 1/N

When we get to 1/N = 1.0, anyone can manufacture anything (commonly available) if they have the raw, or standardized materials, even other tools, up to and including the tool they are using to do the manufacturing itself.

I mean an apocalypse could happen, and as long as just ONE of these 'universal tool making tools' (lets call it an omega machine) exists, we can have *all* the tools and manufacturing necessary to rebuild civilization.

A universal manufacturing 'multitool' means, the only hard requirements for restarting civilization no longer rely on specialized knowledge as far as tools go:

- still need arable land after civilization is gone so when it's coming back, people can feed themselves
- still need people to operate the machine, even if its just one man, or a literal adam and eve (nevermind all the incest).
- still need knowledge to operate the machine, such as an operating manual (and literacy), or knowing say, voice commands.
- assuming it doesn't run on nonrenewable resources, or resources that can't be recycled or replaced..or resources that won't run out for a very long time.

But these are all problems we'd face even without a universal manufacturing machine.

Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194

There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?

Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.

The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

DEAR NON TECHNICAL 'IT' PERSON, JUST CONSUME THE FUCKING DATA!!!!

Continuation of this:
https://devrant.com/rants/3319553/...

So essentially my theory was correct that their concern about data not being up to date is almost certianly ... the spreadsheet is old, not the data.... but I'm up against this wall of a god damn "IT PERSON" who has no technical or logic skills, but for some reason this person doesn't think "man I'm confused, I should talk to my other IT people" rather they just eat my time with vague and weird requests that they express with NO PRECISION WHATSOEVER and arbitrary hold ups and etc.

Like it's pretty damn obvious your spreadsheet was likely created before you got the latest update, it's not a mystery how this might happen. But god damn I tell them to tell me or go find out when the spreadsheet was generated and nothing happens.

Meanwhile their other IT people 'cleaned the database' and now a bunch of records are missing and they want me to just rando update a list of records. Like wtf is 'clean the database' all about!?!?!?

I'm all "hey how about I send you all records between these dates and now we're sure you've got all the records you need up to date and I'll send you my usual updates a couple times a day using the usual parameters".

But this customer is all "oh man that's a lot of records", what even is that?

It's like maybe 10k fucking records at most. Are you loading this in MS Access or something (I really don't know MS Access limits, just picking an old weird system) and it's choking??!?! Just fucking take the data and stick it in the damn database, how much trouble can it be?!!?!?

Side theory: I kinda wonder if after they put it in the DB every time someone wants the data they have some API on their end that is just "HERE"S ALL THE FUCKING DATA" and their client application chokes and that's why there's a concern about database size with these guys.

I also wonder if their whole 'it's out of date' shit is actually them not updating records properly and they're sort of grooming the DB size to manage all these bad choices....

Having said all that, it makes a lot more sense to me how we get our customers. Like we do a lot of customer sends us their data and we feed it back to them after doing surprisingly basic stuff ever to it... like guies your own tools do th---- wait never mind....

After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.

This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]

As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."

A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.

Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.

Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.

The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.

The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).

I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.

I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.

I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.

I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.

Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.

I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.

The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...

If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!

Objective: drill a huge hole in the Apple!
Following rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1564522/...

So... Apple music store saves the music in m4a in the app folder, so no other apps can access the music.
It saves it with wird file names, no structure.
I'm noob at basicly anything, and because I'm on vacations I have a cellphone with python basicly.
How can I get the music info from the files, change the files names to their singer/group + song music and latter sort them in folders by artist, then by album

Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.

A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:

A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.

The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".

In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.

In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.

On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.

On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.

After the fun I had with the XEN Orchestrator UI ( https://devrant.com/rants/2554182/ ) I build an exporter that normalizes XEN / Proxmox API output and writes it into a nice spreadsheet.

Took PHP 7.4 for a spin. Sweet jesus, lot of nice stuff.

Been nearly a year since I did something larger than small scripts in PHP, but felt really at home again.

The type hinting and arrow functions made writing the exporter a breeze.

DTOs with typed properties spared me quite a bit of headache when normalizing the different APIs...

Utilizing *sort with fn arrow function is a pretty nice and concise one liner with the spaceship operator.

And I have now a nice spreadsheet...

Thanks at the PHP folks.

So for anyone interested in or following my drama regarding my breakup first ranted about at

https://devrant.com/rants/1651305/...

I figured I would provide an update. Things have been going surprisingly well. Yesterday after some initial avoidance and silence and anger we just kind of went back sort of to normal, just being friends instead of lovers. She went and picked up two cats from the shelter and we talked about logistics of how this whole broken up thing is going to work, then watched some tv and ate dinner and stuff. So not too bad.

Today is still not too bad, but as you would expect emotions are still a thing. We talked a bit in the morning but basically just about necessities. She then took her laptop into the bedroom to be alone. So basically just sad emotions all around today, which sucks but it could suck a lot worse. On the bright side, it is looking like we can keep the friendship intact after all our emotions settle down.

Thanks for all the comments and ++s on my previous post. It really helps to vent a bit and have other people care how you are doing.

So continuing on my PC buying post, my friend found a cheaper, by $300, option but it's sort of a give and take. And not sure which one is the best. Plus AMD * still gives me a bad impression.

Last rant/Intel:
https://devrant.com/rants/1867462/...

AMD: https://slickdeals.net/f/...

CPU Compare: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compa...

I had originally written a rant, asking about workflows. It then devolved into something much worse > Reddit-like taunting and whining.

Reference rant(https://devrant.com/rants/1554055/...)

Now before I go any further, yes I fell into his trap and sort of got taunted him back. Ill take half of the blame and hate that it might deserve.

So new question, why do people start off reading a rant (I thought my rant was a genuine question) and immediately enter a dick fighting contest? - myself included

!rant !dev

So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162

I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.

"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.

Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."

So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.

Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.

I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.

That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.

And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.

Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.

Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.

So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.

After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.

In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.

So my fist task was.

task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.

Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.

Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.

Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.

GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.

Capture, Process and Review.

Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.

Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.

And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.

You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.

update : we are at hr round baby!!!

part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...

part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...

the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲

--------

now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:

current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player

- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.

- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.

- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things

new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)

- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days

- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.

- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(

so ... any thoughts about it?