I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

Working on a funny/new api/service (will be a public one) and I'm only now realizing how important good security is but especially:

The amount of time that goes into securing an api/application is too goddamn high, I'm spending about 90 percent of my time on writing security checks 😅

Very much fun but the damn.

Last night I realized I may be spending too much time programming. Got together with some non-programmer friends, and once I got drunk, all my conversations were formatted in my head as api requests in Json 😅😅

Between plague and smoke, spending way too much time indoors. Localised co2 got pretty high in the office my husband and I share and opening the windows is dicey during giant spider season even before the wildfires.

So as a result, I'm starting a little indoor garden in each room. The succulent are going to be hydro, and the prayer and snake plant will get soil so I have some place to dump my coffee grinds other than the rose garden. In the next month or so we also want to set up some living moss panels to help control the nitrogen balance.

And of course, obligatory rpi sensor suite and irrigation is inbound as well. That'll be a shared project. 😸

People say programmers are no fun!! But they don't know the truth.

We have big Ass container of emotions almost ready to explode anytime. We are spending too much time in debugging stuff one after another that having a free time is just a hoax to us, even when we came back home for sleep, it's only to dream about solution. We would be happy with debugging the error that is not letting us sleep for weeks.

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

My wife is complaining that am spending too much time on devRant. I just told her, am coming here only when windows is updating :p ;)

my girlfriend told me to stop spending too much time in front of the computer, so I stopped dating *foreveralone*

PM says you are spending too much time testing. Fast forward to a production bug and they are standing behind you while you are frantically coding saying "this should have been tested more".

Mom and dad never really cared me being a developer claiming they did not understand what I do and used to talk down on me becoming a loser for spending too much time making video games when I was a kid.

Got depressed for a long time and stopped making games.

Brother comes drunk at 15 years old, got yelled but bc he was out partying and socializing he never got called a loser by them. Now they laugh at that experience.

But never apologized until I got a breakdown. Fb becomes big and now they want me to invent the next Facebook and telling me to be happy.

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.

My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.

Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.

She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"

One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.

We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.

NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.

Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.

Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.

Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.

In the last project i worked in, the product owner wouldn't treat people as people but as resources.

The problem with that is you just look at people and their work in terms of a checklist and remain blind about real humans face.

She wouldn't understand the challenges of building something with an absolutely new stack which people needed to learn from scratch and put pieces together. She wouldn't be supportive of people trying out things and fail.

One fine day I told her that I was spending too much time on meetings and i should be excluding that time from available sprint timings.. she made me open my calendar in a screenshare session with all team members. Made me go through go through every meeting invite i had on calender and ordered which ones should i be attending from then and which ones i wont. That was insulting. It broke the trust.

I decided to not work with the project. Stopped putting my heart and soul into it and eventually got out of it in a month time.

Don't put your team into a position like this ever. You have to trust them with the problems they face and try to find a solution. Scrutinizing and micro management will always kill the team.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

Best: Discovering devRant.
Worst: Spending too much time on devRant.

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

My god the wall looks really punchable right now. Let me tell you why.

So I’m working on a data mining project, and I’m trying to get data from google trends. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of roadblocks for what should have been an easy task.

First it won’t give a raw search volume, only relative “interest”.
Fortunately it lets me compare search terms, which would work for my needs however it will only let me compare a few at a time. I need to compare 300.

So my solution is simple: compare all the terms relative to one term. Simple enough, but it would be time consuming so I figured I’d write a program to get the data.

But then I learned that they don’t have an official api. There’s a node module for this very thing based on a python module that reverse engineers the api endpoints. I thought as long as it works I’d use it.

It does work... But then I discovered that google heavily rate limits the endpoints.

So... I figured I’d build a system to route the requests through different tor nodes to get around the rate limit. Good solution right? Well like a slap to the face, after spending way to much time getting requests through tor working, I discovered that THEY FUCKING BLOCKED TOR IPS.

So I gave up, and resigned to wait 5 hours for my program to get the data... 1 comparison at a time... 60s interval between requests. They, of course, don’t tell you the rate limit threshold, so this is more or less a guess (I verified that 30s interval was too short and another person using the module suggested 60s).

Remember when I said the discovery that the blocked tor came like a slap to the face? This came as a sledge hammer to the face: for some reason my program didn’t dump the data at the end. I waited 5 fucking hours to get nothing.

I am so mad right now. I am so fucking mad.

Why ? Why is there no time left for the cool stuff? Spending too much time at work - beeing tired- bought a new rasp-pi - it's already 1 year old - untouched @ home ... just why?

had holidays ... spent 4 days of 7 to recover - just slept.

fck you visual studio!!! seriously what is wrong with you?!?
~me peacfully writing some code ~
ok let's see what we did
vs: I can't compile that. The key whateverKey in line 15 is not defined.
me: ok let's investigate...
nowhere in line 15 use whateverKey.... ok....
wait I didn't change that file at all.
~me clicking rebuild solution~
vs: can't build that because of whateverKey in line 15.
me : WTF?!?
checking git diff -> file not changed
me okkkkkkk......
closing visual studio and reopening solution.
Build succeeded.
What the actuall hell?!?
I'm spending way too much time trying to get that shity peace of software to do what it is supposed to do!

My social life consists of spending much of my free time with my girlfriend, seeing my close family on weekends and meeting with a few friends from time to time.

It's enough for me and since there's not much of it, it isn't hard to "balance". Whatever that means.

Seriously tho, "social/work life balance" is subjective. It depends on what you need to feel good and happy. What works for some will not work for others. Don't try to push others into being social when they don't want to. Don't give me that "you need to go out more" crap. I don't. I'm fine just like this. I prefer to stay home and see a movie with my girlfriend.

That "people need to be social" mindset made me feel bad about myself for too long because I'm just not like that and people keep pushing that idea into my head. I'll go out with you when I feel like it, don't push it. Stop asking me every fucking weekend ffs.

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

It has given me a great understanding of how important perfection is. At school everyone said, "you spend too much time perfecting everything" or "spread your* effort, rather than spending lots of time on one thing and rushing another." But now, in programming, knowing where to put the time and effort is the most useful skill I could ever need.
Also, I can barely use the mouse correctly anymore, except when playing video games.

*Here, my Google Keyboard suggested: legs, wings, Marmite. 😕

Friend and I work on some side hustle. He does most of the content work, I just manage the tech stuff and pay for infrastructure. Domain renewal is upcoming too, so yeah...

He has refused to adopt project management methodologies and task tracking tools multiple times and it's becoming a real problem since I am paying for infrastructure and there are no plans for generating income. There was, but it's vaguely defined and I have no fucking idea what he's working on. I ask, but it's always vague AF.

I have no idea where this thing is going and I barely have time to work on it. Two weeks before I am writing exams, he asks me to urgently help with a project he's behind on due to power outages. I just fucking can't, I have too much other things on my plate right now.

Gonna have to have a sitdown, I can't keep spending money like this and not have a damn roadmap for planning things.

I've decided to take a look at flutter today and boy... I must say I hate writing layout for it.
Not cause of all those margin thing no.. It's just too verbose, awful.
I don't want to spend that much time writing the UI, I want to focus on the logic.
Even XML was better than that.

I think I'll wait for a layout editor before coming back to it.

But I have to admit that hot reload is really nice after spending so much time waiting for my builds on Android 😓

Just realized that the scroll position indicator dances when scrolling through a long list of comments 😄, and I think that's beautiful

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

– Douglas Coupland

Most definitely not dev related..

Guitar tabs that contain arrangements for +5 guitars on a band with just a rythm and lead guitar are fucking annoying.

Fucking hate having to piece the fucking melody by myself. And yes. I DON'T neeed the fucking tabs since I can figure the song by ear, its just that doing it like that takes way too much fucking time.

Getting fucking bored of playing the guitar tho. Been doing it since I was very young and never really liked it. Always wanted violin and then bass.

Have been looking at a nice fender precision bass. Made in Mexico so not really expensive, sounds equally as good and is going for a good $650 bucks plus the amp.

No lie, i am way too interested on getting me that bass already. Have been learning Roundabout by Yes(because I am a progressive rock fan AND a Jojo fan) and practicing with a friends bass whenever I get the chance.

If you already play guitar and you are good with guitar then picking up the bass takes some adjustment, but it's still not as heavy as going at it with no musical training.

Man I just want a bass so bad. I am just so cheap at spending money.

Management noticed that employees are spending too much time on social media sites such as stackoverflow and ordered IT to block it

My monday started with boss calling me at 0730 asking if I could do a support-mission at the offices of the local landfill - this because 2 of the support people had called in sick and we where short on manpower. RIGHT! I said, with a sense of dread and disbelief. ended up spending much of the day there. fixing everything from default reader of pdf to calibration of mouse sensitivity.

It's not like I need to code or anything, since I am working on two different projects and in competition of a third. Finally came back to the office after been at the landfill until lunch and got another support mission; this time internal mission. namely write out from our companys database and import the data to an absolute atrocity called PowerBI so our accountant get the numbers......... FINE!!! I'll do that too, but dont come to me and cry when the project delivery date gets postponed into eternity!!!

I know I've been spending way too much time in doors programming because I had a panic attack while at the grocery store. I've never had one in a long time.

i am seeing this weird pattern of people getting too much close to their work colleagues and i am unable to understand the why behind it .

so one of my homies is a kind of introvert but a smart genius IT guy who ended up with a rich paying job.

now, his job is mostly wfh and 1 day wfo, but he has engrossed himself in his company so much that i fail to understand why. like,
- he would go to his office for 3-5 days instead of 1
- he would plan trips/vacations with his colleagues and bosses
- he would go to different cities/countries to attend the meetings that are happening virtually too( basically a zoom call where some people are joining from office and some from home)
and so on. basically instead of spending time with his homies/family, he prefer spending time with work people.

another guy is doing somewhat similar . basically he runs a legal firm, and instead of having a strict boss employee relation with his interns, he would bring them to his home, celebrate birthdays/parties with them in clubs, and even bring them to our homie gang trips.
as of late ,those trips now don't even include us :'(

-----

i fail to understand why. my work culture is so shit, i just wanna complete a fucking year here and grab my bonus and leave. most of the team that i work with is in a different city, we are asked to work from office that is 40 km away from my home, other colleagues are practical snakes and i am not even interested to see their double-faced faces even during work hours, leave alone after-hours.

another guy among us is a tution teacher and this fella is taking coaching classes even on weekends. i don't know whats wtong with people of my age. we haven't crossed even 26 and we are all running some rat races.

i need some people in my life with whom i can spend some hours relaxing without worrying about my job or backstabbing

What do you do when people(parents) are telling you to go out and tells you you have no life..just because you spend too much time on the computer..and you are actually spending the time learning stuff techniques and technologies which would help you in the future..it just sucks..it kinda looses your morale in a way...

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

And just when my boss thought I was done with spending too much time on StackOverflow, I discover devRant.

The taboo of not finishing.

(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)

It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.

But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.

But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?

Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.

But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.

In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.

Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.

But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.

But, let's go back to programming.

Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.

That is understandable.

But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?

What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?

Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).

Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?

First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.

I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.

And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.

If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.

In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.

Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.

And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

Before I started working, I used to feel like I depended on documentation and the internet a little too much owing to ultra crappy long term memory. After spending some time at my internship going through code written by "professional developers" several years senior to me and trying to write unit tests for it (surprise: the code was in production without having underwent any sort of testing), I feel like the amount of time I spend online reading usage recommendations, alternates for optimisation, best practices for writing clean and descriptive code and all that is a lot more rewarding. Some bad things help you feel good about yourself.

Programming is spending entirely too much time on something entirely too simple

Spending too much time on smaller decisions sometimes. Spending 5 minutes thinking about naming a variable and such.

Question for my fellow devs:

Do you feel like you are spending too much time on maintaining ur devops/infrastructure rather than focusing on the actual product?

Do you think your company would be willing to spend a bit of money to outsource scaling problems to someone else and just focus on the product?

Ik we got lots of fancy new CI platforms like Circle CI GH actions etc but like I personally feel like I’m doing certain infrastructure tasks twice when I look at the two different codebases I work on.

Deciding whether I should buy a PS5 is driving me nuts these days.

It has started to grow its library of amazing games. You may know about the Marvel Spiderman 2 trailer. It looks fire AF. So I know I'll enjoy playing games on it.

But I am afraid it'll take a hit on my productivity. So alright, don't play on weekdays.

But then it'll keep collecting dust and I don't want to buy something I'll use only couple hours a week. And who's to say I'll play every weekend? You skip one weekend and bam! You forget you even had a PS5.

It'll cost me about 500 USD which is right around the mark of me spending money that's on the umph side. It's not too much to make a dent in my savings but at the same time not too little that I don't have to think about it.

I'd probably end up not buying it because I am 30 years old and people like me shouldn't be wasting time playing games.

This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?

Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.

And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.

Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.

Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.

You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".

The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.

Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.

Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.

Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.

Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.

That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.

In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.

But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.

Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.

How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.

If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.

On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.

On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.

Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.

And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.

What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?

I'm so fed up with Codecademy. I payed for the pro, and I admit I haven't been able to consistently use it everyday as I would like. But every fucking time I would be on a lecture of some sort, I swear to fucking to christ it's the most buggy, uninformative piece of shit! And everytime you're in deep into subjects, the information is beyond unclear!

AND GOD FORBID YOU NEED A FUCKING HINT! they leave you to dry saying in the hint that "Look back at the previous sections" or "try to remember the steps you've learned"

No you stupid fucking bitch for a site. I clicked on the hint because I needed an answer as to what I'm doing wrong, and to something that can stir me in the right path. My god....I feel so stupid for giving PRO a chance. I thought maybe it would be nice to have some sort of professional site would be useful.

I swear this early afternoon I was spending fucking forever on the first few lectures of HTML trying to figure out what the actual fuck is wrong with the system fucking up not letting me change directories. And the community was no help whatsoever to the issues at hand.

Again, why the fuck is Codecademy so goddamn buggy!? Sure it may be a fun site to fuck around with to get your feet wet on the free version. But is it too much to ask for some good actual lessons that are being payed for!?

Idk anymore. I'm sticking to just YouTube and other free help. This is the last time I spend a fucking penny to any site that's supposed to teach something valuable.

I feel so upset because I feel like I wasted my money and time on something that I thought could've helped a lot.

If anyone was asking if PRO is worth it....definitely not! Please don't waste money with it! Don't make my mistakes, stick to YouTube and other free sources! The least I can do is warn people about spending money on this site. Trust me it's not worth it. It may not seem bad in the beginning, but once you go deeper it becomes clear the issues.

If anything stick to only free!!

Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?

I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.

Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.

My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more