One colleague was that good, that he did the job of 3 people without bteaking a sweat...
He put up with shit from the client, where others would have gone on a killing spree.

One day he was blackmailed by a colleague and a project manager.
And then he had enough... This 100kg guy went kratos -spartan rage mode- yelled at all the guys who deserved it... Came to the office, where i was placed. We shook hands, he wished the other competent guys and me the best of luck and fare thee well...

Then there was an argument, which resulted in including lawyers between him and the company... He had to support us for 2 months in order to fulfill his contact... Which he did with as much detest as possible...
He didn't come into office once... Home-Office all the time...
We are still talking over social networks... Learned/learning a lot from him...

Aspecially not to take all the shit...

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

I’ve really got to turn these notifications off when listening to music 😍😎

Thanks @AlexDeLarge

Let's try something different - Let's have a DevCaption challemge

Best caption gets a updoot spree

Here's the first pic

When you're in the middle of a spree and you haven't saved in the past half hour. Then this blue beauty appears. 🙃

We all know who the winner of week 27 is...

So i started using atom text editor like a month ago. After finding out i can install packages and going on a spree.... I may have broke it. You know you are in for a pickle if the editor starts with more errors than windows vista.

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Staying in because I have some really awesome stomach pains this morning courtesy of my time in the wonderful U.S Army.

As such my daughter did not get dropped off at the daycare center.

It is 09:22am. She(daughter)would have stayed asleep till about 10 if we didn't mess with her.

For WHATEVER FUCKING REASON and knowing that my stomach is on a fucking murder spree right now my wife decided in ALL OF HER FUCKING WISDOM to wake her up.

I am so
Fucking
Upset

I really feel for the motherfucker that would today and I am really wishing a motherfucker would.

When you estimate development time for a feature and management asks: "But aren't there widgets or sth that you can... [you raise an eyebrow] like... drag and drop or something...?"

So I am a part of this volunteering initiative where one of our tasks is to assist people in distress (virtually).

Now this activity is led by two chipmunks. One claims to be a therapist who themselves is seeking professional therapy from someone else and the other is a corporate HR.

Well that information should be enough for you to understand how chaotic the situation would be.

But allow me to continue...

So they decide to go about an activity in the group where everyone has to share a meme. Some of the cringest memes I have seen in my life. One of them went to an extent of sharing a husband wife joke as a dark joke.

Next day, someone spammed in the group and one user sent a sticker of some character hanging from a rope. It was evidently a fun and sarcastic sticker which they all use.

But all of a sudden the chipmunks got offended and went on a delete spree warning and banning users.

Most of the time, the group is dead and another group where they plan shit is more active. Full of mindless opinions and worthless conversations.

All they are doing is spamming everyone and forcing people to participate in the name of volunteering.

What's more exciting is, they control it so rigidly that no one, except the two chipmunks, is allowed to even have an opinion or disagree with them. If you do, they'll belittle you in front of everyone.

Yes, you guessed it right, the entire initiative is a massive failure and being dragged in the name of hElPiNg pEoPlE iN dIsTrEsS

Sleep is always the answer. Go to sleep, wake up, cringe, and go on a deleting spree. Voila!

I don't like it when my brain goes on a self conflicting spree after I fix a bug.

*** Fixes a bug and commits ***
Oh wait, it works but what if this happens? It'll break.

*** Thinks more on the correct solution this time ***
Oh wait, what I did was right! NVM.

*** Another situation comes to mind ***
Start thinking again. Same outcome.

Go through this a couple of times.

Aah, screw it. Will see when it breaks!

Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.

Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.

Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.

I'm supposed to migrate a WP site and modify it accordingly by tomorrow.....
Went on a shopping spree instead.

Holy shit dude you're amazing :D

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Last week me and my friend have been changed from a legacy PHP project to new Ruby on Rails-based setup. What, in first instance, looked like a great improvement, now becomes a nightmare.

All this convention-over-configuration is awesome - but only if you already know the conventions, or if somebody told'em to you.

And everything is going even more out of control because the damn project is based upon Spree gem and several other extensions, that MUST be changed to meet out company needs.

I'm getting really mad with all this pressure. Ruby seems to be a great language, but I'd rather be working with Laravel. Its overall organization, the centralization of CLI commands in artisan, and the astoundingly clear, eloquent, direct and well-designed documentation made my adoption curve there a little more pleasant.

I mean, legacy PHP systems are awful, but Laravel framework sounds way more easy-to-learn and well-constructed when compared to rails.

But given all this nightmare, I really want to be proved the opposite.

Found these in the mail!
Many thanks from Paris!

What's worst than waiting in a queue inside a mall in the middle of Christmas last minute shopping spree?
Low connectivity when the only thing I want is reading some devRant post 😱😓

Thanks a lot for the ++ spree, bitsnpieces! (For some reason, your name makes me think of a merchant in Skyrim)

Going to go on another distro jumping spree but think I'm going to install stock Ubuntu 18.04 on my actual system (Just want to see if it can change my opinion on ubuntu because last physical install i did was the release of 14.04).

Throw me your suggestions to give a gander!

(Also #IUseArch so don't worry, that has firmly been tested, broken, fixed and then fucked beyond reconcile)

The particular day
it was in April.
A news to convey
of a new job to cradle.

The first one it was
and well it paid.
One problem existed because
too late I was laid.

And still in school
for two years to come
I'll sit on a stool,
my keyboard to drum.

Good it was on paper
but too young for me,
using C shaper
being on a coding spree.

In two years time
I'll hope for the best,
tired of making the rhyme
I'll let you imagine the rest.

Those semi-ugly contraptions you hide away underneath an "abstraction layer" in the hope that no-one stumbles upon them...

I think one of the great things about this app is how we handle bug reporting. Any time someone posts about a bug, people independently do extensive tests to determine the extent of the bug (or at least what devices are affected), and people nearly always give detailed replication steps. I think this is a great feature of this community

What is the longest spree of consecutive days without single line of code because of dev environment problems?

all they want is to lure you to a feed and let you scroll through it forever. TikTok will even scroll for you. Your right hand is for holding a phone, your left hand is for cramming junk food into yourself, your head is for feeling acute guilt. After junk food is no more, you make yourself puke, wipe your eyes and go on a compulsive shopping spree to fix your self-esteem. All paid for with your credit card, of course. As if you were able to afford the whole ordeal in the first place. Then, go to your local bar and get wasted.

Never explore yourself. Never stay with yourself one on one, without an algorithm taking the pain away through the screen, all at the expense of making it stronger in the long run, because that’s how addiction works. Never talk to yourself, never ask where did certain feelings come from.

Without pain, there is no motivation to change. And you shouldn’t change. You. Must. Drive. The. Economy. Die early, of heart attack because of junk food, or by suicide because all that mental strain and misery. Never retire. We shouldn’t pay you a penny back.

Now switch back from devRant to Instagram. Now.

That moment where the client and the project are ticking all the boxes: he's competent and you know working with him will be pleasant enough, the project is interesting and you've already picked node.js, it's well paid and you've already mentally spent the money.

Oh wait no! I wanted to talk about the moment right after, the one where you're told that this dll you NEED to use is in VB6!

Why do people have fucking problem when I just wished you for something

Why the fuck do you want to know how the fuck I came to know

And come on I didn't wish some unknown person for something too personal

I wished a professor for the birth of daughter

Why the fuck would you go on a spree on fucking around and sadden someone who just wanted to wish you

I would from now on discontinue to wish anyone anything and not even try to contact someone unless it's my business to do so

I'd like to be alone from now on

I'm not a people's person

DAMN!! I feel like quitting, I am fucking tired... much work than I could handle.
fucking no options...
the worst part is the fucking poor documentation, have to hit my head on the damn wall, every time I encounter an error.
2 weeks to go...
184 files to customize!
damn, why does life has to be fucking so hard!

When a project requires a web UI in a IE11 embed and it's in your best interest to forget Flex ever existed...

How did the pandemic screw you and your life plans? Tbh there are more serious matters connected with that but just for the sake of my lifeplan: I paid off my debts and was ready to start my travelling spree and visit the countries everybody already have been and maybe go nomad. But pandemic hit, and i am right now stuck in my life which is clawing its way to become my permanent reality.