In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

Having a spring review meeting with a fucking micro manager

I guess I am having what is called a burnout.

I feel braindead, unmotivated to do anything, constantly tired and sleepy, and the only thing I want is to hibernate and wake up somewhere in spring.

Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

I hate the entire ecosystem of dot net
I just got assigned to a project that uses dot net tech stack.
I had plenty experience on spring and gin, I had a lot of fun learning and using them,
now I'm learning what dot net has to offer, and well
everything is just crapy as hell, It's the shittest learning experience in my professional carrier. I dun wanna get into the specifics, I'm sure you guys had enough.
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.

and what the hell devrant

TIL you can crash a Tomcat request processing if the app reads request bodies using a reader() and you feed it a json body with an innocent nbsp :) the whole request processing just goes *pooooft*

reminds me of an ios bug which could brick the phone if it received an sms with weird chars.

These lynch-pin-bugs where a single byte/char in the right place at the right time can tear things down, are so subtle and fascinate me for some reason :)

Eli5: senior dev here, 18 years experience in tech. I don’t get why spring boot/batch is so highly rated. I absolutely hate it. Please tell what I’m missing?

A sweaty furry sodomizing a dead dog would still be less disgusting than the codebase on which I have to work, some highlights are:
- The same class repeated 40 times with little variations instead of using some decent parametrization
- Inexistent encapsulation and separation of concerns, most changes requires to modify and recompile 2-3 indipendent Maven projects
- Abuse of inheritance which instead of being used to create "is-a" relationship as it should be it's used to reuse some methods of a class in another instead of using Spring dependency injection as we should be

It would be understandable in a 20 years old legacy projects but in something which started 2 months ago it drives me mad, I tried to fight to change it but in the big enterprise to which I'm "body-rented" it's impossible

Learning Java Spring, their official documentation is a fucking mess. Can't get any useful information other than got dumped with loads of confusing terms/packages references/libraries.

baeldung blog site is better than the docs to some extend, but still, very fragmented information.

Ok enough ranting.. Any good learning resource recommendation? Forum?

I think my next remote job is going to be at least 500 miles or a minimum of four states away to make it harder for someone to spring a “everyone local to the office has to come in for this day of corporate training and indoctrination” on me at the last minute.

“Oh sure I can come in. I’ll be on the lookout for my flight tickets and itinerary”.

Usually makes them scurry off.

Best:
- I built a good automation mechanism with a decent UI [slackbot]
- used as few frameworks and ext libs as I could. Mostly based on bare java
- client wanted to migrate it to Spring
- got 3 peeps assigned for the migration
- 2 months later their effort failed.
- win: my project has not been molested with Spring

Worst:
- i had an idea to develop smth on top of jmeter, using jmeter as a lib
- I downloaded and imported jmeter's src code
- static contexts, singletons, jmx/rmi everywhere [java is deprecating rmi support]
- not gonna happen... Not gonna build a new project on top of a legacy codebase.

> Work with Spring Boot
> Find a bug in an official Spring Boot Plugin
> Open a GitHub issue offering to fix it yourself
> Wait a month
> "status: waiting for triage"

I love Pivotal Labs professionalism

Got a chance to work again on a Spring project after a few years of working with JavaSE.
All these horrible memories started rushing back. SpringJPA and its dark magic that only works unintuitively and under very certain conditions...

Ooooh boi. Now I remember. I remember it all.

Why do developers enjoy being squeezed into frameworks and enjoy spending half of a day figuring out how to make the application code compatible with the said framework rather than just writing code that they have full control over...? Masochists much?

[!dev], [toasters]
Does everyone only ever toast perfectly uniform slices of bread?
My grandma has a toaster that has two doors which open to the side and are held closed by a spring. This way if a slice is too thick the door can't close properly, but the damn thing still works. It's from before ww2, like most dead simple devices that work surprisingly well. I can't find anything similar anymore. The only two types now are the top-loaded design that simply doesn't work with thick slices, and the version for Americans or families of twelve that is the form factor of a smaller oven. (Which I obviously don't have room for. I already have an oven.)

Btw, how should I tag this? It's a rant, but it has nothing to do with the platform except perhaps the undocumented dependency between toasters and bread slicing machines.

Today my manager asked me to provide technical skills. I replied with 'spring boot, react...(did not mention java)'.
He replied to me saying 'you know spring boot without java?'
Am I stupid thinking he should understand that already by seeing spring boot?

I hate the fucking Spring WebFlux and the goddamn Project Reactor on which it depends!
Even debugging a simple CRUD microservice with simple business logic is such a pain in the ass, exception handling has a lot of "magic" implicit stuff which makes me waste hours in fucking trial & error and I have to use very little breakpoints because if a request is paused for more than few seconds it gets terminated.
I love functional programming but why shove it in fucking Java making me waste 90% of my time in trying to guessing what the fucking framework is doing, why not just use Scala which runs in the JVM? We don't even need compatibility with legacy code since it's a greenfield project!

And before you ask yes, I read a fucking book about Project Reactor and Java reactive programming and a lot of docs on Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Web Flux.

Any advice on how to find proper customer as a freelancer? Should I go on fiverrr and pay for coldcalling and an assistant?

Because honestly I'm sick of corporations employing me (my company) for the sake of not paying taxes but still expecting a 9 to 5 and all the corporate bullshit.

I just want to get customer, do UX, pay a designer, get figmas, implement, invoice, repeat. Not have 3 hours spring grooming calls stuck between a team meeting with management, a demo and a mid-spring alignment review. Is that too much to ask?

In most businesses, self-proclaimed full-stack teams are usually more back-end leaning as historically the need to use JS more extensively has imposed itself on back-end-only teams (that used to handle some basic HTML/CSS/JS/bootstrap on the side). This is something I witnessed over the years in 4 projects.

Back-end developers looking for a good JS framework will inevitably land on the triad of Vue, React and Angular, elegant solutions for SPA's. These frameworks are way more permissive than traditional back-end MVC frameworks (Dotnet core, Symfony, Spring boot), meaning it is easy to get something that looks like it's working even when it is not "right" (=idiomatic, unit-testable, maintainable).

They then use components as if they were simple HTML elements injecting the initial state via attributes (props), skip event handling and immediately add state store libraries (Vuex, Redux). They aren't aware that updating a single prop in an object with 1000 keys passed as prop will be nefarious for rendering performance. They also read something about SSR and immediately add Next.js or Nuxt.js, a custom Node express.js proxy and npm install a ton of "ecosystem" modules like webpack loaders that will become abandonware in a year.

After 6 months you get: 3 basic forms with a few fields, regressions, 2MB of JS, missing basic a11y, unmaintainable translation files & business logic scattered across components, an "outdated" stack that logs 20 deprecation notices on npm install, a component library that is hard to unit-test, validate and update, completely vendor-& version locked in and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.

I empathize with the back-end devs: JS frameworks should not brand themselves as "simple" or "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They should not treat their audience as if it were fully aware and able to use concepts of composition, immutability, and custom "hooks" paired with the quirks of JS, and especially WHEN they are a good fit.

In your opinion how much would it take to learn Java with /Spring(Boot)?/ enough to get paid for it?

I already know Java's basics and at uni did some frameworkless server side development.

Ugh the boss is giving me a "trial spring" because I'm not speaking during scrums (sorry I don't have 3 hours attention span. Guess what, nobody does).

We were developing a new feature and on the code complete day, I had to take leave. While code review one of the devs changed my code without proper analysis.
End Result, half the things cannot be tested until that piece of code is fixed

I dislike how many frameworks there are in the Node.js ecosystem. I feel there are too many for the same purpose. It is daunting. One time you see X framework catching attention, then after you study it, learn it, and seek to use in your daily professional life, suddenly a wild Y framework appears, supposedly doing a better job than what X could in certain aspects. Then Z, then back to A. And what's more, majority is not opinionated, allowing one to write in any way he or she likes. Soon, what you've learned has become irrelevant or simply discontinued.

It's like Linux. Any Joe makes something, either because he or she doesn't like one aspect of something, or just wants to be part of the mob who creates stuff and reinvent the wheel.

I don't like this. What I like is how Spring and .NET are. I feel their opinionated characteristic is great, allowing for easy code reading when studying, understanding others code in a new job, etc. You do it like this, this, and this, and maybe, like this if you'd like, but that's all, mate. To me, it is important to become excellent at one or two technologies/languages, things that do not get replaced so easily as it is in JS.

I had studied .NET for the backend development for a year, but I never found any opportunity, until I was laid off and is when I decided to focus again on React. After some time, I learned about NestJS, liked it for being inspired on Angular and for being opinionated. I checked on how demanded it is right now, almost nothing. It was all pure Node.js, seemingly, which made me reflect on the point of this rant: Node.js is vast, a land of no one. What is going on at the moment?

NestJS seems to be the real deal. It is how I like things to be. Perhaps over time it will become The Framework for Node.js backend development, like Java/Kotlin is Spring, C# is .NET, python is Django or Flask, Ruby is RoR, we have Go, and Rust, too. The majority have years upon years of existence and still widely used and relevant. But given how things happen in this universe of Node, I cannot but wonder if in 4 years or so another Joe will decide to make something of his own, something totally different and yet again throwing away a big part of what has been previously learned, and then turning Nest irrelevant. Maybe the name will be NxxtJS, you know, because we have Next, Nest, Nuxt...

Amen, sorry.

When im coding a backend in java spring boot i feel like im "at home" and in peace. No other programming language or framework makes me feel this way. Do you guys also feel like this when you work in your favorite language + framework?

Is there anyone who switched from Java backend (Spring Boot) to Nodejs? If yes what was your experience? Some people say it's a downgrade because of lower performance and less specialized tooling want do you think about that? Also what about salary? Is it the same level?

I have a question I'm struggling with for some time.

In spring boot application should service method accept DTO or entity?

I see benefits of using entity for basic CRUD operations, but how about business logic methods? I'd like to hide details behind abstraction and also block any incorrect usage of this method, like:
I have a method "restrictOrder" which alters an order and saves it. But someone can modify order object before passing it. Should I only pass id and new value to be set or am I paranoid?

And how do you do it in your project? I'd like to point that right now we are not using DDD or some other fancy architecture, just the Spring defaults

It's me or the "Reactive Functional" Spring WebFlux is a stupid fad? It's hard to train new developers on it, a PITA to debug and there isn't any study which proves which it brings better performance compared to the classic Spring MVC.

#Suphle Rant 2: Michael's obduration

For the uninitiated, Suphle is a PHP framework I built. This is the 2nd installment in my rants on here about it.

Some backstory: A friend and I go back ~5 years. Let's call him Michael. He was CTO of the company we worked at. After his emigration, they seem to have taught him some new stack and he needed somewhere to practise it on. That stack was Spring Boot and Angular. He and his pals convinced product owner at our workplace to rebuild the project (after 2+ years of active development) from scratch using these new techs. One thing led to the other, and I left the place after some months.

Fast forward a year later, dude hits me up to broach an incoming gig he wants us to collab on. Asks where I'm at now, and I reply I took the time off to build Suphle. Told him it's done already and it contains features from Spring, Rust, Nest and Rails; basically, I fixed everything they claimed makes PHP nonviable for enterprise software, added features from those frameworks that would attract a neutral party. Dude didn't even give me audience. I only asked him to look at the repo's readme to see what it does. That's faster than reading the tests (since the docs are still in progress). He stopped responding.

He's only the second person who has contacted me for a gig since I left. Both former colleagues. Both think lowly of PHP, ended up losing my best shot at earning a nickel while away from employed labour. It definitely feels like shooting myself in the foot.

I should take up his offer, get some extra money to stay afloat until Suphle's release. But he's adamant I use Spring. Even though Laravel is the ghetto, I would grudgingly return to it than spend another part of my life fighting to get the most basic functionality up and running without a migraine in Spring. This is a framework without an official documentation. You either have to rely on baeldung or mushroom blogs. Then I have to put up with mongodb (or nosql, in short).

I want to build a project I'm confident and proud about delivering, one certified by automated tests for it, something with an architecture I've studied extensively before arriving at. Somewhere to apply all the research that was brainstormed before this iteration of Suphle was built.
I want autonomy, not to argue over things I'm sure about. He denied me this when we worked together. I may not mind swallowing them for the money, but a return to amateur mode in Spring is something I hope I never get to experience soon

So, I'm wondering: if his reaction reflects the general impression PHP has among developers globally, it means I've built a castle on a sinking ship. If someone who can vouch for me as a professional would prefer not to have anything to do with PHP despite my reassurance it'll be difficult to convince others within and beyond that there could be a more equipped alternative to their staple tool. Reminds me of the time the orchestra played to their deaths while the titanic sank

I'm starting to learn AWS. I have experiences with spring cloud and i am wondering if it makes sense to use it within aws. opinions?

Why tha fuck doesnt spring boot integrate with with eclips
why tha fuck do i need to run another instance of an editor

I am currently studying at UAS and work fulltime but I want to move to software development.. what are the chances to get a junior position with beginners java/spring/flutter experience? Are there any knowers here?

There's no official integration (package) for JWT in Java Spring?

I am new to Java Spring and want to create a simple RESTful server with JWT auth. Checked many tutorials, all of them involved creating your own JWT middleware to retrieve JWT token from incoming request and validate it using some 3rd party JWT library like jwtk/jjwt.

I am surprised this is not as simple as including a Spring JWT package and it would work out of box. I used to write a similar site using Python/Django, and for that adding JWT support is quite simple as adding "xxx.middleware.JWTAuthMiddleware".

Damn, I hate Spring and most CoC frameworks. We’re using it from 2 years, I read most of the docs and it still gives issue for basic taks which takes hours to fix because I have to guess the exact convention which allows the program to process corner cases which aren’t explained in the docs. Yes, in the end the code is more elegant but it’s worth it when issues which could be solved in minutes by a trivial if/else statement takes hours (rigorously on pair programming™️ since being one of the few which actually read the docs I end up with lots of calls for help for Spring related issues by other teammates) and huge headaches to fix following the framework’s way?