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Search - "story-of-a-dev"
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The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).
I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.
I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.
He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.
But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.
Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.
But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.
So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.
I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.
We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.
Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.
That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.
Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.
1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out
So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.
I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:
Never underestimate the power of friendship.21 -
This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.
One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.
After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.
I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.6 -
I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.
The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.
We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.
Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.
Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.8 -
For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.
*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*
I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".
R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".
I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...
I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.
Some of the other highlights of R include:
- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.
- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.
- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.
- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"
Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!12 -
Not a specifically dev related story, but absolutely rant worthy.
Today I was working from home, and my wife called me to tell me that some awful person had thrown a young cat into the dumpster at her work.
To that person - you are a scumbag. You’re lucky no one left you alone in a hot car as a kid, let alone a dumpster. Seriously, why? Why is it so hard to take it to a shelter?
Anyway - I went and bought a whole bunch of cat stuff - I grew up with cats but I’ve never had one on my own. We’re at the vet now. I think we’ll name her Curry (after Haskell Curry, and lovely spicy dishes).22 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
I just love it when my coworkers talk (troll) about Google Ultron like it's the answer for everything in front of a new dev and he's getting more and more confused thinking "what's this awesome Google product I've never heard about"
And we just know that within the next 30 minutes he will have tears in his eyes of laughing after reading the story and probably also has it 'installed' (like some other devs) on his desktop (http://imgur.com/gallery/W9Pnh)
Have a good chuckle if you haven't read it before:
http://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f
http://imgur.com/a/AOz0d
Don't forget to download your adobe reader guys.7 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...
Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why29 -
There was a previous developer who my managers has told us was terrible and toxic. Yet due to terrible planning, he had everyone work for over 13 hours last Sunday.
I contacted this previous developer to learn his side of the story and learned a lot. I realize between their two narratives is the truth, but I see all the ways we've been lied, the ways this other dev was scapegoated and all the additional work that's sure to come.
I refuse to work weekends again. I refuse to work over 40 hours. I wish I could convince everyone else to do the same. No amount of money is worth making up for bad planning and management.1 -
Life story of every Dev in nutshell :
Everything is working perfectly as expected and no body congratulates Dev and no one gives a shit.
Single thing is broken and the whole universe be like : "Where the fuck is that son of a b*tch? Bring that bastard in front of me right now."
😡😡😡😡6 -
Storytime!
Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...
Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...
Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)
Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?
Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!
Dev: 🤦♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)
Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...
Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!
Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!
Long story short:
The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.
WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.
JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.
Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷♂️
Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎
Cheers!11 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Less recruiter and more recruiting company.
Specifially: Robert Half.
t;ldr version:
Robert Half is scammy as hell, and they 'fired' me for quitting when my girlfriend got raped. Really.
------
Robert Half took half of my paychecks for the entire duration of my contracts with them. I didn't know right away because, as a policy, they hide how much the hiring company is paying for you, and they also forbid the company from telling you. (The company pays RHI, RHI pays you). Makes sense why they hide it because it certainly pissed me off.
Long story short, I worked for a php dev shop through them (after telling them to lower their fees or i'd walk), worked there for awhile (while remote moonlighting because why not!), and quit. I quit because my girlfriend at the time had just gotten raped, and with the emotionall fallout from that, there was no way I could focus on two jobs and be there for her. My boss understood and let me leave, though it put him in a bind.
The next day, I got a call from the regional manager of Robert Half. He was a total tool. He demanded to know if I quit, didn't care why I quit, proceeded to "educate" me in the finer points of why that was unprofessional and why i'm unemployable, accused me of lying about idr what, and finally switched into legalese to say "I regret to inform you that you can no longer consider Robert Half as a means of employment." (or something along those lines) and hung up on me. Asshole. I hope various large someones rape him so he has an inkling what it's like to be objectified and thrown away like trash.
Guy was an asshole; probably still is.
RHI was awful and scammy; probably still is, too.
Wasn't really a fan of the job either.
So at the end of it, I wasn't out anything but some patience and serenity (a lot of serenity). I kept the first (remote) job, was there for my girlfriend, and helped her through everything.
But yeah, Robert Half?
They can fucking go to hell.18 -
A story of the backend dev. from our client:
"I used !important once now I'm not allowed to do frontend anymore :("17 -
I’m surrounded by idiots.
I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.
Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!
While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.
To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.
He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.
This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.
It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.
This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.
The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.
What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.
No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.
Asdfajsdfk.rant fucking moron even when taking down the server hey bob pass me all the paperclips mysql murder terrible code slow query idiot can do no wrong but he’s the golden boy idiots repeatedly murdered mysql in the face21 -
Today I felt sorry for my boss.
Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.
All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?
If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.4 -
This one is for devs and gamers.
But first some background story.
My girlfriend is special. Not just generically lovey mush mush special. She is 1 in 100 more accurately 1 in 10000. She was born with a rare Congenital Heart Defect {CHD}. Called Truncus Arteriosus or TA for sake of brevity. TA's main thing is the two main arteries going into the heart are fused together and never seperated at birth. It's bad news. There is no cure for this kind of thing. Simply repairs that happen over the course of life.
So here is me. Desperately trying to find a way to get the word about this and the 40 other types of CHD out there in the world. I thought. "What if I make a game..." Not based around the medical jargon but on a level people could understand. I spent the better part of the last six years attending appointments with her and still don't get it. What I do get is her Emotional state. How her CHD causes her to think and feel.
So here is the pitch.
The game is about a girl who is diagnosed at birth with a CHD. She is now in her 20's and has to undergo an open heart surgery to repair the defect. The day comes. She goes under but when she wakes up she find herself in a final fantasy style environment. This new world has a darkness cast over it. She is unknowingly the hero of this world and she has to face off with multiple bosses of varied degrees of evil.
Then after beating these bosses she really wakes up from the surgery. Waking up to the realization that the world she saved was herself. And all the bosses were manifestations of her own internal feelings. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness, Denise, desire and so on.
I would sell this game with the caveat that 2/3 of all profits get split between the Adult Congenital Heart Association and Project Heart. As those are the two main organizations that deal heavily with creating standards of care and raising awareness for CHD survivors.
Thoughts?
Note: I am still learning game dev. This is an eventual goal for me.33 -
Client: We need to add a field to the model that serves as a unique identifier
Dev: You already have one, it’s the _id property
Client: We want another! This one is for a task number so we can make a connection between the database record and our ERP.
Dev: Ah I see. I can add that for you. Is this truly a unique identifier or will you be using the same ERP identifier for multiple database records?
Client: I already said it’s a unique identifier. One ERP record to one database record, end of story! To do otherwise would be absolutely ridiculous! You should think for yourself before you ask silly questions.
Dev: My apologies I just want to make sure to clarify exactly what the requirements are.
**6 months later**
Client: HOW COME I CAN’T ASSIGN THE SAME UNIQUE IDENTIFIER TO MULTIPLE DATABASE RECORDS??? CAN’T PROGRAMMERS GET ANYTHING RIGHT EVER??
Dev: …14 -
Got together with my old dev team (5) who all left the same company at the same time almost two years ago. (Thats a whole other story).
One of them told us he left and went to a new company that measured performance by the amount of commits a dev would to per day. Of course he didn't know that when he signed on.
Three months into the job he had a week where his first commit wasn't until a wednesday and he got called in by the manager to explain his lack of commits and how he was going to improve.
He quit on the spot. Had a new job in less than a week.
Other devs at the company were fixing typo's and just commiting them one at a time to create a lot of commits.10 -
First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:
So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.
Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.
Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.
For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.
Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.
Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.
I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?13 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
Appreciation post.
Fucking love Amazon even more now.
Story -
I created a new Aws account and they asked me to pay ₹2 (0.031$) as part of the verification process.
No big deal right?
2 days later, I got a notification saying - "Your account has been credited with ₹2.66"
Not only they returned me my money, but they also paid a certain interest with it too.
And the fact that they are taking care of their dev community (as if we are their customers) is appreciable.
Amazon - you bloody have my respect. I trust you.
No big deal7 -
Back in the day when I was a junior developer, I somehow got hired by this guy who asked me to code his entire platform from scratch. I was being paid a junior dev salary, being asked to do senior dev work, and unfortunately I needed the money, so I didn't want to turn the job down. So I did what any junior dev would do in the situation... I decided to experiment and ended up with an insanely inefficient codebase.
For some stupid reason I thought that a good DB model would be to pull one record from the DB at a time, and then just repeat the method in a loop as needed. Keep in mind I was a self-taught junior dev. The backend worked great during development, and after 3 months of developing we decided to add a lot of data in the DB for further testing, and... you guessed it... the platform slowed down like shit!
Moral of the story... u get what you pay for, so hire great talent and pay them well! And also that self-taught junior devs don't know that the f@*k they are doing sometimes.5 -
Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.
I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..
First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.
Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!
A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"
I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.
At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.
One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!
Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.
With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.
Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.
I dont know what to do...
Edit: I missed you, devrant6 -
My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.
A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”
Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.
Glad to finally get that off my chest.6 -
!Story
The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.
I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.
They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...
And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.
So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.
I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.
After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.
I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.
So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.
Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.
So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.
I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.
Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.
We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.
"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"
I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.
My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.
If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.
Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.9 -
Less a rant, more just a sad story.
Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.
There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)
There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.
And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.
Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"
He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.
I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄
Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)
But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.
So.
That's absolutely amazing.8 -
!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.
As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.
So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.
Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...
The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.1 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".
So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.
At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.
A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:
"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.
"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!
I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!
It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.8 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
Story of every failing tech startup (from personal experience, but a bit exaggerated):
Step 1: Come up with AMAZING idea that blows your mind!
Step 2: Run to investors to do presentation, continue to constantly repeat CLOUD, CLOUD, AI, CLOUD, MACHINE-LEARNING, MUCH WOW, MORE AI until investors are confused but mesmerized as fuck and decide to give you a shit ton of money.
Step 3: Hire all the developers you can find, a JAVA dev, a Python dev, a PHP dev, a Ruby dev, and ask them to get along with each other! I mean hey, they're adults right, they'll figure it out.
Step 4: Ask devs to launch the app, meanwhile, throw a LAUCH PARTY! HELLS YEA WE'RE ABOUT TO BE RICH BITCHES!
Step 5: Find out the hard way that no one needs a product that was launched! :/
Step 6: Pivot, and pivot next month again, and pivot again, and pivot in a middle of a pivot, and pivot pivot pivot pivot... and OH FUCK WE RAN OUT OF MONEY!8 -
A previous co-worker (dev) bought a "foot mouse" he found on a Chinese website, then changed his keyboard's layout to match the "natural human cognitive ability" also bought a sleeping bag because he needed a "power nap" after lunch break he even asked our MD to buy him an ergonomic chair which would cost around 1200 USD ( of course our MD refused) then the worst of the worst, he had this habit of chewing his food loudly when he's eating something he likes.
One time our operations manager (she was pregnant XD) screamed at him from her desk " RAYAAAAN SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH I CAN HEAR IT FROM HERE DAMN IT"
He literally spilled some of the food he was chewing on his desk and I burst out laughing like crazy.
On the same day our MD told us to follow a new "no food in office" policy 😂😂😂
Sad story is that when he left the company I had to revert his PC to how it was including resetting the keyboard layout to default, remember his "foot mouse" ? Well he had to modify the mouse settings so all directions were inverted.
The first thing I said when I turned on his laptop was
FUCK YOU RAYAN!!3 -
The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊rant deploying straight to prod prod prod prod dev server? dev on prod you chicken migration on prod wk149 git? who's a git? you're a git! scariest deploy ever game development1 -
my story so far
Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.
i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.
but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.
thanks for reading :)4 -
Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.
Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.
Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.
If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.
Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn3 -
Fuck that fucking company three way while dozens of homeless HIV crack junkies puke and shit their diarrhea on the three bosses!
I can't put it in words how stupid they are!
Let me try to tell you the latest story while I try not to get multiple strokes.
Backstory: We are three devs, all with a TCCI certification. One has been working for us for almost a year, the other one has been working for us since one and a half year. Both are good friends of mine, btw. I have been working there for almost three years.
Fortunately, I am allowed to work on a reasonable computer. The other devs work on PC's with Windows 7 and 8!
One has just 400 MB space left on his drive and has to delete every month some shit because he does not want to be able to call up websites anymore... How awful?!
The PC of the other great Dev Crashes three to six times a day and needs about 30 minutes to start up!
We can be so productive, but...
We told that in February one of our bosses and asked him to buy new hardware. His answer: yes, of course, I understand that, it's my turn (he always says that "ich bin da dran")
We got a new colleague in the middle of this fucking month. She is responsible for conception.
She works on an old notebook, but today she gets a fucking new PC to work on while the devs are trying to weld with a sparkler! Better hardware than every other Dev PC!!!
Guess what? She is the daughter of a friend of one of our bosses!
We are the only devs at this company.
Fuck that fucking company! Fuck that fucking bosses!
I think we don't go to work for that fucking company anymore!6 -
TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!
As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.
Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.
I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."
Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!7 -
So, Today was the last day of my internship.
and it was a great last day but everything was fine until.
I started my computer and for some reason it got caught up in boot. It didnt start Nautilus.
So i asked a Senior Dev for help. Nice as these Devs are, he helped me look for reasons. And we found them. My ubuntu hadnt had enough disk space to start. (On a side note there is nothing but Atom Firefox and a few files on there.) So we looked for the biggest files in the system and found them. Syslog was 40 Gb big. And if you think that is shocking behold. Because Syslog.1 was 290Gb big.
Not really a rant but a Story.4 -
Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.
Me: okay cool
So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.
*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*
Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.
Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?
Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?
Me: um... Yeah?
Him: yeah, so they want that.
Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.
Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.
Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.
Him: You're a novice rn.
Me: why don't you do it?
Him: I'm your boss.
*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)
Him: deal with it.
Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!
(I actually make something like that)
*Lol yay*
That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.5 -
!dev && feelsbadman
I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.
Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.
The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)
Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.
So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.
They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.
But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.
And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*
I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.
I wish y'all a nice week.3 -
This happened a while back but thought it would be an interesting story.
So there is this guy, I'll call him Jack. Jack was a weirdo. He just graduated high school but thought of himself as very hot in terms of dev skills. He boasted lots of good programs, that are the best in industry, except they don't work (like the best proven file compressor, that just can't decompress anything because of some "bugs"). He also entered language holy wars quite actively, saying that Delphi is the best platform ever.
Aaanyway, a couple of years pass. Jack is now a student. Jack tries to make some money, so he talks to some guy, that offers him a "job" at the tax office, where he has to modernize the data infrastructure of the tax authorities. If you think this sounds very wrong, then you're 100% correct. But it gets better. After 2 months of work, the guy manages to do that. It's a simple CRUD application after all.
So everything works, but the guy who gave him this job refused to pay. He stalled and then just stopped answering the phone. Jack is now furious. So what he does, is publish the databases online, so everyone could see the income of every citizen. Authorities are in panic. They send the police to his door. They seize his computer and lock him up for a few days.
To sum it all up: Jack took up a job, without any contract, without any NDA, which is completely illegal in of itself, but he did that with the tax authority. And delivered the product before getting paid. And when he understood that he was owned, he published all online. He got bit back. The guy who gave him this job had no consequences for illegally hiring someone and not paying for their work.
Lesson: Don't be Jack11 -
Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.
I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.
(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)
But onto the story:
Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).
I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.
However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.
But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.
That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.
Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.
But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.
Ugh.
`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`rant zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance postgres heroku ship's sinking and the fixer's all fixed out burnout21 -
Hello devRant, i think this is my first story here, but i want share my happiness with you.
After working 1 year as C# dev and no reaction of my current company to my claims:
I get a job with 25% more pay, christmas and vacation bonus und 5 more holidays!
Holy fuck that`s so cool.
Hope you guys have a good week!
Please excuse my english skills ;-)4 -
Does anyone else despise buzzwords? A little background. I am a senior dev with a government organization who works in machine learning. As everyone knows, AI is the hottest of the hot now. Thus, everyone believes that they need it.
Long story short. I had a "requirement" come down to develop an "AI" algorithm that totaled all of the hours that a device was used last month. I explained to them that they weren't looking for "AI" and instead they needed rudimentary mathematics and a touch of Business Analytics for visualization. When they finally understood, they told me "nevermind, we just want to get into AI"...11 -
Somebody asked on how to get started on Full Stack web application development.
This is how I got started.
Client side Web Application Development:
---------------------------------------------------------------
• Start with basic HTML, CSS and JS, JSON. For quick learning, see W3Schools for these topic or YouTube it.
• Get a local web server. "200 OK!" webserver chrome extension is a good start. (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...)
• Learn Chrome Dev Tools to debug the pages. YouTube it.
• Get a good IDE. I am very happy with VSCode. You can use it for very serious WebApps.
• Start learning JavaScript language in depth, but just related to Web Browser related topic or you would get sucked in server side too early.
• Install node.js. Learn NPM package manager. Learn basic node commands.
• Learn complexity of JS file referencing, JS modules in browser. Just learn, don't use it yet, to understand the benefits of code bundlers.
• Learn Webpack code bundler.
• Learn how to make you simple site much faster and using in Mobile using "Progressive Web Apps".
• Now learn to make modular UIs. I love React. Focus on getting the UI code modulear. Create Single Page sites. (You are not there yet to create a Web App) “Create-React-App” started kit is a good starting point.
• Learn to create multi-page site using React-router.
• Learn application state management using Redux.
• Learn to create application decision engine using Redux-Saga.
Practice and master each stage.
Along above, learn git / GitHub (to learn from others code), find good web resources like Medium / Smashing magazine, good YouTube channels etc. I subscribed to some popular Udemy courses too.
Server side Web development:
------------------------------------------
:) First learn client side Web Application development. Server side learning is another story.3 -
I develop apps for a medical school. You'd think the students would be pretty bright, but it legitimately scares me that some of these people are going to perform brain surgery.
I guess the moral of the story is you're not too dumb to get that dream dev job - if these morons can be doctors, you can do what you set your mind to. And you can feel good knowing your mistakes won't kill anyone!9 -
Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.
Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.
In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.
This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.
It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.
I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.
The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.
On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.
Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.
10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.
There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".
I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.
What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.
Sorry for mixing so many things here.14 -
The day I discovered Schrödinger's lesser known paradox of simultaneously being fired and not fired.
This isn't really much of a dev story, but I figured I'd share it anyway.
About two minutes into signing into all my stuff, I suddenly was kicked out of everything. I tried logging in a few more times, and then suddenly started getting the error, "Your account has been disabled for security reasons." I couldn't sign into chat, and co-workers confirmed that I was missing from the company directory. My manager didn't come in for another two hours, and we couldn't get anyone else to answer what the hell was going on. So I was kinda panicking.
Eventually, we found out from one of our coordinators that someone else with the same name as me was leaving the company, and they had deactivated the wrong person.
It ended up getting a lot better. They told me that it could take up to 48 hours to restore my access (it took longer), so I found stuff to do so I could maintain my paycheck. One of those things was assisting someone with data collection and processing, where I eventually said, "Dude, I could totally automate this," and now that's what I'm getting paid to do.1 -
I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.
This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)
As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.
One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊
I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.
The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.
But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.
The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.
I havent met anyone like him ever again.
Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.
It's been lonely. ☹2 -
Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶
So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗
Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂
Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯
But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄
Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.21 -
!dev !sex I promise this is a good read
I once read the whole bible.
Not in one sitting, ofc. I read it in a period of a year, just 3-4 chapters a day.
Is it something to boast about?
I'm not sure.
I mean, I guess being able to read through it despite not being exactly entertainment material (except some fun parts) kinda is. So I might feel a tad bit proud about that.
But I'm actually more happy that I did instead.
The reason I'm more happy than proud is because I took awareness of the religion I was in.
I became christian when I was an early teen. I grew up in an agnostic family. My dad was kinda hippie and my mom was into leftist ideas.
So me becoming a christian was a bit orthogonal to their philosophies.
I started assisting a church because I was very alone and misunderstood, and found some people there that seemed to get me, and viceversa.
But as time went on and I got more exposed to christian doctrine, my level of commitment grew.
I wanted to save people from going to hell. It sounds funny, maybe egotistical, but it's true.
3, 4 years of being in the church go by. I collaborate in the church, I make some very personal friendships, I was very deep in church by that point.
I then decide that I should take it to the next level and read the bible. So I did. And unknowingly, it started this feeling in me that I didn't liked being a christian at all.
I'm not gonna deny there are some christian values that are still compatible with today's modern society, such as being a good samaritan, working hard, being honest.
But there were too many verses in both old and new testament that I found morally repugnant,
The ones that made me feel the worst about christianity, though, were the ones that condemned homosexuality with death.
Since my dad was a hippie, he used to be in artsy things, like theater or music, and through that he had some gay friends
And for real, I think they were the nicest and most cheerful people I'd met as a kid. So I could not be part of that anymore.
Let me clarify that I didn't stop being a christian immediately after finishing the bible, but it did start a spark "of "what tf do I even believe in...?"
That spark turned into flame when I started the university, a place where people think for a living.
It's no wonder my mind started completing the puzzle, and slowly I started liking church and christianity less and less.
Until one sunday I didn't want to go, and I didn't, and from then on, I pretty much severed ties with that church and christianity.
Which is crazy considering I went every sunday without interruption for 6 years, and several saturdays too.
Anyhow, that's my story of me getting in n out of christianity. Like in the previous post, it sure how to end this, so go fuck a rock or something.12 -
Greetings from Denmark! Thought I would join after a lot of lurking, and tell a little story, as to how I fucked up when I started in my company.
I've been there around 10 days and had never used git besides just add, commit, and push. I was told to work in feature branches, and I did, I was playing around trying to learn, and got some merge conflicts, made a lot of unnecessary commits etc. I was told to clean it up before I merged into dev. And as I didn't know git I asked how I could do that. I was told I could force push in my branch, and that it was okay as long as it was only inside my branch. I tried that and saw my command line force pushing to all branches including dev, and master. My heart skipped a couple of beats, and I went directly to my Lead developer and asked what happend. He got a bit mad at me for pushing in dev and master, and override all the commits there had been made. I tried to explain I didn't he did not really believe me, I was so nervous. Luckily everything came back to normal with people's local branches being pushed etc. But that day I learned about git's push matching config, and my lead was luckily only mad in the heat of the moment and even apologized for getting mad. Just one of my little fuck up's in my short time as a developer7 -
!rant
A rather long(it's 8 hrs long to be precise) story
So I just finished an amazing homework assignment. The goal was to open a new shell on Linux using a C program. We were asked to follow instructions from http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html . However the instructions given were for 32 bit processors and we had to do same for 64 bit machines. In a nutshell we had to write a 64 bit shell code and use buffer-overflow technique to change the return address if the function to our shell code.
I was able to write my own shellcode within 1hr and was able to confirm that it's working by compiling with nasm and all. Also the "show-off-dev" inside me told me to execute "/bin/bash" instead of "/bin/sh"(which everyone else was going to do). After my assembly code was properly executing shellcode, I was excited to put it in my C code.
For that, I needed opcodes of assembly code in a string. Following again the "show-off-dev" inside me, I wrote a shell script which would extract the exact opcodes out of objdump output. After this I put it in my C code, call my friend and tell him that "hell yeah bro, I did it. Pretty sure sir is gonna give me full marks etc etc etc". I compiled the code and BOOM, IT SEGFAULTS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FRIEND. Worst, friend had copied a "/bin/sh" code from shellstorm and already had it working.
Really burned my ego, I sat continuously for 8 hrs in front of my laptop and didn't talk to anyone. I was continuously debugging the code for 8 hrs. Just a few minutes ago, I noticed that the shellcode which I'm actually putting in my C code is actually 2 bytes shorter than actual code length. WHAT THE F. I ran objdump manually and copied the opcodes one by one into the string (like a noob) and VOILA ! IT WORKED !!!
TURNS OUT I DIDN'T CUT THE LAST COLUMN OF OPCODES IN MY SHELL SCRIPT. I FIXED THAT AND IT WORKED !!
THE SINGLE SHITTY NUMBER MADE ME STRUGGLE 8 HRS OF MY LIFE !! SMH
Lessons learnt :
1)Never have such an ego that makes you think you're perfect, cuz you're retarded not perfect
2)Examine your scripts properly before using them
3)Never, I repeat NEVER!! brag about your code before compiling and testing it.
That's it!
If you've read this long story, you might as well press the "++" button.6 -
Worst guy I ever worked with was a Bulgarian Web dev that had been flown over to work on a few projects to make deadlines run smoother.
He would get offended if I was ever in another meeting without him and send passive aggressive emails then refuse to contribute.
He would storm off if anyone ever criticised his slow work ethic
He went on other team members desktops without permission, under one instance running a command line ddos that the IPS logged straight away and got that person a stern meeting. The Bulgarian guy said he was using it to "learn".
He would take a camera into restricted areas, take pictures and then argue as to why he couldn't do that when security would stop him.
I squashed a bee on his arm out of reflex, he screamed at me that I'm stupid causing a room of over 500 employees to go silent and stare.
Moral of the story, fk that guy6 -
!dev
Just went to the pet asylum to look for a cat. There was a shy black one (eh, maybe not a good first but Moar Blacker, Moar Better 😋) and a black and white one which was very open towards me.
Probably I'll get the latter, and build some food, water and litter dispenser systems for it with motors and my esp8266 boards 🙂
The lady who was volunteering there and showed me around had an interesting story though.
Apparently both of those aforementioned cats were wild cats (so they don't come from a proper household or anything). Except that black and white one which apparently came from some rather retarded people.. think average Facebook user.
According to her those previous owners came there with 2 cats including the black and white one as "extremely wild, we found them in the forest, put them in cages (because everyone carries cat cages in their car every day, right?) and brought them here". Nice excuse for average Facebook user level of retard I have to say 😜 but it's not very waterproof, you know?
But on average the people that they get there are even worse than that.. some get a great initial meeting with a cat, but then leave them there because they don't like the stripes on a paw or something stupid like that. As she put it: "you're not fitting pants in a clothing shop, are you?! 😑"
Had to try hard to not burst out in laughter from that description 😂
Point is, the average customers there are awful.. apparently she was very grateful to have a rather down-to-earth customer like me and my home supervisor (who helpfully drove me there 🙂) for once. So terrible clients.. they're everywhere!
It really taught me to be mindful of the hardships of people in any profession who deal with clients.18 -
This is a friend's story:
So I've been trying to upload a free sticker pack for iMessage to AppStore for a while now. Why "trying"? because it keeps getting declined for the silliest reasons. It's nothing complex: just a bunch of our company's stickers about dev life. "Stickers for devs, from devs."
The first time Apple has declined the app because of the overall design, the second time it was because we used iMessage in the title. But this time it makes no sense at all. This is the message I got from Apple:
"Your app contains references to test, trial, demo, beta, pre-release or other incomplete content.
Specifically, some of your app’s stickers have “beta” references."
Huh? Check out the pic - one of our dev-related stickers says "still in beta". I guess Apple took that way too literally. Good thing they didn't tell me my app was too buggy because it has a sticker of a bug which says "it's not a bug, it's a feature"...
On second thought, what if AppStore is a modern-day Genie? Maybe I should add a sticker that says "Apple owns me $20 million in stock"? Or just one that says "Apple approves this sticker pack".
#Thisneverhappens_on_googleplay #appstore_make_a_wish #rookout8 -
I know I am late to this but I have a happy story for this one.
My first dev job was awesome. Except for the pay. I had interviewed and taken the job based on the fact that I was done with my master's degree, but because of a paperwork snafu I wouldn't be receiving my degree until the spring. I was assured that if I provided proof of my degree when it was awarded I would get a pay rise in relation to my education. Well that was not to be. So this professionally and socially inept bitch I was working with was going to be ahead of me in her career because the people I worked for gave pay raises based on time served rather than ability and education.
So I started interviewing for other positions. Especially after government furloughs cut my pay by 20% for 11 weeks, causing me to max out my credit cards. All of my coworkers had my back. They went to the upper management and the higher ranking military people we worked for and explained the situation. They were my job references for my interviews. They got me a job that paid double what I was making. I still get the warm fuzzies thinking about it.
They were some of the sweetest people I had ever worked with. One of them gave my mom and brother a ride to the airport when I crashed my car. They bought me lunch when I was in dire straights. I really would have loved to stay but I couldn't afford it. That and winter in Utah fucking blows.2 -
The girl I'm talking to right now (not officially dating), I met because I knew web dev. I've mentioned the story before a couple times, so I'll just give a TL;DR
She has a graphic design class with my friend. The class was doing basic web development and had no idea what they were doing. I decided to go in there to help out some. Started talking to her, now everything's fun.
Here's a picture of us from Friday (you can only see my face tho, not hers). We were just being cute, as ya do.12 -
A couple years ago my now ex-colleagues pranked the lead dev for being nitpicky about the importance of the story post-it wall in the agile process.
His desk was like this the next morning.
Needless to say, he was pissed and we had a good laugh :D -
I started drinking coffee when I started as a junior dev.
I loved its boost, but after a while being on coffee was exactly how I felt before as normal. I incrementally upped the dosage, while my resistance creeped up too. I reached a moment when I drank a liter daily, so I witched to yerba maté instead, which resulted in more potent brews. Then I got used to its strength too plus it tasted like horseshit. I switched to caffeine tablets, takingg more and more. Soon after I reached a level which was described medically as the top one should be allowed to take.
I no longer felt any boost. In between caffeinated moments of normalty, I felt like a brain-dead zombie. When I was caffeinated, I was jittery, my shoulder and eyebrow was glitching, my stomach was flexing like before taking a huge exam.
After some miserable time like that, I quit caffeine entirely. I was fatigued, dull and my mind was hazy for te next 1-2 weeks.
I then finally, became gradually normal again.
I drink tea and coffee only socially, perhaps a few times in a month, and never after too much later than noon.
Now I can't wear my "Programmer. Converts coffee into code" shirt anymore. Apart from that, I'm much better off :)
What's your coffee story?14 -
this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.
I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.
There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.
There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.
Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.
I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.
I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.
I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.
And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.
I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.
I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.
My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.
On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.
I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.
I think I'm fucked25 -
So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.5 -
Admin Access
Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?
Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.
About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.
As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.
People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.
At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.
Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?13 -
[ Introduction ]
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
[ The story ]
A year ago I had a problem with X software.
I opened a ticket on its repository but a week goes by and no one responds. I need it to work! So I opened a pull request and it got merged in a day or two after a quick review.
Seeing that the tickets were many and the maintainers were few, I decided to stay and help.
Today, I am in the top #10 contributors.
I have made 20 commits and edited 4k lines of code. (Honestly, it's not that much, at work I do way more than that, anyway...)
This repository is an alternative to another popular closed-source software and it's massively used by well-known companies
(tech-giants).
[ Stats ]
User base: 20.000 (all of them are devs)
Total contributors: 200 (1%)
Contributors with more than 1 commit: 60 (0.3%)
[ Consideration ]
I would never have believed a year ago that participation could be so low despite the number of dev-users being so high.
The software does not require great technical expertise and if you are using it for work then you already have the skill-set you need to contribute.
Now listen, I know that not everyone wants to contribute. I know right and I respect it ... but really:
The 0.3% ?! Only 60 devs on 20k are active contributors?! Only 200 (1%) devs have ever made a single commit and then they left.
Holy sh**11 -
!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.
One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.
A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.
That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".
After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".2 -
Ticket: This API param doesn’t work.
Ticket Size: 1 story point / extra small baby fries
Found the issue almost immediately: some fucked up date math. Or at least backwards as hell. I don’t know. I don’t care.
There’s no spec for it, and writing it is a bitch. None of the API test helpers are designed for end-to-end tests. Why? I don’t care. They’re stupid. They all just break. And the API does weird shit like fucking redirects to an HTML page. Which is… i don’t know. They mix up API and embedded sessions a bunch, so who knows if this is right or broken as fuck.
I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
It’s just mountains of fucking garbage. Every time I dig into anything, anywhere in this codebase, or, let’s be honest: the entire goddamn company, it’s just more fucking garbage. The code is garbage. The specs are garbage. The people are garbage. The woke crap they love so much is garbage. The industry is garbage. The macs we’re required to use are garbage. The strongly-encouraged editor is garbage. The new hires are garbage. The legendary devs are garbage. The VPN is garbage — still haven’t gotten it to fucking work outside of fucking Safari, which is also garbage. The meetings are garbage. The “culture” is garbage. The “raises” are garbage. The thirty-step dance ceremony for each ticket is garbage. The literal fucking garbage at the office is the best part of the entire goddamn landfill.
And yeah, over half of the code that’s been giving me problems on this ticket was written by the same dev: The legendary golden garbage boy himself.
Just.
Fucking hell.
I’m going back to looking for work again. I can’t do this anymore.10 -
Worst realisation of myself when I was a greenhorn dev? Nobody gives a f***ing damn of what you achieve as a software developer. For them you're just the uncool nerd - end of story. That's where I just stopped having any conversations about my job at all... unless it's with other devs.10
-
!dev
T-32min
Long story short:
I dont have many friends, I'm isolated in my home, for the first time in 25 years I actually felt like my birthday is worth celebrating but Im alone because corona.
Therefore I'd like to ask you to drink a glass of your good (or other) booze at 23:00UTC (Which is midnight here) to celebrate the first bday party I never had and to celebrate DevRant as a great community and each of you, the members.22 -
This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.
Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.3 -
!dev
TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.
Hello folks. Time for a little family story.
This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.
He told me he would pay by the end of June.
Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).
A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.
He literally said:
"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".
He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.
That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).
I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.
I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.
And one of the clauses was.
"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄
He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.
It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.
So that's the background story for the laptop.
Now time for a dinner story.
We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.
When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.
Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.
Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).
I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)
Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.
I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.
And now I'm sad. 🙃
Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?
I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))
It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.
But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.
I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.
I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.10 -
During the last couple of days, I got to hear quite a horrible story...
So we start at the beginning, where I have a dev-related chat with some other strangers on the internet. One of them was working on a custom protocol implementation with an API to go with it, written in Python. There were plans to migrate the codebase to another language like Rust in the long term. So the project seemed to be going well.
Another guy and the main subject of this chimed in on various of our messages, and long story short - he uses Express.js for everything he does, and he doesn't know jack shit on what he's talking about. Yet he still does.
Later we got the delight to hear that he had beaten up his mother, and that she's now in the hospital because of it, with broken arms, hands, fingers and severe bleeding. Yet he has the audacity to complain about his sore throat, caused by all his shouting. He refuses to seek any help, or to take medicines he's been given. This has been going on for several days now.
As much as I hate to even think about it, these too are "developers". I too have skeletons in my closet, but goddamn.. that these people even exist. The very idea that you may be talking to them every day. It disgusts me.16 -
TL;TR
My mum just came to me asking me why the mouse is not working ...like I'm GOD of electronics :( (I'm just a simple dev) I simply though that the battery is dead because it's old. Soooooo.....
I showed her how to open it and how to change the battery. After 5 min she came back with a new battery and the same mouse asking me to fix it for her....
In my mind I literally snapped my brain was bleeding and exploding at the same time.
I just cringed a fake smile and changed the battery in front of her very slowly. I sure she won't remember how to do it next time.
At the end of the story I can't talk back or be angry to my parents I have to much respect for them. They though me everything from how to poop, speak, dress, eat and so on.
Be kind to your parents.5 -
Story of WTF happened to my job
During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.
So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)
On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.
Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.
Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.
I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"
Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.
How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?16 -
Story: A sudden pleasant realisation about myself...
Realized today that I have reached a level of Developer I always wanted to have reached.. A junior forgot his mouse, I gave him mine and took out old trusty hacky scroll from the cupboard, the junior brought batteries as a thank you, I told him thanks but there was no need, I have coded without a mouse and can do again if need be, no issues really... I have even used my phone over wifi as a mouse, I can dev as long as I have some form of something at my disposal... Had a meeting where I had to implement a feature for something that was mentioned in a meeting I was never invited for a bunch of months prior, that had to go live today, asked all the right questions, remained calm, tested like a pro and it was practically seamlessly inserted into the system by yours truly... I was proud of my work on a different level to be honest.. Had a difficult meeting with my manager, but kept really calm, stated the facts effortlessly and made him feel comfortable too, happy ending and happy resolution. Then I spent the ride home trying to project an fm station using my phone.. by the time we got home me and my colleague found a solution to be tested soon... It was only when I put my phone down after closing all my research tabs and deleting the apps used for the day that will not be needed tomorrow when I realised how awesome I seem to have become... Treating myself to a juicy burger and coke with gaming tonight. Something is bound to go sideways again sometime. But you know what, it seems like I'll be just fine.. Somewhere I seem to have become exactly who I wanted to be.. Now for further goals and higher aims while maintaining this person I only noticed today.2 -
Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!
Anyway, story and rant:
The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.
All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.
This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.
The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000
I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.
I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.
The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.
I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.
She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.
I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.
Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.4 -
Karma Story
2 motherfuckers that were absolute shit as managers applied for a position for the web tech manager at my institution. I was the one that Xed both their applications.
Now, I didn't do it out of pettiness, I did it because both of these assholes lied about their positions, responsibilities and knowledge.
One of them washed his hands on a project stating that he had no knowledge of web development, but stated on his resume that he was working as a web dev at the time(in node and asp.net) as well as angular frontends <--- fking bullshit
The other stated that he has been coding all his life. Yeah shitbag, that is why you were selling phones at a company and when i mentioned to you that i studied comp sci you said that it sounds interesting but you had no idea what development is or how computers even work.
There were many. Might say fuck it and just take the position for myself. Shit got funny af and it is amazing how being a shit person and a liar will get back to you and bite you in the ass.
Fuck them8 -
i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.
but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.
even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...8 -
My dev colleagues, the ceo, a external designer and me (dev) are sitting in the meeting room
and we discuss the result from the designer. He designed a complete relaunch of a
small CRM for the logistics sector.
The designer is a designer as you know him, big beart, small macbook, chai late
and he designed nothing, he hired a freelancer from romania.
My boss studied software development in the 80s but didn't really developed a software
for about 20 years, but he thinks he knows all and everything.
My boss is constantly complaining about the colors in the design and he would like
a iOS approach. Our system should complete copy the styles from iOS.
The really funny thing happend in just 1 minute. My boss is complaining again about the
colors and told the blue color is way to dark and the designer meant thats not possible the
blue color very bright. My boss sat next to the designer and looked not on the wall where
the picture was thrown from a projector, instead he looks from the side in the macbook screen
of the macbook which was in front of the designer. Then the designer says "Oh my god, the color
changes if I look from the side or from the top of the macbook." The Designer was blown away. My
boss couldn't believe it and did the same movements with his head and said. "Wow, you are right
the color changes".
We all other people couldn't believe that they are so dumb and thought this must be a joke. But
that wasn't a joke. After the meetin my boss told everyone in our company his results regarding the screen.
I wrote every story in a document, and I'm planning to create a book with dumb shit like this.2 -
One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).
Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'
This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"
Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best. -
!dev !rant but still funny story
As the goth of the dev team, sometimes people ask me several things about me.
I was working on my code. It was 3 or 4PM and a bored dev asks came to me
He: Have you ever tried to be a vampire?
Me: No, I’m just a goth
He: Do you know a vampire?
Me: Unfortunately no, but I’ve heard of them.
He: Do they suck blood?
I don’t know if he was asking because of curiosity or in a sarcastic mode. As usual, I answered in a polite way explaining him what means to be a vampire, the types (blood and energetic) and the difference between a goth and a vampire.
While I was explaining to him this, the boss came into the office, heard me talking about the energetic vampires and said “Wow wow wow! What is coming on here?!” 😂15 -
Raise your hands if you absolutely need a screen to work!
Most of you? Ok.
Well, let me share a story of a dev who doesn't really need a screen at all.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/workin...6 -
My recruitment story is a bit funny,
i had two interview, first one was to evaluate working style, behavior and ethics, where the interviewer and i spent almost 20 minutes discussing video games 😀.
second was technical, was interviewed by a lady dev manager and the team's technical lead "which i didn't know their roles at that time" went really good and at the end they asked:
Do you wanna ask us any questions?
Me: *leans back, with one arm on the chair arm and with a curious look and pointing one finger at both of them😕*
So what are you two?
them: *both had a shocked face and looked at each other for few seconds, manager chuckles😓😓* Well i am the team's dev manager and this guy is the team's technical lead, and in case you were wondering, we are not a couple.
technical lead: 😂😂😂
Me: 😨😨 no no that's not what i meant i swear.
Interview was over, i left the building thinking 😢😢 oh god, i totally blew it.
2 weeks later i get a phone call asking me to come and discuss contract terms 😂😂😂
sorry for the long story5 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)
For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.
She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.
But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.
Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.
I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.
So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".
I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.
I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.9 -
Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.
Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...
I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.
Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.3 -
While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.
I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.
The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.
Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.
Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.
This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.
What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.8 -
Had to change my avatars clothes, dont want people thinking i dont wash.
Went to check my closet on the app, shit... Im a poor bastard. Dont have enough money, cough i mean points to get that new pair of shoes ive been eyeing.
Got me thinking, we are all essentially sugar mommies and daddies. I always wanted to give that a go, so far im liking it.
Long story short - thanks for this space everyone including the community
#liveLongAndProsper Dev Rant2 -
My first rant/story
> 3 years ago company x decides to pay for my software dev degree
> fast forward to today.. x has no idea what I've learned as they never asked..(basically java,php,sql,android)
> x gives me a contract 1 week before my final exams and expects me to work everyday except exam days..
>next day, a dev contacts me - 'oh please brush up on your Vue, Node, angular as well as laravel php framework'
>I've never touched any of those xD fml.. what to do!?8 -
getting into dev work is such a shit show. thinking back 2 years ago I decided to switch career so went on bootcamp and starting looking for junior role.
as you know full well all jobs requires 5+ years when the tech has only been around 3. Anyhow, got a junior full stack role at a start up, all good , great pace (cos of startup) and wide range of tech to learn. one minute i am doing great , next day I am not good enough and got let go (WTF?) ,also whats up with some backend devs Jesus why wouldnt you let me put a " on aws because you are the backend dev what the fuck is wrong with your ego man?
fun story number 2: after being let go of my first role due to being good dev for one day and bad the next. I went for an intern role for really low paid. well fair enough I am here to learn right guys? nope, i have experience with the main tech from my last job and I managed the take home test and despite I told them i have more experience front end they criticise my backend code , despite i was able to tell them what I have done not so well and I have found a better solution AT THE INTERVIEW. still not good enough. I was really doubting myself If I am that shit at being an fucking intern with a stack I have experience in.
fast forward another job interview I landed my current role with fantastic culture, good line manager & tech lead. nice colleague and I am being treated like a prince with the work i put in. Why is this industry so fucked?
so, folks out there trying to get into this game. dont lose hope, you can do it , you just need to get fucked a bit to know whats good out there!5 -
Friend of mine who is not a Dev and loves to go out sees me few days ago with a couple of Dev friends...
Dude what's going on? Dude dude let me tell you about this chick... 1 hour later story ends. We gave him respect as one Dev should to a non dev and started talking about IDEs and how the new VS Code is pretty awesome.
He interrupts and goes ... that chick Venesa Code, is she hot? Would you?
Silence ... We would, we all would. -
This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.
We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).
When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.4 -
mangodb's rant reminded me of smth.. Folks from my country might remember this story.
So we have a national e-health system. Millions have been invested, half of the money have never reached the project [disappeared smwhr in between] and its quality is not shiny. It works, sometimes even fast enough. But boy does it have bugs... Let's not get into that. It's politics.
So some time ago one IT guy spotted a bug that allowed him to get sensitive info of other patients. He informed e-health folks and waited for a fix. He waited for a few weeks but the fix had never been released. So he published his findings in soc media [yepp.. Stupid move]. That caused a national scandal. Not to mention he had been pressed with charges.
That guy and our health minister were invited in one of the tv debates. The guy was asked to explained how he found all this sensitive data. And he explained that he hit f12 in his browser, opened a network tab, issued a network request by clicking smth in the webpage analysed received data in the dev tools.
The minister looked somewhat happy, maybe a lil proud of himself - a person who has a "gotcha!" moment has that very glow he had. And he said: "what you did there was obvious hacking. I reckon you should know that true developers do not do those things you have just explained to us" [he was talking about dev tools].
I died inside a little bit.3 -
A little back story:
A dev who left already implemented a system and modeled the data like he doesn't even care because he was going away in one month anyway.
This sucker here inherited the responsibility to remodel this fucking clusterfuck of data.
I was trying to do a good work here until today but some things came to my mind :
I don't care.
They don't care.
Fuck it.
I'm gonna do the same shit and the next person can suck ma'dick.
I have better things to do.
Look, I'm gonna do a lazy job that is gonna be a million light years better than what this sucker did anyway.1 -
!rant but story
https://devin.xyz (v.0.0.1)
My quick and semi-ugly solution to save amazing rants and comments forever and more organized.
What it is and it will be:
- archive of rants and comments from devrant that I found very good
- the original ranters will be informed when their rants are archived
- the original ranters and/or the management team of devRant has the right to request the archive content's total deletion
- every single thing on there will be accessible by anyone anytime anywhere (as log as server is healthy)
- open-source
What it may become:
- anyone can register and save their archive
- dev content archive from other sources
- dev articles blog
What it will never have/be:
- any form of payment
- ads
- tracking (I don't even wanna know how many users are viewing)
- non dev related content
- devRant
I'm willing to create user accounts for anyone interested in very near future. So please buzz me here if you want one.
So far it's a website of Laravel + Voyager + bulma with very minimal custom codes (I had to write below 100 lines of code in total). It is on Vultr server.
I'm gonna maintain and update as much as I can on my spare time. Hence I don't consider this as a collab. However, the code is on gitlab private repo. I'll make the repo public soon as well. Any contribution is gladly welcome. 😄10 -
So in my 6 ppl dev team management had to do cuts and pulled a jira report of story points sum of the past 10 months, it went like this:
1. 307
2. 307
3. 283
4. 274
5. 257
6. 220
The 6. Guy is a teamlead so he was safe. 4 and 5 guys were fired with zero notice and 1 weeks severance pay (we are contractors).
Best part is that remaining 2. And 3. devs produce very low quality code. But hey, they have enough story points. Managament didnt even bother to discuss with teamlead about who to keep. Workload is the same, we were told to "level up".
You can't make this shit up. US based startups man.11 -
Just wanna to share my story:
I just quit my job 2 months ago to ramp up my own startup. I will be funded with 2k Euro per month for 1 year to prepare the founding of my startup. Basicly that means i got one year to build backend/frontend/app. I have a friend that is doing some nontech related stuff like business development and shit. Sounds good until now i guess.
But:
Developing all that stuff in a one man show as a junior-like developer is really hard. I did not find another dev who wanted to join me as a sideproject or something.
Do you guys think thats even possible to ramp up all this by myself or am i to optimistic? I mean, i learn a lot atm, but i am a bit scared to fail too.
That should not be whining or shit, just gathering some input of you guys.
(excuse typos and stuff as i am not a native speaker :) )17 -
!Dev
Okay so this is a very embarrassing story but I guess it's kinda funny so I thought I'd share it anyway.
I was playing a tabletennis game in VR and my opponent was a pretty chill guy who started blasting metal music. We were just casually vibing and then we started headbanging. Not a good idea with a VR headset on your head. There are two deep scratches right on my forehead now. Two perfect parallel lines.
I lost the game, and the smoothness of my forehead.
Okay kids, never headbang with a VR headset on, remember that.3 -
Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.
The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.
The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.
Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.
In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.
After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).
I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?
In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.
Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).
But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!
Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.
He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".
To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....
Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).
01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.
When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.
No punt.
No finish.
Just the project file with a password still there today6 -
Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.
We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.
DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)
BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.
WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.
What do you think of this piece of shit?6 -
!dev
I used to read.. A lot. Long and complicated stories, where the plot would only unveil itself after a long time. I used to dig myself into a book, learning about the writer's thoughts and mental image, reflecting on our differing viewpoints on the question at hand. I didn't expect action or beauty, merely thoughts which, by themselves, constitued a value to me.
But pulp and especially social media had lowered my attention span to the point that even reading through a short story without getting sidetracked takes a lot of effort. I still value what I used to value, the only thing that's changed is that I no longer have the patience and I feel discomfort due to the lack of sensations.
What do I do? Had anyone solved this problem before?4 -
!dev !rant
You guys talk about having too much coffee occasionally - enough to where you weren't able to even focus;
I, being the dumbass I am overachieved a little and actually drank so much once and basically seized up
My friend was driving me home and all of the sudden i felt my arm muscles contracting, and then my abdomen and chest
shit was scary
we had to pull over and i had to struggle to shove a bottle and a half of water down my throat before he could drive me home
moral of the story = Make sure you eat in the morning, and there IS such a thing as too much coffee6 -
Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.6 -
Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.
I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.
=====
What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.
Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.
At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.
Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.
Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.3 -
True story
Was free at work so applied for a stretch project.
PM: you know mobile dev?
Me: yes, built a few apps
PM: good, we have an old app we want you to take the JAR change everything but the look of it and make it a new hybrid app with the required features.
Me: *kill me please*
PM: and use WordPress as the server.
Me: ...........
Accepted the challenge. Did the entire app in ionic and build a server for it with SpringBoot. Client loves it PM is still doesn't know😂2 -
I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.
The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"
Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.
To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.
...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.1 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
Kinda all other devs translate incompetent with a lack of knowledge
i would go with not able to recognize his lack of knowledge
Story 1:
once we had a developer, whom was given the task to try out a REST/Json API using Java
after a week he presented his solution,
2 Classes with actual code and a micro-framework for parsing and generating JSON
so i asked him, why he didn't use a framework like jackson or gson, while this presentation he felt pretty offended by this question
a couple of weeks later i met him and he was full of thanks for me, because i showed him, that there are frameworks like that, and even said sorry for feeling offended
- no incompentence here -
Story 2:
once i had a lead dev, who was so self-confident, he refactored (for no reason but refactoring itself) half the app and commited without trying to compile/run test
but not only once, but on a regular basis
as you may imagine, he broke the application multiple times and blamed the other devs
- incompentence warning-
Story 3:
once i had a dev, which wanted to stay up with the latest versions of his libraries
npm update && commit without trying to compile/testing multiple times
- incompentence warning-
Story 4:
once i had a cto
* thought email-marketing is cutting edge
* removed test-systems completely to reduce costs
* liked wordpress
* sets vm to sleep without letting anyone know
- i guess incompetent alert -2 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
So here's a story..
Whenever we have a job announcement, whether tech or dev, there's this one guy who applies every single time and never gets selected. I have interviewed him once and learnt that he doesn't in fact have the skills or experience we're looking for. Also someone else with better experience applies everytime. He's been doing this for more than 3 years now.
Now WE feel embarrassed everytime he comes in for interview.
You can't blame him for wanting to work so much with one of the best teams in our tiny country. I gotta say I really admire his perseverance and I think and hope that he's gonna find what he's looking for with that kinda perseverance.2 -
!Rant && successStory
Im curious to know what people's opinions on tech Internships are?
Some people have the option that it's cheap labour to get basic things done.
I believe they are wrong. I just finished my 11 month long internship at a medium size tech company in Melbourne Australia
Although finishing up there was a sad story in itself I was taking some time to reflect on those past months and I believe it's truly amazing.
I've discovered my passions and interests. I was mentored by some truly caring people that honestly gave a shit about me.
The code I write is so much cleaner, decisions I make are more informed and I could go on!
Most of all they paid me decent and I really cannot ask for more.
Kudos to all those companies that actually care about the emerging dev community.2 -
I JUST HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT MAKES ONE WANT TO BANG TWO BRICKS ON HEAD SND END THE PAIN THE STORY STARTS YESTETDAY WITH ISSUES AFTER A MIGRSTION AND THEY ASK ME TO HELP TROUBLESHOOT EVEN THOUGH I'M A DEV DBA AND THE ISSUE IS IN QA/SAT AND I HELP ANYWAY AND THEY CAN'T FIND A VIEW AND SO I LOOK EVERYWHERE AND CAN'T DOING IT EITHER AND IT DIDN'T EXIST IN PROD OR DEV SO I TELL THEM IT'S NOT THERE, AND THEY ARE LIKE, CAN YOU RETRIEVE IT FOR US AND I'M LIKE FROM WHERE? I DON'T KEEP VIEWS IN MY BUTT AND YOU GUYS ARE SMOKING CRACK AND THE GIVE ME THEIR QUERY WHICH CONTAIN THE VIEE ANYWAY AND THEY SAY CAN YOU RUN IT AND IT RUNS AND WORKS AND THEY CAN'T MAKE IT WORK AND IT WORKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CALL THE VIEW THEY HAVE ME SO NO PROBLEM THERE SO I FINALLY ASK THEM ARE YOU POINTING TO THE CORRECT DATABASE AND THEY'RE LIKE OH MAN WE TOLD YOU THE WRONG DATABASE AND SO I LOOK AT THE RIGHT DATABASE AND FIND THAT THE GRANTS ARE MISSING AND YEAH THANK YOU FOR TAKING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE WE WERE IN THE WRONG DB YOU GAVE ME AND I HOPE THE FLAG OF A THOUSAND CAMELS INVEST YOUR ARMPITS AND THE CHIGGERS OF A THOUSAND SOUTHERN LAWNS INGEST YOUR SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. YAAAAAA!!!!9
-
Why the fuck is this apple stuff so fucking expensive?
I want to dig into IOS app development but I am seriously considering not to do it because it's fucking expensive...
Backstory:
I am a young dev (in apprenticeship) and my company offered me a phone. That's great because I can save the money that I would have payed for my phone bill.
But sadly it's an iPhone... I thought why not make something cool out of it and start learning IOS development.
But so far all I saw from IOS development are extreme high costs...
Is there some kind of student plan or anything that makes it cheaper to learn?
Can you guys give me any advice on this?
I own an old MacBook but I need a new OS on it... (long story)
Are there anymore hidden costs? Any tips where to start?
Thanks for your help fellow ranters and sorry for the half rant half question12 -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
Sat down with the Project Management team today to discuss a signage installation. This is how the conversation went...
Me: Right, so we need to get the hardware on-site asap so we can get this configured before it goes over to the production guys to have the facisa installed.
Them: That's fine we have plenty of time. Stop rushing things.
Me: Okay, so do we have the story board in place ready for development?
Them: Nope. Hasn't been done by the designer yet because he is in a bad mood.
Me: Okay so when does the client want this?
Them: 3 Weeks' time
Me: But it is atleast a week of dev time?
Them: Sure. But you can work late if needed...right?
This is a typical conversation between them and me. I'm the sole developer here. So done with today.12 -
On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.
When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.
So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.
Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..
Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"1 -
I'm usually nice to people and try to look for the best in them... but this one time one of my colleagues gave me a code to review that, something about trees, can't remember, and the function was hammering the databases with 3 nested cycles, that's when I could no longer just watch. I was kinda mean on him that day, but as a result he did fix the problem and was really happy and I sensed a bit proud of himself as well.
Long story short, I believe he's not a software dev anymore. Kinda shame, I liked the guy, but he seemed enthusiastic of his new job and that is all that really matters in the end1 -
Fucking hate my job 😡
I joined as nodejs dev at a mnc 3months ago involved in banking software in which i dont have any domain knowledge.. first 10 days I was told to go through fucking udemy nodejs and graphql tutorial (wtf) which i already have experience with before joining.. after that my reporting manager gives me task to resolve fields and gave me shitty jira story link to read.. that shit story link had no explanation about the fields and what the database it is, then she says to use some shitty sdk which is built internally by shiity devloper which had no documentation and have to follow other module which was again written by that sr. Dev... They hav fucked up the graphql and nodejs and entire stack and also till date no one has ever given any explanation about the domain and the fields and database schema.. this manager refuses to share knowledge about the domain now how the fuck i resolve the graphql schema which was again written by non technical b.a.. all they have used is latest technology in a shitty way with no standards to to follow .. no dataloading no caching no batching.. use shitty sdk which does not give access to dbconn and fucking tightly coupling expressjs which when i start consumes crazy 400Mb of memory .. these fucking seniors devs + the fucking b.a having 12+. Yrs exp each have fucked the entire codebase... Each day killing my passion for app development.. fuckkk ... Dunno what to do now5 -
One of my ex-trainees, mid-level dev at the time of the story, from the previous job asked me and insisted to work with me and if it's possible to open a position for him at my new employer (i was a team lead). We were also somehow friends, spending a lot of time together - including our girlfriends - outside of work.
He went to the interview, passed it and he received an approx. 1500 euros salary, jumping from around 1k euros. He was very happy with it and accepted the offer.
One week before starting his new job, my manager came to me and asked: "hey what happened with X?". I was like: "what happened?". "Don't you know? He sent an SMS this morning to announce us that he doesn't want the job anymore."
I had absolutely no idea about that. The second thing that I did was to give him a call and ask him about his decision. His argue was that "my current employer made my another offer: 1550 euros". I said something like "ok, have fun".
I got back to the manager to tell him about that. He offered to make another offer of almost 2000 euros to the guy, but I refused.3 -
I work on a warehouse dev team. One day this past year, I was trying to deploy a new build to a QA server. Earlier that day I had been looking at the logs on the production server and had left the ssh session open. I had been working for less than a year out of college at this point and shouldn't have had access to deploy to the production server.
Long story short I deployed my QA build to the production server and saw there were problems connection to our production database. Then my heart dropped in my chest as I realized I had just brought down our production server.
I managed to get the server back up by rolling back in about 5 minutes and no one ever knew except some people on my team.
I felt horrible for the longest time. Later in the year another guy that joined my team that has about 20 years of experience under his belt did the exact same thing, but needed help rolling it back. Needless to say, that made me feel a lot better. 😂
Definitely the worst moment of my year.3 -
Not at all dev related but I don’t have a social life so I share with you guys:)
I’ve been fat for all my life. You might say it’s my own fault blah blah but I quit sugar over 10 years ago, I don’t snack and eat 1-2 meals a day, not much more than others do.
The first time I was in good shape was when I was 16. I was growing, I started boxing and I was happy-ish with my body for the first time. I got down from 110kgs to ~87kgs, which is a good weight for me, I have heavy bones and wide shoulders I guess.
I insured my shoulder and couldn’t do boxing anymore but my weight was still pretty much stable. After working in the office for a few months I started gaining weight again, I think mainly due to the stress and lack of sleep.
In 2017 for the first time I hit a new high with 120kgs. I quit my terrible, stressful 24/7 job and relocated and got down to ~115 which I maintained for quite a while (still going to the gym and stuff).
And then the lockdown started..
I went up to >120 in no time.
(Sounds really bad but as mentioned, I’m heavy anyway so I’m not THAT obese, just fat.
Seeing my weight was really scary to me so I started a keto diet again, which I did before but with limited success.
Warning: Controversial topic coming up..
I took it a bit further and tried 0-carb (carnivore diet) instead of low carb and I lost 6kg within a month. Then the next plateau at 114, then at 112 etc.
Went more strict and removed seasoning and stuff and started eating more nutritious meat, liver, heart, tongue etc and my weight started dripping again.
Yesterday for the first time in ~a decade I got down to 105kg.
My end goal is 90, so I made it half way through.
Just really happy to have achieved this. The 1 good thing about lockdown I guess, I had so much time to be on my own.
Before you say eating no greens is bad, keep in mind that most not old people die because of obesity, not because of a lack of fiber.
It’s a big achievement for me and I hope that I can get to 90kg in another 3 months..
Story over8 -
Fellow Devrantians,
I have a ridiculous story and a mission if you choose to participate.
So we had a dev that worked here for 2 years. He eventually left. It was a mutual decision as they didn't want to perform some of the work the boss assigned. Okay, I guess that is a thing. Not working on stuff for 2 years is kind weird but okay.
It has been almost a year since he left. A cop shows up today. Apparently they were investigating a crime perpetuated by 2 people at my work. During the last year it is alleged that 2 people that are very high in the company have placed mice in this former employee's vehicle. Yes, the very serious crime of Vehicular Rodent Redistribution has occurred at my work place. There were 2 people involved (there may be more). So technically that raises it to a Conspiracy to Commit Vehicular Rodent Redistribution. This may mean the feds will have to get involved.
This is a dark day for our company. I am not sure how to deal with this information. I cannot look at these people the same way anymore. I didn't realize we had Mouseketeers in my work place.
The mission: Please help me come up with additional crime titles and perpetrator titles for this heinous crime. I intend to share my thoughts at next weeks meeting.6 -
Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.
Here's a little story of what happened to me:
I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.
Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.
I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.
We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.
In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.16 -
== Internship Interview Rant ==
This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"
He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?
So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !
Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.
And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.2 -
Here comes the story how I became a DevRanter.
When I was young, I built an expensive gamer-machnine, so I had to crack games. I Got used to computers, so I startet an apprenticeship in IT. I finished with good grades. I left everything and everyone behind and moved in a city, found a parttime job as a PHP developer and started studying CS. After 5 years doing work as developer, studying CS, creeping around as soldier, I finally finished and graduated. After a few months working fulltime (same job), as my life began to settle down and I got bored.
A flatmate (also CS) laughed his ass off about something, then he introduced me to DevRant. It became part of my life to read DevRant, to overcome boredom. But there are not enough new Rants.. I'm f'cked. OK, I resigned my Job, and my flat and signed up for the BS in natural scinces at university in an even bigger city. I will again leave everything behind to begin a new life. Now I'm planing to freelance to pay the bills and challenge me again. Wish me luck :)
So I am beginning this new life with writing this story, how i became a dev. I klick Post, and bang! "please verify your email before ranting.. blah" I got no mail, no span, nothing. Resend.. wait.. nothing. I WAS BORED AGAIN!! FUCK YOU MAIL-SERVER, WHY CAN'T YOU SEND AN EMAIL WITHIN SECONDS OR MINUTES, WE ARE IN 21ST CENTURY AND THE INTERNET CONSISTS MAINLY OF OPTIC FIBER CABLES!!
And this is, dear DevRant community, how i become a Ranter, just then when I wanted to Post my first story.4 -
My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.
She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.
And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.
I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.16 -
!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.
Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.
My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.
Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.
But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.
There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.
I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?5 -
Worked in a company that had a lot of problems reusing code / UI across many similar iOS apps. Current devs were basically trying to build this: https://jasonette.com/ (after other multiple failed ideas).
I argued for weeks after joining that this is way too much, with better use of storyboards and autolayout we can fix the majority of our problems. They did everything short of laughing.
Few months later managers in my office were tired of them so gave me a chance, I build an app my way, the most senior of them build an app their way.
Long story short, my app was a bit more complex, both had the same amount of time. I finished 2 days before the deadline, he went 8 weeks over.
Never felt more vindicated in my life. Mysteriously he and another dev randomly "decided to leave" 2 - 3 weeks later. -
The story of how I got my new job (I will start in december) even though it is not a dev related one:
I was about to reduce my work hours, because my wife was getting a really good job. We couldn't both work full-time, because our son is in kindergarten. Then she broke her ankle and the job was gone. Right at this point I was offered a job at a friends company. I knew him by being an intern in his company.
Things always go well in the end.1 -
I have been burnt out for over a year and a half now combined with mental health issues.
I was working an underpaying job, doing senior-dev work for a less than junior-dev pay, with an incompetent understaffed team. The work was so mundane and most of the clients were stupid. I hated work, my colleagues, and most of all I hated programming.
I finally quit the job and quit programming as well. I couldn't touch or see a terminal window without panicking. I've been spending my time binge watching series and movies.
Recently though, I've started picking up coding again. I've been blogging and doing some changes to my blog beside other light stuff.
This is the story of my first burnout and it's taken its toll on me. I hope it's the last one but who knows.3 -
I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.
We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.
The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!
Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...
I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!
True story!
PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!1 -
First time going to college was my first time commiting for real becoming a dev. But with my close minded brain. I believe i only want to became a backend. So here is my story of me getting mad to monitor.
First year i got 24" Monitor. "Shit this is so unproductive, a need a new workspace to place my debugger".
Got another 24" Monitor. "ahh better" -- later on got a Web Developing Class. "Fuck i need moar workspace, i need to see a live reload and a debugger !"
Got a 27" Monitor. "FUCK, there is no way to plug this monitor"
Got No-Brainer-Fast-Bought 1060 3GB. "Finally !". Hmm "this one bigger monitor seems odd, i need to change this to become even"
Got another 2x27" Instead of 1x24" To replace 27". "Why the hell am i wasting money?".
...
...
...Maybe gamble poker when working is nice...
...
...
Got another 27".10 -
!dev
I hate it when people ask me questions that are easily googleable. I'm sorry but, please, don't waste both of our time on asking things like how to make a screenshot on an iPhone...
1. I have an android
2. Hey, you know this magical thing called Google?
3. You do know it? Oh my, good for you! Now try using it, thnx.
Unfortunately, I can never say this out loud. I just silently Google for them and send them a link. Perhaps, I need to grow some balls :D
Okay, never mind, said it once in a more polite form, and the dude replied with "fuck you, you female developers are such arrogant bitches", then he unmatched me. Good story, fun times.5 -
I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.
I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...1 -
A friend came to me whether i want to do a project on c++(someone asked him to find a c++ guy).
Me needing money didn’t refuse. Even though i am a Java developer with 0 skills on c++, but wanted to give it a try.
So project started, and it was about a plugin for rhinoceros app(3d graphics app).
The plugin was simple, had some views and some services to upload a file into s3 and some api calls, not something complex..
So i ended up working on the project together with my friend(web dev).
So long story short, we had a lot of issues, but considering we both had no knowledge on c++, we were really lucky to finish the product almost on time(3 days after).
Did no memory management even though i’ve read that we have to do that by our selfs and that c++ doesn’t have garbage collector.
But the plugin worked great even without garbage collector.
Had a lot issues with string manipulation, which almost drive me crazy.
PS: did a post here before taking the project, to ask whether it is a good idea to take the project or not, had some positive and some negative replies, but i deleted the post since i thought i was breaking the NDA i signed 😂😂
PS2: just finished OCAJP 8 last week with a great score😃6 -
!dev related
My best mate and I got invited to an Adelaide based Christmas do which they flew us to free of charge (we are from Victoria).
It was an open bar so we needed up racking up an alcohol bill just shy of $1000, in the end we wound up having some people who were about twice our age trying to 'debug us' if you will.
A month or so later they called up asking for us and it was the most awkward thing I have ever experienced (story is quite a bit longer but not all of it is savoury .-.)1 -
!rant, but some kind of story
I work as a lead dev on a gmod server of a pretty big german community. With the fun stuff, there come the duty‘s to help Jr. Devs or even help people get into Developing. The part, where you help junior devs is always fun, but what I find interesting is the part where you help people learn coding. It’s not easy work, but you learn more every “lesson”. I catch myself exploring and learning something new, even if I know the topic. For me it’s a new journey every time.
Not sure if there are many people who can relate but I just wanted to tell my side on it.1 -
For those who had already followed my story here, a while ago I was in bad hands having several employers not professionally consistent (unfortunately).
Soon like any professional, I went in search of other jobs and looking for something better for me. I did several interviews with several recruiters around the world (massively trying to go to Europe).
Some never gave me feedback, they never wanted to at least respond to messages, emails or direct messages on LinkedIn.
Until one day a company whose owners are of the same nationality as mine opened the doors for me I came to Europe to work for a client of theirs and that client absorbed me in his company and today I am their CTO.
And magically all those recruiters from different nationalities appeared with the old man "hey, remember me ?! So about that interview, it really didn't work, right? But now I have another *** opportunity ***, how are you? Available for a conversation?"
I have already made several selection processes in my professional life, and I never failed to answer a candidate (that's right, everyone, even negative feedbacks) and I am proud of that. I am a dev and I still did the only job that HR should have done, it gives feedback.
With a lot of joy in my heart I say that the game has turned.4 -
So, first a bit of background:
We've got a parent class, owned by another team, and two child classes, owned by my team. One of the children is unused. (Already sounds bullshit right.)
On to the story:
6 months ago, I had to modify one of the children (add new functionality).
I try to modify the base class to add it, the senior dev in charge says "no, just add it on the child". So I do, then merge it in.
Yesterday I wake up to a high priority bug. Turns out the senior guy wants to add another child class, and wants the functionality I put in my class on the base class.
Even commented on my PR from 6 months ago asking why I didn't do that.
The fucker opened up a high priority issue assigned to me, asking ME TO DO THE CHANGE I WANTED TO DO 6 MONTHS AGO THAT HE SAID NO TO.
Fuck this shit. I have a meeting with him and my boss in an hour. My boss is pissed, I hope he tells the other guy to go fuxk himself and do the change himself.14 -
#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.
This is NOT what I signed up for.
When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.
He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.
Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.
Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.3 -
It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)
So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.
It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).
And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....
All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...
Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.12 -
Issue or Error? Rant story time!
I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.
Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.
We all though “WTF?!”
To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.
Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”rant wtf brain software development wtf is going on wtf? story time windows problems wtf wtf are you doing!6 -
Impossible deadline experience?
A few, but this one is more recent (and not mine, yet)
Company has plans to build a x hundred thousand square feet facility (x = 300, 500, 800 depending on the day and the VP telling the story)
1. Land is purchased, but no infrastructure exists (its in a somewhat rural area, no water or sewage capable of supporting such a large facility)
2. No direct architectural plans (just a few random ideas about layout, floor plans, parking etc)
3. Already having software dev meetings in attempt to 'fix' all the current logistical software issues we have in the current warehouse and not knowing any of the details of the new facility.
One morning in our stand-up, the mgr says
Mgr: "Plans for the new warehouse are moving along. We hope to be in the new building by September."
Me: "September of 2022?"
<very puzzled look>
Mgr: "Um, no. Next year, 2021"
Me: "That's not going to happen."
Mgr: "I was just in a meeting with VP-Jack yesterday. He said everything is on schedule."
Me: "On schedule for what?"
<I lay out some of the known roadblocks from above, and new ones like the political mess we will very likely get into when the local zoning big shots get involved>
Mgr: "Oh, yea, those could be problems."
Me: "Swiiiiishhhhh"
Mgr: "What's that?"
Me: "That's the sound of a September 2021 date flying by."
Mgr: "Funny. Guess what? We've been tasked with designing the security system. Overhead RFID readers, tracking, badge scans, etc. Normally Dan's team takes care of facility security, but they are going to be busy for a few weeks for an audit. Better start reaching out to RFID vendors for quotes. Have a proposal ready in a couple of weeks."
Me: "Sure, why not."1 -
!dev
Just wanna share yesterday nights story because I really really enjoyed it..
Have been to Galway with a friend.
Went to the pubs and 2 Irish girls tried to speak French - just for fun. A French guy wanted to flirt with them and said: “you British girls are so cute when you try to talk French.”
The girl completely freaked out and screamed at him: “ DONT YOU FUCKING DARE TO CALL AS BRITISH..” and the second girl started singing in the middle of all the people: “Come out ya Black and Tans, come out and fight us like a man”..
Ended with those girls trying to stop other Irish guys from beating up that French guy.
Few pubs later at 2:30am walking to the car (driver didn’t drink) when the “irish Jesus” (YouTuber) walks by and asks us if we have “something”, he really needs to get stoned 😂
Best night ever..
No offense to the British here, I assume you’re familiar with your shared history;)2 -
Well today is my last day at my current job. I have enjoyed the last 4 and a half years here and learned a lot.
This last week of my notice period has been surreal though and quiet a stark contrast to how things have been.
Before I was the "go to" person for pretty much the entire dev team even though I am hired as a front end dev (so my remit was the companies website). This included the backend devs who worked on the internal business software.
The last few days have felt like I was a "persona non-grata". Conversations that would end up being held at my desk are now held elsewhere and what few tickets I do have have been given over to others.
I knew on some level this would happen but living through it is a different story.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to the new role I am starting Monday but will certainly miss the old team very much!3 -
This happened a couple months ago, but I wanted to share this one, since it still baffles me.
We were hiring and had this weird candidate. The team said no to the guy after the interview, management still hired him and pressured us to train him, which cost us tons of hours we had to somehow squeeze in during a hot phase of our project.
After almost 3.5 weeks training he had to hand in a small component. What he handed in was brainlessly duplicated, half of the stuff in there wasn't even used, the other half wasn't working properly. At the review we asked questions about the code he handed in - he could not answer one of them.
We then had a big argument with management to let the guy go, which they eventually unhappily agreed to.
The icing on that cake of a story: Turns out, the guy was hired as a senior dev with a way higher paycheck than most of the devs on the team. Wtf?!9 -
!Dev / story
My phone starts dying gently but surely. Since last week I cannot use my jack input anymore, and thus can't listen to music in the car. I also compose music, and was eager to listen to my latest production (for reviewing purposes) in the car. In my frustrated search for a spare device with a jack, I found a pile of blank CDs instead. "Aw yiss, I can haz music in my car" I thought with a huge relieved grin.
I grabbed a CD, looked at my pc, and my grin faded instantly to an "oh" of disappointment: I deliberately did not install a CD drive in my computer.
Not losing hope, I grabbed my Mac and tried inserting my blank disk in the drive. "Clunk, clunk", the cd won't go in. "Ah silly me, I replaced that drive with a SSD". So I went looking for that spare cd drive.
After I found it, its SATA power interface was smaller than regular SATA devices, and any connectors I tried were too big. "Hmpf, ok, I'm desperate, let's remove that SSD in my Mac". So I went grabbing some screwdrivers, removed the cover lid underneath the computer, and removed two screws from the SSD casing, allowing me to lift the unit up, disconnect the cable, plug in the cd drive, flip the Mac carefully, turn it on... And burn my CDs, and finally I resetted everything back to normal, carefully removing the cd drive and closing the computer.
What one doesn't do in frustration...2 -
I always wanted to be an airforce pilot since I was a kid. Then snes came, spent a great deal of hours playing so many games. I got curious on how they were created and although I did it, I always wondered why people blow on cartridges if the game won't start. Fast forward to CS, Diablo 3, Red alert. I was fascinated whenever I type something on the console and something happened, that got me excited. Add that I was using wordstar and programming HTML/CSS in school when I was just 10-11. When I turned 12, I was programming using Borland C++. It just snowballed from there, curiosity and a series of my programs working made me focus a lot of my time talking to computers (especially when I built robots using lego mindstorms). While my classmates were having a hard tim deciding what course to take in college, I was already certain since I was just a sophomore in high school. I will write and talk to computers until I wear thick glasses.
So there it is, my dev story. Apologies for a lengthy post. 😀1 -
This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month
Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..
The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)
During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.
During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.
The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.
Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.
Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..
Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..2 -
Following situation:
6 people sitting on a table having a few beers Friday evening.
3 Devs and 3 non-Dev people. The devs were talking about stories and problems with customer service...
So far so good... Suddenly one dev came up and said:
Hey guys! I have a very funny and interesting "GoDaddy" story to tell!
The faces of the non dev people were priceless because they imagined a totally different story.....4 -
story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions
big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with
the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while
* everybody laughs *8 -
This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.
The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;
Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.
I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.
And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.
Yay. Thanks for reading :)2 -
I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.
One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .
My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:
1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)
2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))
Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.
When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"
So I messaged the CEO ...
Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?
CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.
Me: and how does one maximize value?
CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!
Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)
CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>
I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...
So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.
Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...
You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.
%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.rant measure impact motivational quotes eastern european ceo not six figure salary jealousy simon sinek4 -
Story time:
I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.
They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).
They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.
I was hired for this purpose.
It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.
He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.
I was only there three months.
In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:
- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app
It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.
It was pretty dang cool.
End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.
I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.
But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.2 -
To all the cheap bastards out there, especially those who are here for a long time, become a ++ supporter and help to keep devRant running! (Okay that might was a bit dramatic, but still, keep it running as it is)
It was mentioned by @dfox here: https://devrant.com/rants/1467574/... that the numbers of the suporters program have gone down slightly and that devRant still looses it's creators @dfox and @trogus money.
If you're working in IT, you can't tell me, that you can't spare this little! Don't be cheap.
It's a different story, if you're still in school. I can even understand, that you don't have a dime to spare as a student. But when you're working (fulltime) as dev, tester, pm, recruiter, whatever and receiving a salary, then you can afford it.
So come on! Girls, guys, this is our home. It's awesome! Show your appreciation and hit that suporter button. It's a tiny amount every month, but if we all pull together, we can cover their server costs! Become a ++ suporter.
(And don't say we should create a crowd funding campaign, where you donate once, otherwise we'll be in the same situation in a few months, a bit every month on the other hand helps in the long run!)6 -
Story && rant && dev && linux
I was using linux mint for a while... more like 5 months for work, there's this Touchpad/mouse issue in it that was driving me crazy, so basically the mouse stops responding out of nowhere in the middle of my coding and I have to restart the fucking laptop to get it back. Yeah, I tried all the solutions I could find on the Internet and nothing works.
This issue likes to fucking mess with me so much, it seems to only happen when I absolutely mustn't restart the laptop or I'm working on a task and have a tight deadline and I don't have time to waste restarting my pc.
A couple of days ago, I had this major feature I needed to release to production and the time I estimated for it and shared with my team turned out to be insufficient, so I had to work extra hours from home to finish it ... while I was working, the mouse issue returned and I had to restart my pc like 20 times that day. It was fucking frustrating and It was already midnight and all you can hear are keyboard sounds and fucks flying.
I made a promise to myself that once i finish this task, I'm gonna fucking migrate to another distro, I'm fed up with linux mint's BS. I've been putting up with it for so long it's time to move on.
Yesterday I installed Manjaro and I'm happily working on it today xD.3 -
!dev
Another tinder story from last night.
Matched with a girl, I thought she was cute and all. She texted me first, and we started talking. We kinda just clicked, had similar interests and everything. Conversation turned to musicals, she said she wanted me to come listen to one with her at some point when we were both free. I mentioned the whole story from Sunday night to her (see previous rant), and told her how the girl said I was a "rebound", but nothing actually happened. Then she changed the conversation by saying something like "rebounds normally involve sex, maybe I can make up for it".
After that the conversation got sexual. Dirty talk, nudes, everything. Talking about how hard she wanted me to fuck her and everything. That carried on until about 6 in the morning. We both decided we should go to sleep.
I woke up around 11, we talked for a few minutes, then she said she had to get ready for a doctor appointment, and I didn't think anything of it. Went to work at 2, had to go get a car from a dealership like 20 minutes away. Me and my coworker got back, I decided to check my phone and see if she messaged me or anything.
Come to find out, she basically just fucking ghosted me. Blocked me, unmatched me on tinder, the whole nine yards. No warning, nothing. 8 hours earlier she was saying how much she wanted me inside her (not paraphrasing), and now she just decided "nah fuck him altogether".
I don't fucking know what it is. It's been about 10 hours since I found out, and I just..I don't know. She could have just said "nah I don't wanna fuck" and I would have been 100% fine with that. But nope. No warning, just blocked me.
I'm not mad that she just backed out of it, I'm mad that she didn't say fucking anything about it. Like, even apart from all the sexting and stuff, I genuinely liked this girl. She was nice, cute, funny, just everything I could have asked for. And now, I'm honestly kinda sad about it. Everything seemed like it was going well (maybe all the sexting would have been better for another time in the future ya know, but I can honestly say I didn't initiate it), and now I have nothing again.17 -
Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.
The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.
Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.
The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.
A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.
I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.
I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.
Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.3 -
https://devrant.com/rants/3140022/...
So I just realised it's been a while and I haven't updated this story.
So the job mentioned in the previous post did not work out. Things were tough for a while after that but then all of a sudden I had 4 interviews back to back. I guess everyone got the 2021 budgets and suddenly knew they could afford me.
So had an interview at a small company, only 6km from my house. A week later second interview, another week later, when I had the other 3 lined up as well, third interview as they wanted to physically meet me. The first two were digital.
They also only offered me 47% of my previous salary but they said there was a salary review after probation (3 months) and another at the 6 month mark.
Another interview was for more just a general "the printer's not working" type job. I went for that interview as at the time, I'd take anything that paid enough to cover the bills. They also made me an offer for 47% of my prev salary. I turned them down as I was about to sign for the other gig. I recommended my brother and he got the job.
The monday of that week I had an interview at a bigger company. They called on 11th Nov offering almost the same as my last salary and wanted me to start on the 1st of Dec. So I took that one as it was double the other two. I then got delayed by 2 days with starting because they were having trouble getting my equipment sorted. All's well now.
It's a support job, not dev but it's internal 2nd line so at least it's not customer facing. They want to grow me into an RPA role, which I'm down for. I figure I'll kill 6 months doing that and worm my way into microservices.
The forth company, I didn't even actually for the interview, it kept on getting delayed and by the time they came op with a date, I had already signed my current contract.
Overall, the job is not what I expected but it was a godsend as I was about to sign for half as much money. Finally, I can pay all my bills, catch up on debts and even save a bit!
Thanks for the support and encouragement from those of you who have been following this story -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part III)
The next mentor is my former boss in the previous company I worked.
3.- Manager DJ.
Soon after I joined the company, Manager E.A. left and it was crushing. The next in line joined as a temporal replacement; he was no good.
Like a year later, they hired Manager DJ, a bit older than EA, huge experience with international companies and a a very smart person.
His most valuable characteristic? His ability to listen. He would let you speak and explain everything and he would be there, listening and learning from you.
That humility was impressive for me, because this guy had a lot of experience, yes, but he understood that he was the new guy and he needed to learn what was the current scenario before he could twist anything. Impressive.
We bonded because I was technical lead of one of the dev teams, and he trusted me which I value a lot. He'd ask me my opinion from time to time regarding important decisions. Even if he wouldn't take my advice, he valued the opinion of the developers and that made me trust him a lot.
From him I learned that, no matter how much experience you have in one field, you can always learn from others and if you're new, the best you can do is sit silently and listen, waiting for your moment to step up when necessary, and that could take weeks or months.
The other thing I learned from him was courage.
See, we were a company A formed of the join of three other companies (a, b, c) and we were part of a major group of companies (P)
(a, b and c) used the enterprise system we developed, but internally the system was a bit chaotic, lots of bad practices and very unstable. But it was like that because those were the rules set by company P.
DJ talked to me
- DJ: Hey, what do you think we should do to fix all the problems we have?
- Me: Well, if it were up to me, we'd apply a complete refactoring of the system. Re-engineering the core and reconstruct all modules using a modular structure. It's A LOT of work, A LOT, but it'd be the way.
- DJ: ...
- DJ: What about the guidelines of P?
- Me: Those guidelines are obsolete, and we'd probably go against them. I know it's crazy but you asked me.
Some time later, we talked about it again, and again, and again until one day.
- DJ: Let's do it. Take these 4 developers with you, I rented other office away from here so nobody will bother you with anything else, this will be a semi-secret project. Present me a methodology plan, and a rough estimation. Let's work with weekly advances, and if in three months we have something good, we continue that road, tear everything apart and implement the solution you guys develop.
- Me: Really? That's impressive! What about P?
- DJ: I'll handle them.
The guy would battle to defend us and our work. And we were extremely motivated. We did revolutionize the development processes we had. We reconstructed the entire system and the results were excellent.
I left the company when we were in the last quarter of the development but I'm proud because they're still using our solution and even P took our approach.
Having the courage of going against everyone in order to do the right thing and to do things right was an impressive demonstration of self confidence, intelligence and balls.
DJ and I talk every now and then. I appreciate him a lot.
Thank you DJ for your lessons and your trust.
Part I:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...
Part II:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483875/...1 -
GWT.
Let me explain:
Tl;dr : someone fucked up, I took shit, it was a gwt project. In a sense I don't hate GWT because of the framework itself but because how I was introduced and forced to "work" with it.
Context:
Was working as a paid intern at a small company there were 3 devs 2 interns and one senior employee that only worked from home handling the shit ton of legacy VB6 code he wrote over several year and a boss with no technical knowledge. (Other unimportant people as well)
I was working with their DBA (cool dude) because I was writing statistic and report generating software.
Story:
The other intern was tasked of doing a gwt app that was supposed to use a input file.
Rather than asking the user to upload it with a file picker (I guess they exist in gwt I didn't got to dig in the framework) he was trying to load the file with a http request directed at the same host the app was running on.
It did not work.
Then his contract was other and the app was left in an unfinished state.
The boss then tried to have the app deployed, the remaining dev dodged the bullet invoking some bullshit because he was clearly incapable of doing it.
So it fell on me, couldn't deploy the app because it was not even close to working.
Tried to fix things and make it work.
Turns out he thought it would take me 3h to deploy when I clearly explained that the other guy didn't finish the app.
Boss got mad, threatened to ruin my studies and my future career.
Couldn't because my uni had my back.
Didn't want to see me anymore.
Couldn't break my contract.
Told me to work from home for the end of my internship.
I got 3 weeks early vacation and got paid, fuck him, fuck GWT, fuck his company.
Still got well marked for the internship as my supervisor was the DBA who was happy with my work.
Morality:
Don't let your intern unsupervised, don't let your main dev work from home when you don't know shit, don't piss me off and send me work from home. -
I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.
The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.
Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.
But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.
Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.
Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.5 -
Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.
This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.
Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.
To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!
I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.7 -
A /thread.
I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.
This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.
START:
As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.
The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.
These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.
These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.
And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????
While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.
500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.
A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH
In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.
EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.
This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.
ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???
are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???
Fuck You.
This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.
Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???
Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?
Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.
1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.
2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.
????
This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.
Will post part 2 later.8 -
This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.
Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).
But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.
So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.
The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.
Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.
I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.
I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?9 -
ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev
code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev
- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups
1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.
2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.
d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3
day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.
day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?
🥲🫡5 -
!rant !dev Still funny office story
This happened last november. I decorated my desk for halloween (plastic bats, vampire stickers, more bats, a plastic raven, a little skeleton, etc). I also put a photo of Chris Pohl (vocalist from Blutengel, a electro-goth band).
I decided to remove all the decorations except for the raven and the Chris Pohl‘s photo.
One day, a partner and I were cheking out the code, and she suddenly saw that photo.
She: Oh, who is he? is he your boss?
Me: What?
S: Yes, is he your direct boss?
M: No, you‘re my boss
S: No, no, is he the vampire who you report your activities with?
M: Oh! XD No, it‘s Chris Pohl, Blutengel‘s vocalist
S: Mmm... he‘s pretty weird... his eyes...
and then, she got back to her desk.
That‘s it, continue reading rant stories 😅
P.D. What‘s the weirdest thing you have on your desk? 🤔7 -
Am I crazy ?
Right now we have an API which returns a full planning for a week for 300 employees with indicators (Like "late", "may be postponed" etc) in 4 seconds.
I have a pressure, people telling me it's not fast enough.
I honestly think it is fast.
In order of data it'a around 100 MB of JSON. AND you can do actions on the whole set if needed.
Long story short, I think 4 seconds to get all that data is pretty great. Customers think they should have it instantly.
(Never mind the whole filtering system at thier disposal, they literall only lod the full set and then MANUALLY scroll (Yes there is a quick search box)).
What can I do more ????? cache that ? I can. But they also expect that any changed value is reflected.
And we fucking do it. While you are on the page there is a SignalR conenxion created and notified when any of data is changed and updates it on front. Takes around 500 ms.
Apprently "too slow".
I honestly don't see what we can do more with our small 4 dev team.
Give me 56 developpers I can do something, but right now I'm proud of result.14 -
What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.
He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.
A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.
At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.
Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.
He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.
The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.
Really scary. -
!dev but is somewhat tech related
So I was like 7. I was hanging out after school with a friend who's mom worked there. We were in her office. So there was a song l really liked are the time (Song of the South by Alabama) and it was on a CD.
So I put that CD in the computer and play my favorite song. Well literally 15 seconds after a line in the song, which was "Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth," played, my cousin who was in another teacher's office decided to
prank call us.
What did they say when I picked the phone up and said hey? "Sir your order for 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes is ready to be delivered."
I nearly shit a brick as I slammed the phone down and started freaking out. I ran to where he was and bust in there to see themn laughing really hard
Now I look back and laugh, but I genuinely
thought that by somehow playing that song ordered a lot of potatoes.
And the wild part of the story is that of literally all the things they could say, they chose sweet potatoes. Like it still blows our minds that that's the choice he made.5 -
[story of your first dev project] - i really think there should be a headline like that for wk rants
Anyways, it was a while back, le college teacher approached my friend and me asking if we wanted to do a project. We said sure, it was a medium sized data analysis project. We got the specs with a lot of formulas, basically implement them all and make a web frontend, thats it. Took like a year but we did it. Few months later teacher is furious because the calculations didnt give him data that he expected (by expect i mean he thought that a distribution formula would accurately yield 200+ data fields from around 4) and blamed it on us. Not the retard other professor who fucked up half of the formulas. Ok.1 -
Back on dev rant, been a while. Been two Jobs later...
Was extremely underpaid at the previous job.
Started a new venture two weeks ago. Long story short this company outsources their developers to other companies. The job I applied for is 'Junior Developer'. JUNIOR DEVELOPER!!!
Yet I'm being outsourced as an 'Intermediate Developer'.
Honestly I like the challenge, but businesses need to treat their employee's properly and not manipulate their young developers so they can get more money for cheap.
Really now, I've been dealing with this everywhere I go and it pisses me off.
On top of that I have no Senior Developer. I am the only developer. The other six, including my boss, are DBA's and don't know C#1 -
If anyone here remembers the first 2 part rant story I posted then you will know that I got unceremoniously laid off by a company that tried to blame me for their bad decissions at one point
Well, a couple of days ago I found out that the senior dev and the owner took a trip to San antonio tx in order to try and look for growth opportunities and more developers. The thing is, being a Mexican company they thought they could go away with half assed solutions and mexican pay charts (to them it is completely reasonable to pay a dev with a degree and experience close to 13.99 an hour) just to find out that shit like that does not fly with American professionals. After I left, no one would monitor their .net implementations , the lead developer being a new php developer himself and not knowing much about .net had to take care of much of the things they had to work with, their API made no sense and it was damn near impossible to connect their services to a mobile platform unless you had ninja like skills and ingenuity.
I hold no grudges and really wish them the best, but it pleases me to know that they know now that their way of doing things is not standard in the U.S. now that makes me happy. -
!!!rant
Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.
I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.
I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.
My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.
The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.
Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.
That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.2 -
many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!
you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.
It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.
It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.
Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!
Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.3 -
For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.3
-
Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.
The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.
Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.
That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.
The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.
The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files
If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.
Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.1 -
Man I am tired of my company's dogshit software release process.
We have to commit to fucking estimates for 6 months (2 quarters), SQA shadowing dev by 2 weeks, and freaking estimates and work done at the end are not even close. And then we call it a minor release. These shitty estimates are based on requirements that basically say "we want feature x, plz make it work". It's some fucked up agilefall garbage that does not work for shit.
We rush like motherfuckers during the final weeks because estimates are bullshit but we are still expected to be done with every story points which somehow are days instead of other better metrics.
I swear this fucking bullshit has been designed by the board so they could plan their money entries based on the software release.
The only reason this company actually still holds itself up is because the engineers are good at their job.
Go fuck yourself high management. -
Well I guess my first dev project will probably end up as my last (For good reason).
Not long after dippig my toe in the programming world by messing with Minecraft mods, I decided to take a gamemaking class at my high school which introduced me to gamemaker, straight away I was able to use my java knowledge to sort of become the go to person for help, so while everyone was following tutorials for a basic pac man clone I had started work on the final asignment which was to create a fundamentally playable game.
Taught myself how to use spritesheets, tilesets, external libraries and the like and decided, fuck it lets make an RPG based around looting dungeons, ended up decidng on the title 'Plunder', since then the project grew and grew in scope to the point it is now unrecognisable with my goals as of now compared to then.
Now that project has been placed on hold as the story and world just grew in scope to the point I litteraly do not have the knowledge or time to actually work on the game, so I've started converting that world into a book which is slowly motivating me to almost slice up the game and work on individual pieces.
But considering the drain and effort that has gone into this, pretty sure IF (And that's a big if) I ever do release this game that took basic concept 9 years ago, don't think I would ever be able to top that achievement.
Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.
(Just for shits and gigs I might try and did up some old projects related ot this and post them in the comments if anyone may be interested ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) -
I have a co-worker who won’t stop “refactoring” our codebase. He will go on a long tangent — under the guise of working on a proper story — and then reveal proudly after a few days that he now introduced a new middle-layer into the code which will help us such and such.
I have never seen any benefit from this. I think sometimes cleaning up variable names is nice, but a lot of the things just add noise and complexity. He’s a junior dev, I’m a senior dev. My progressional opinion is that he is doing a bad job. Management doesn’t know the full extent and the lead programmer scolds him every now and then but in the end let’s the code changes pass code review. “It has already been implemented so what’s the harm”.
Then the rest of us are stuck with horrible merge conflicts. I recently noticed that some new business-important unit tests that I wrote were mysteriously gone. Oops — lost in some misguided refactoring I guess. I’m assuming they were failing after the refactor, so clearly they had to go... Fortunately the underlying logic still works I think.
His main tactic in all of this seems to be to just use argumentative stamina. He will lose discussion after discussion but doesn’t seem to care. He’ll just talk and talk. And the in the end the lead tech gives in. And/or doesn’t have the energy to catch the error introduced.
I swear, the company would be better off without him. Maybe even better if we keep paying him but he just cleans the toilets instead. Sometimes I almost believes he gets up in the morning to come to work and just fuck with people all day.2 -
When I started this job 4 months ago, I was given a grace period of a week to "get into the groove of the code". I asked the lead dev where on pulse (intranet) the documentation was, he laughed and then resumed what he was doing. I shrugged it off and continued scrolling through the code.
A week later, working on a story, I'm stuck at why a particular function exists. I say "it would be nice if there was documentation, where is that anyway?". Lead dev replies, "one thing you should know about this company, there is no documentation unless it's API related".
Last month's retro, 80% of our (mine and lead dev) problems were related to a lack of kt, I laughed.3 -
This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.1 -
Here is a story about 5 years of my life.
My studies had little to do with web. I did embedded systems (architecture and software) but quickly realized that I couldn't see myself living my life in my homecoutry and that my degree would be worth little to no more than shit elsewhere in the world. That was on my 3rd year in uni.
I liked coding so I decided to pursue computer science, then web development. For that, your degree mattered little.
From then on, when I wasn't in class I was doing some coding.
This allowed me to get short (2 months) internships in Mobile and web development, 4 in total.
Doing so I had made it so that my professors would allow me to do my graduation project in web and mobile dev. That project having ended, I secured a long (1year and a half) internship in Mumbai India doing web for a big consulting company. Having finished that I headed to Belgium for my current job. All with having no to little financial resources except what I could come up with.
"I'm proud of all the efforts it took to make it" is what I think sometimes but what is it that I made? I realized my first objective which is to be on the international job market, but now that I genuinely love software I realize that I didn't really make anything I can be proud of working as a consultant. And having worked on many things but not a lot on practically anything, it's getting hard to do something else.
I'm hoping for devranters insight on how I should proceed.1 -
I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.
They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.
I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.
It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.
You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.
And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.
Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.
Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.9 -
I can be manipulated. Yes, I’m now more resilient to manipulation than ever because I’m autistically good at recognising patterns, yet I’m not perfect.
For a manipulator, there is just one problem — now and then, my disorder obliterates my entire worldview, together with the foreign manipulative framework, so I can start with a blank slate. It protects me. Yes, this protection is akin to our body’s “we’ll boil all the germs in our own blood” tactic that instead of defining winners and losers only leave survivors, yet the force is unstoppable. You cannot secure the land that is hit by a tornado every three months.
That inner Nemesis is so strong that it even defeated a complex, almost fractal-like manipulation of my own mother that I lived in since birth, leaving her with a wound that will never heal. Wannabe manipulator exes didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t care if that force destroys me or not, as during that time, there is no “me”.
About my mom, long story short, she told me “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming-out. Full story is here:
- part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4923052/...
- part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4924040/...7 -
!dev related
"Ah! Ah! Ah! AL QUEDA!!"
The opening theme song to the soon-to-be-a-hit docuromance-cum-comedy-on-ice, called "kidnapped-and-brainwashed in egypt: berry barrows story, starring samantha kaffir the isis headchopper, as herself."
Written by Adam sandler.
I wonder if the mods ever think I just write these posts to see the most unusual combination of tags possible.
There has to be orphan tags out there, tags associated with only a single post. Like half of them are probably because of me.8 -
So in my current workplace we have an IT department of... 7-8 people, with 3 developers (or 2.5, but that's debatable)
The oldest dev is old school, over 65 now came from Visual Basic, of course, and is a father of department's director - this is a story in of itself, but besides the point of this rant
Anywho, this dev is of course in this workplace way longer than me, and historically is in charge of finance and Microsoft CRM systems.
Guess the reason why Microsoft CRM was chosen at all in the company?
Because dev said he is not good with creating web forms from scratch, and apparently with MSCRM you can craft them without much trouble.
Yes, that's it, our MSCRM is used as a web application with custom forms that store data into custom DB tables that dev creates... nothing to do with actual CRM use cases.3 -
So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.
I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...
I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.
Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.
I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.
Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.
Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."
It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...
The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...
Seriously frustrating some times...2 -
(Apprentice dev)
Cut me some slack ;)
Learning JavaScript for a few days To a week to familiarise myself with it and really get to grips with it.
Then have to go on to jQuery which is a lot a fun I must say, very easy structured framework to learn and found myself getting really engrossed into it.
Now for the past few days I've been learning angular1 which is a really cool framework, can be a little bit complicated at times but it is learnable
Moral of the story is you never stop learning! Which isn't a bad thing by the way I'm finding web developing a lot of fun!7 -
I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".
Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.
Why thank you.
Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.
Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."
It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.1 -
Long story ahead
Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.
Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.
I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).
So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”
This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.
Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.
Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?1 -
Before getting my dev job, I taught myself some java and made a program to assist myself in the position I was working. It was borderline a keyloger, but it helped me with a lot of repetive tasks. Long story short, our security didn't dig that I installed something they didn't approve (I probably could have just not made it an exe and gotten away with it but my boss wanted it as an exe to run on other computers) they didn't know exactly what it was. I totally understood the security concerns though but they sure gave me a fucking heart attack right before my interview for my first dev job! Was seriously worried I was going to be fired and miss my big chance to make it in with out a degree.2
-
My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are. -
Has to be writing.
Not exactly a better dev, per se, but close enough.
I used to read books and imagine all sorts of possible scenarios to different events. One day, after replaying the Mass Effect series, I began to think about alternate ways to end it. Opened Libre Office and started hammering away. 10 minutes later, I had an outline. Never actually finished that story, but the spark was there.
I began noting down outlines and creating structures for interesting games and books; that soon carried over to my work. Before and after every meeting with my boss, I'd have outlined how the meeting was going to go, and how it actually went. Gave me a sense of order.
This in turn helped me be a better manager (I work with a team of 9), and I tell you guys, it couldn't have come at a better time. I had been promoted quite suddenly, and had been fucking up quite a bit at the start.
I had my shit in order. My team was happier and more efficient. My boss was happy. I was given bigger goals and tighter deadlines. I fucking loved it.
All this, from writing some fanfiction. (there, I said it!)
P. S: I stared at this for a solid minute, still not sure how it all came together.1 -
TL;DR Shit programer trying pass off stealing code as "Recycling"
Backstory:
Client hires senior dev. He lied and knows nothing. Has been causing havoc in production since day 1. My crusades to defend production have been without much success.
Since he wants to LITERALLY put his name on every big project, he finds any reason to make a new version of it (or make a slight astetic modification) to say he did something.
The client doesn't know or care about the programming side of things. Which means it is incredibly difficult to get him to understand the issues this brings. Not to mention that the "senior dev" is acting as a consultant to the client, altering the facts.
Story:
The piece of shit, is trying to make a new version of a big project. It was originally made by my mentor. Again, if you are using someone else's work to complete your own, I don't care. But if you take 99% of another person's work and then say...
"I took and existing project, which was similar to what I'm trying to make. Then I modified it to fit our needs."
Fuck you man!
You took someone else's work. Now you're trying to present it as your own. No references to our team. Again, there is literally nothing new about this project. It's exactly like the original. The client didn't even ask for this.3 -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
Reminder: if you were tasked with breaking down a work item/story, and your breakdown involved so much incorrect, outdated, and downright incomprehensible gibberish that, when you were approached by another dev, you had to rewrite the whole thing -- after rewriting it into a form that includes almost none of the original and still contains errors and omissions, you do not get to announce to everyone that you were 'helping' said dev to 'understand'. If you do this you are not some machevellian linguistic genius, you are just an asshole who is going to get found out for your bullshit sooner or later.7
-
Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"
"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"
"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"
"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."
"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."
"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."
"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."
"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."
"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"2 -
So I came from the Portal modding scene. And I know most other ones who did similar stuff.
Now there was a cool looking upcoming free mod and I somehow came in touch with the lead Dev. Now somehow I managed to get into the developer team and me and my girlfriend we're part of it. We got a level name and should start mapping it (TL;DR, we never finished one because we didn't know what to do).
I actually made a website for the mod. But sometime later we both left the team because the lead Dev (12 yo btw) was "hiring" (working for passion not money btw, that's fine in this case) everyone he got in touch with. They had no team structure just a huge list of people and a long story script. I'd guess the mod won't ever be done, although it has made it through steam greenlight (R.I.P greenlight). Just because they're not working on a team. -
if (rant !== story)
System.out.println("Dev rant story time")
A coworker mentioned to me that I might have depression as part of my personality. They think this because I always feel at my best when I'm being active/productive (programming) or doing meditation practice. I thought that was strange.
Bit of a brief background, I've had depression since I was about 12 and I still get small bouts of it into my late 20's. I've been on antidepressiants for a very short time and I've been through talk therapy multiple times. It was a lot worse then it is now and I believed I have it under control.
My coworker thinks that I ended up dealing with it for so long that it has become a part of my personality so I don't notice it actively. The whole thing has left me sort of, I don't know, jaded. Or maybe just afraid that it could be true?
I thought about how I have a very all or nothing attitude in life. I don't think about getting a house because I don't put too much faith in myself towards having a family. Or how I have to make very radical changes to my life immediately if something starts triggering the new depressive episode. If I can't code or read at night I'll hope in the car and drive with no destination in mind for several hours just to keep my mind at ease.
I don't know. It sorta upsets me because I always thought of depression as something you need to "get out of", but now I wonder if my case was severe enough that I've adapted my life around it.9 -
I need help!
This is gonna be a long question/story.
I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.
I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.
Here's a summary:
My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.
He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.
He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).
The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".
This was a month and a half ago.
He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.
After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.
Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.
His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.
So basically he has close to no options.
Now to where I come into all of this:
I want to help him.
I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.
If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.
I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.
Now to my request:
how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)
Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?
Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?
If you've read all this... Thank you :)17 -
I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:
1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.
2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.
3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.
4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.
5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.
6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.
7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.
8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.
9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.
10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.
Except…
Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.
11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.
Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Two cents.1 -
Story time;
Major project, multi million budget, huge business and IT coordination, board level status updates, meeting started back in March 2018 for a Go Live of Aug 2019.
Based on draft requirements (and experience) I request the test environment be built for half of the work. Turns out that no one told Server Eng and they are out of space in both dev and prod until Q2 of 2019. We went from Green to Red because a Service Request.5 -
its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.
we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)
after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)
we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..
[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]
..because we were not using VS code to find things in files
HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE
ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?5 -
I handed a technical story to my dev to work on, including an example of how it has been done elsewhere in the system. He comes back and told me it does not look that simple. Well yeah, that's your job to solve the problem.
-
the more i think about the effort i've poured into various projects and products over the years, for clients or my own, and how little its payed overall... its quite depressing (people probably understimate, but i'm talking years upon years, not all at at time, but month spurts where i'd be done for the day at 7 PM or later) 12 hour days are easy to hit quickly when you are cranking out software
if you need an application requirement i've probably built it before, probably most of them twice
everyone tells me "it will pay off in the long run!" or "its great you have so much experience and built those different things!"
great to say, but i'm not getting payed for it / see no benefit from it
not fun to think about
and every place i go i know its gonna be filled with the workaday dev bros who are just there for the paycheck, have no passion, and who don't even know what TypeScript is (true story about that TypeScript one, i shit you not, occured only last year, and the guy is a frontend dev)
😩😩😩
where do i belong devrant?15 -
It's hard for me sometimes to tell the difference between a dev who actually got fucked and a dev who just didn't know how to budget their time correctly...
I've had freelance web friends who will go out partying twice a week... I've also had freelance web friends who shutter themselves indoors the moment a project of significance comes up. Both types have complained to me about crunch time.
Obviously i can't tell a whole story from just a devRant thread, but for a select few of them i really feel like this person just had no idea what they were doing, were negligent, or estimated their time way under the cut.
I'm not calling anyone out, I'm just saying that when you post about crunch when the item is something fairly obvious you should've been able to catch within the first week of the project, it makes me doubt your sensibilities.
Obviously I'm not making any judgements or saying that i know even half of what you know about the project and the job, but I'm just saying a little more detail couldnt hurt...7 -
[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
I really don’t get it, how can most people just so easily accept shortcomings and not even try for a second to improve the situation?
It drives me crazy ...
story:
I’m debugging an issue with a colleague over screen sharing, both of us have huge 4k screens. Colleague sets a breakpoint, popup opens „do you want to switch to debug perspective“, clicks on yes for the umpteenth time. Breakpoint halts, IDE is full of open and unrelated panels, he doesn’t even see the whole line if code but still grabs the scrollbar every friggin time and scrolls left, right, left, right, ...
changes some code, popup that hot code reload didn’t work, clicks ok for the umpth time here as well, although it has a don’t show again checkbox, like every frigging dialog in eclipse.
how can people work like this, it’s driving me nuts. Am I the only sane dev here??
Other colleague has weird message in the browser console (angular). I ask whats the problem and if he can’t just set a breakpoint to analyze the situation. No thats not possible, he says, instead he’s going to add a return statement to check how far the code execution goes ...
I wonder sometimes if I‘m already dead and have to suffer in dev hell for an unknown reason ... 🤔 -
In my country there is a huge economy deflation.
Like 1 year ago 1USD used to be 1500 pounds.
Nowadays 1USD is more like 7800 pounds.
Wait a second let me explain more into details the whole flow.
There are 3 to 4 prices we are being dealing with:
* Official Bank price that refuse to change the base price: 1500 pounds
* Bank ATM machines that exchange your dollars on a 3900 pounds per usd
* Black market: 7800 pounds managed by random mobile apps that spread rumors
* Foreigners currency: the only way to grab your reach dollars.
Long story short:
Whenever you want to win extra cash, you ask any of your relatives to lend you money from any bank in the world ( foreigners currency), try to ask in black market who is willing to exchange, you meet, you check on any mobile app what's the current price and you do the exchange.
So in order buy USD dollars on a low price, devs build 2 mobile apps one that send a POST request to change the amount in DB and a second one fo retrieve this value.
So whenever he want to buy dollars he change the value to the lowest. And whenever you want to sell the dev raise the amount slowly. So far the government has no regulations over developers why? Because the one behind the forensic are at least 60 to 70 years old more like their informations are dead.
So we struggle.11 -
Today someone shared one of @trogus his devRant comics on my best friends Discord community with people from her stream. Now I'm in doubt if that asshole (another story) is here or if he saw it somewhere else. As far as I know he isn't a dev.
But if he is here: Still waiting for your apology Neko3 -
Hi All !!!
Woah this is my first Post after 3 years not opening this website.
i don't know why.
but maybe between 2017-2020 my live got better so i don't think will have any Rant again.ahahaha *kidding
but today i see email, that i got sticker from devRant, woah i think i will go to devRant again.
wow devRant more cool than before , i don't think this website still open. i just want to check it. i forgot my password too. but luckily still got an access to my email.
So i want to tell a story about this weekly Rant,
Family Support? what the he** is it.
my family only look for money.
at my first job finding, i always pushed for find work in Factory/Oil/Goverment that will give a BIG money.
my first reaction to this i tell i won't do that. but overtime i think i will not talk about it again.
i just want to get Dev Job anywhere.
i don't know if this is the meaning of passion or something like that.
but from the first time , i try hard to get job only is software development.
and hey Maybe my Pray Listened by Almighty God.
so i got my first job as Fullstack developer that luckily accept me as self taught software developer. i don't have any formal education.
actually i only learn software dev from Lynda.com(not promotion) .
i learn algorithm, pseudocode . then i got passed the test of psudocode.
Then because the money is good in there. my parent just accept my first job. not complaining again till now..
maybe this is what they called ikigai??
i love software development so much....
but still i always have a Rant every day about it.
someday you like it, someday you hate it.
someday yo miss it, someday you regret it.
maybe that what is called Love.Damn... -
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me3 -
!dev
Well, it's time for a personal thing today, because I was hit with some shit today that I'm still kinda shook about.
So, as a bit of introduction (I've mentioned these in previous posts before but whatever, not everybody sees everything): I'm currently a senior in high school and I'm in the school's band (neither are too related, but a bit of setup for this story). I've been talking to a girl lately and I think I like her. She's fun to be around, kinda silly, and just great overall. She makes me happy and I like it. Her name is Grace, her sister's name is Taylor (just to avoid confusion later)
In the school's band, we play at home football and basketball games. Today was a basketball game. Normally when there's a game I just stay after school because I don't want to go home and come back a couple hours later, plus I like to hang out with some of the other people who do the same thing.
Grace was staying after for the game too. I was talking to her in the band room, kinda flirting a bit (on an unrelated side note, she's ticklish). Someone comes in the band room because he wanted to practice a bit, to get ready for the game. She's going back and forth between the band room and somewhere else (not too sure where she was). At one point I left to get a drink, come back, she's sitting next to him, just talking. I join the conversation, and her sister (Taylor) comes in, to get ready herself.
I go over to talk to Taylor for a minute. She looks at Grace and the other guy, then looks at me and just says "separate them". To which I said "...what? why? how?"
Me and her go outside the band room and she tells me that basically the guy has been cheating on his girlfriend with Grace, and it's just hurting everyone involved, except him basically. His girlfriend doesn't seem to fucking care, and he's done it before with someone else. (The other person actually like vaguely mentioned it to me a long time ago, but I didn't really know what she was talking about until now)
So basically, dude's cheating on his girlfriend with Grace. And I like Grace. Honestly don't know what the fuck to do. I want to do something because whenever something's going on with Grace, her sister always trusts me to make sure shit goes right. Some times when Grace wouldn't eat, her sister would always talk to me and ask me to make sure she actually eats.
Fuck guys. This stuff has been on my mind for the past ~4 hours and I don't know what to do, or if I even can do anything about it. I just needed to get this shit off my chest.
Sorry for the long personal story. Some parts I didn't really articulate very well. Honestly it was more of me just getting everything into words.4 -
The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.
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!Dev
So the winter break is over and im supposed to be in my uni but no! It is flu time!
Since a human is a machine, and we have certain tools to fix it when it misbehaves lets try to debug that problem! I will tell you a story how
it ended.
*4 days ago*
Both of my parents return from a trip, dad is horribly sick (windpipe infection) so i isolate myself in my room, put on a mask when i have to be near him and wash my hands 3 times i leave my room.
Nope that didnt fucking work, the next day i get flu symptoms(high temp, fatigue, musle and joint pain)
Nothing too bad i can live with it, so i took paracetamol and called it a day.
But im still pissed at my dad for being a fucking idiot and walking everywhere in the house coughing everywhere...
The next day (yesterday)
Took paracetamol again but this time i got a stuffed and runny nose... So i take nasal decongestants, and... they dont work at all...
Today
I wake up with stuffy and cloged nose again. Aparently those nasal drugs i have been taking only make your nose less runny by drying it up, making it 10000x more difficult to unclog your nose...
like wtf? So if you have a runny and stuffed nose you have to choose which one is better?! Nah i take nasal drugs again and clean my nose with saline water, so far so good!
Also paracetamol started working weaker and weaker... What the hell is wrong with me? Im trying to solve 1 problem and my body finds another one! Curing a human is like coding a app, it will go to shit sooner or later.12 -
From the day I was born,
Till the day I'll die!!
Every action that I perform,
Is a party if my sin!!
This may not be story of a Dev,
But this is the story of mine!! -
Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius
He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.
So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.
I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.1 -
Devrant lost it content, cuz there is nothing more to complain about. Everyone has already told their story. So normies come to fill the void. People who know nothing about technology except getting likes. Mostly with lame to mediocore posts that are rather far fetched in order to be called dev related.
Also a lot of good ppl seem to vanish over time. AlexDeLarge, Alice, Jase, Linuxxxx (thou he's back for now) and dfox/trogus.
Looks like we are soon going to hit a devrant depression.4 -
This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.
So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).
Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.
I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.
At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.
Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):
I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently
And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)
What would be the best way forward guys?
I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):
One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)
The db.t3.small postgres database
The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting
AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification
And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.
Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??
Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?
Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome3 -
My worst mistake was to not follow the commit process one time. I was multitasking a lot and forgot to run the tests for one of the commits I made. Next thing I know the whole Dev team started complaining that the Head of the branch was all messed up and blaming me. Long story short, it wasn't my change but I had to take the bullet and revert it for not following the process. It was deserved. Process is just as important as writing the code.
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I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.
characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)
tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL
story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.
at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.
i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.
on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!
All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume -
Screw Scrum, screw it very much. Is it a task or a story? Oh let's make it a story to track points. What are points, really? *20 minute grilling always follows* Well they're kind of a roundabout way of talking about time without talking about time, mkay? But last time 2 points took you a day, what gives now? What do you mean points are for internal use, but how will management plan ahead for next quarter? Ok, let's mix in all those new people, and propotionately bump the expectation for the sprint, mkay? Yeah, they did 34 points per sprint over there, we'll just add those in. Oh, and by the way, after the 4-day estimation session we had where everyone was seizuring, I scheduled us at 645 points for the coming quarter, mkay? Don't worry, I added 15% for the "unexpected dtuff" so you're safe. Fuck you scrum, scrum-fall, whatever you are. Lost a dev lead role once for being honest about it after a year with a team that loved me, and projects completed more or less on time. Been reconsidered for a dev lead role for being honest about it in another place. Somebody else peddle this kool-aid, this one prefers a walk-on role in the wall to a lead role in the cage.5
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I keep seeing news story after news story talking about the progress we’re making in AI and how there are not enough developers to fill the jobs in demand for it. I tossed my alternate career choice of aerospace over two decades ago because there were no interesting career paths in what I was capable of doing (not much because I suck at math). And here I am 22 years deep into a Web Dev career that I feel is going to be completely obsolete well before my retirement age. I either need to do the impossible and get good at advanced math so I can even understand the very basics of AI or I need to win the lottery.1