It feels stupid to see a simple google dork returning the list of your mistakes.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

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

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

*rants to some people I met in a cafe about how irresponsible making a ground rail live is*

Girl: "well people do make mistakes, right"
Me: "but they shouldn't! It's civil engineering ffs!"
Girl: "that doesn't change the fact that it's impossible for people to not make mistakes"

*realizes that I'll have to explain redundancy*

Me: "okay, so I have 2 mail servers. If I make an inevitable mistake, during an update or so, it only affects one of the servers but not the other one. So service is uninterrupted."
Girl: "that's far too complicated and technical.. explain it more easily."
Me: "alright, what job do you have"
Girl: *tells her job*
Me: "alright, so imagine that you get sick or go on a holiday or something. When there's someone else in the company that's got the same skills, they can ensure that the job gets done regardless. That's redundancy."
Girl: "aah, still too complicated!!"

What the fuck?! I removed all of the technical stuff and it's still too complicated?! How willfully ignorant or plain stupid can you be?!! Well fuck her then, but not in the way of taking her home. Now guess why I don't really like the muggles in my town. Fucking idiots!!!

"But muh BuzzFeed, conspiracy theories, deferring updates because they hog my WiFi, and casual games on my iPhone"

FUCK!!! FUCK PEOPLE!!!

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

!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.

Rather than singling out one person, I wanna present what I see as incompetent/stupid/ignorant:
- no will to learn
- failure to follow the very specific instructions & later asking for help when they FUBR sth & not even knowing what they did to fuck up in the first place
- asking how to solve stuff, then ignoring the suggestions & doing sth totally against recommendations
- failure to remember most basic stuff, especially if not writing it down to look at later when needed
- failure to check logs & 'google' stuff before asking why something isn't working the way they want it
- after two weeks, asking me how feature xy works, mind you they coded it, not me
- asking me why they did something in a specific way - WTF, am I a mind reader?! Who designed that crap?! Me or you?!!
- being passive/aggressive & snarky when told to do something or being asked why isn't it done already
- not testing their shit properly
- not making backups when upgrading (production) servers
- not checking the input value, no validation.. even after many many debacles on production with null ref exceptions
- failure to admit they fucked up
- not learning from (their) mistakes

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

When you spent the whole day programming in Swift and your mom says that she fucked up her windows 7 machine and you gotta make a clean install (I hate fixing stupid mistakes made by non tech users)

FUCK! agshdklgdahgisdahl;k!

I just spent 45 FUCKING MINUTES debugging try to figure out WHY THE HELL a function that is supposed to return either a pointer to a valid object OR ZERO if a valid object is not found, was RETURNING FUCKING EIGHT!

Then I saw it... I typed:
nodeList[index];
instead of:
return nodeList[index];

It took me looking at a stack trace and a disassembly of the function to realize this.

Can't wait for this three-day weekend...

I hate this trend of making a video out of every bit of information or tutorial you can find. Videos are slow, I cannot properly skip forward to the part I need and the people making these videos are hellbent on not editing out their mistakes to "be more genuine" or something fucking stupid like that.

I want some good old text-based guides. I want docs, READMEs and the like. I don't want to hear you coughing and spitting on your ultrawide monitor for 30 minutes only to find out what I need to know is in video 4 of your ongoing paid series.

I used to think my coworkers are stupid. Now I believe they are purposely making mistakes just to piss me off.

Men. Live with it.

(Stupid mistakes that kept me from sleeping.. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Lesson learned: Sleep.)

I did some grave and irreversible mistakes in my life

- Never gathered enough courage to mingle with women when I was younger and now the hope is lost

- Compromised my values and mental wellness when I met a narcissistic bitch

- Did not invest money wisely when markets were sailing low and allowed that good sum to sit in bank

- Did not plan health and term insurance at early age when premiums could have been low

- Out of fear, did not follow my gut to purchase gold because my father was acting crazy (or else my money would have been doubled)

- Did not plan my taxation well (or until now would have paid almost zero tax)

- Did not define strict boundaries and allowed people to overstep (or else I would have better friends and family relationships)

- Did not quit my job early and stuck with low paying shit with negative learning, for years (or else I would have grown exponentially)

Thankfully few things I did right are, spending more time with my mom and learning from my mistakes.

I hope I don't make such stupid life choices again.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

Worst advice about programming...
My discussion with my company sistem admin :
Me : you must always think that users are dumb and will make mistakes (like putting letters when db saves as number)
He : users must learn, if they make such mistakes its their fault.

My claim: I learned early in school to always assume that users are stupid and will always find bugs and exploits by coincidence. So protect your code from bad imput

Do you ever wonder if you got promoted to senior developer too early? I keep making stupid mistakes that get picked up by more junior developers at code review I need to up my game

Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.

Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...

Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!

How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.

Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.

You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.

New episode on my clients being morons.

Got a call this morning:
Client: hello, we've got a problem here...
Me: tell me about it
C: well... Do you remember the 1200 account we loaded last week ?
Me: yes? What's wrong, we tested them, everything was alright.
C: yeah... But we just noticed we loaded them in the wrong status... Fix that!
Me: easy, we clear the database and load the correct data back.
C: NO WAY! We already worked on 3 accounts. Don't want to lose any of that. Just change the status, it's easy
Me: well not really, there's a lot more going on when you go from one status to another.
C: Don't care, just do it

So... now I need to delete the bad data, checking nothing else gets impacted in the application. And then reload that same data with the proper status this time.

As weird as this sounds like, this is the reason why I love my job. You get challenges like that every single day.

Hooked up a monitor directly to a server that wouldn't boot. Fixed the server. Unplugged the server instead of the monitor. At least it was already out of the load balancer? Oops.

So... I had this assignment. I was chill, had plenty of time, so I wasted hours playing videogames and also spent some learning programming. Then, at 3 am, after spending 2 hours leveling my first character in runescape, I gaze through the clock on my pc and notice the date was the 9th, the assignment was due tomorrow! SHIT

I RUSHED TO WORK AND SPENT THE WHOLE NIGHT CODING (it was for a programming class I took at the uni) HOURS OF HOURS OF STUPID MISTAKES MADE OUT OF SLEEPYNESS.

Until I made it.

I send the assignment, everything is cool. I watch the clock a last time before going to bed and fuck! The clock was in mm/dd/yyyy format! Don't know how the fuck it changed itself and how the fuck I didn't notice there was something wrong with the date. I still had 5 days remaining :(

May I request the world to get their shit together and choose just one global date format?

PS: my normal date format is dd/mm/yyyy

Got demoted, got a pay raise and don't know how to feel about it. A story of how not to drink with your coworkers?

The story begins roughly 8-9 months ago. Me and this coworker (let's name him Tim) go out drinking after a Friday party at the office. We do some rounds and we're both smashed. Tim starts telling me how he's happy with life and that he's earning a nice salary right now. He told me his salary. It was the same as mine. Which was weird - He codes in a more hardcore languages than me and has almost double the time in the company as me. I think after some more drinking I've confessed that I make the same as him. This part is sort of a blur (drinking). I've gotten a pay raise(+30-40%) roughly a few months ago from that point backwards because another company gave be a much higher offer. The company I work for matched to keep me. Anyway, 3 months or so after the drinking,Tim is promoted to team lead, and me and a few other people are added to his team. Conversation slips and he told me his new salary - quite a bit more than me.I think it's safe to assume what happened.

The problem with that is that I was a team lead of 1 person (me) at that time, and I was managing my own time and my own tasks, was working with people individually. I was part of the weekly meetings with the CEO and other team leads. Being stripped of this title wasn't a problem at the beginning, as people still contacted me because of their problems, suggestions, whatever. A few more months pass (to now) and less and less people are contacting me - instead they are talking with Tim, and are asking of his opinion on tasks I should do, where he has no experience and roughly 0 lines in the programming language I code in. This is starting to piss me off.

There are a couple other things to take into consideration as well - The company is hiring a lot of people right now. The whole structure for team leads changed a bit, more team leads then ever right now and new roles added pretty fast.

I've gotten a pay raise a few weeks ago though(10%~).

I'm not sure on how to react to this. Should I comply and just keep on working on these tasks? Or should I still keep contacting people directly on their requests and talk to them directly, take credit for the projects I complete publicly and the stuff I do as I was previously doing? Part of me wants to reroute all of the stupids questions people have to Tim, as he is now responsible for these tasks and get this weight off my shoulders.

I'm starting to shift to learning a new programming language and thinking of jumping ship. Thoughts?

people always complain about semicolons but I don't think I've ever had a semicolon issue cuz of ide's. but I'm plagued by tons of other stupid mistakes, like forgetting to initialize my ArrayList<>'s in java from null to empty..

Have to finish this code today but only slept four hours last night, coffee isn't working anymore, making the most stupid mistakes and constantly dreaming away while looking at my screen because I can't focus anymore. Also, it's around 25 degrees here and the vents aren't working that great... fml.

I just wrote a function that creates a configuration struct that is stored in a Singleton struct, but to create it I called the Singleton to get a connection to the database.

This created an infinite recursive function that maximized connections on the database, as the Singleton never got fully initialized. Not a good idea.

So to fix this I created the configuration after the creation of the Singleton, still calling the singleton from within the function. This worked.

Then I remembered that I could have just passed the connection as a parameter to the function. Like I've done a million times before...

It's time for the weekend, I need a break

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

I love javascript, but sometimes it's just an incredibly stupid language, such as when undefined variables get interpreted as string literal "undefined" when concatenating strings. I like it better how, for example, PHP handles undefined values, that nulls just turn into "". Better still: typed languages, where most stupid mistakes are caught already at compilation, instead of having to spend hours to track down where that mysterious "undefined" comes from. As I said, I love javascript - because it is easy to code, flexible and forgiving in many ways. But I hate it for the exact same reason, for being such a sloppy fluffy...thing, and a bugger to debug. If javascript would be an animal, it would be a cute and cuddly cat that you instantly find adorable, but it's actually quite fat and lazy, plus its fur is littered with ticks and other bugs.

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

Last Week Friday:
PM: We'll be taking you off the one project on to another, we'll send the details later.
Me: Cool

*Hours Later*

PM: Ok cool, so you'll be looking at a script that one of our Pillar heads has scripted. You need to make sure it works and that it can run on the server.
Me: *I always thought this guy was useless now i get to see what he can do* Cool, just send the documentation and i'll take a look at it over the weekend. Just tell me when you've sent it.
PM: Cool.
Project Head: I'll inform you when i send the files and how to run them.
Me: *I know how to set up a database locally, i'm not an idiot* Cool.

Whole Weekend I don't get a single message.

Monday Morning:
Project Head(PH): Have you taken a look at it yet?
Me: Taken a look at what?
PH: The Database and the Script
Me: i didn't get any message over the weekend.
PH: I sent it yesterday, it should be in your inbox.
Me: There's Nothing. Sending anything on a Sunday is expecting me not to see it, especially at 10pm. Besides i can't retrieve any of the files in the attachment(Outlook tripping), rather send it in a zip file or upload it to onedrive.

PH sends the link. I get the files, set up the DB, glance at the script.

Me: This is actually interesting.
PH: You know what it does?
Me: My SQL knowledge is below average but i can read and understand it pretty well. So your dynamically copying the database from the server to the warehouse, cool.
It's not going to work though.
PH: Check first.

I check it

Me: Doesn't work, but it sort of works.
PH: What do you mean?
Me: Some tables are populated but some aren't,, how and there's a shit tone of errors.
PH: So i does copy the data over.
Me: Some of the data.
PH: test it on the Server
Me: Not a good idea.
PH: Just try it.
PM: In the mean time i'll send you some documentation i need you to review and edit.
Me: *Idiots* Cool.

Tuesday:
Me: Have you checked it on the server yet?
PH: Not yet, busy.
Me: Where's the documentation again?
PM: I'll send it it a moment.
Me: In the mean time i'll write some script to fix that script that's definitely not going to work.

Wednesday:
Boss: I heard you done with the script
Me: It's not done, but we'll be testing it on the server later.
Boss: Then why are you running it on the server?
Me: Ask the PH and PM.
Boss: What are you doing now?
Me: Well i'm supposed to do documentation *looks at PM* but i haven't recieved any yet, so I've been writing a script to fix the copy script.
PH: Ok we'll test when the boss leaves, after all the meetings.
PM: here's the documentation.
Me: Thanks

I start on documentation.

PH: It didn't work.
Me: I know.
PH: Fix it.

Thursday:
Meeting.
PM: What you doing?
Me: Fixing the script,
PM: Do the documentation first
Me: Cool.

End of the day:
PH: Why you doing the documentation? The script has highest priority.
Me: Ask the PM.

Friday(Today):
Boss: can we talk.
Me: Sure.
Boss: I though you said the script was done?
Me: i said it sort of works, just doesn't do the job 100%.
Boss: Monday i was told it's done.
Me: i only looked through it Monday to understand it, i done nothing before Tuesday. though i have been trying to create a script to fix it.
Boss: Your working really slow hey.
Me: *It's been a week, and stupid people are in charge* I was doing what i was told.
Boss: Cool.(His Upset)

Stupid FUCKEN people, make stupid FUCKEN decisions. But Hey, the boss only see's the final result. I am a human being, even i make mistakes. But there's a huge gap between stupidity and a mistake.

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

Today's rant: JavaScript's type system.

I realized halfway through that I can't happily call JavaScript a "programming language" so just assume
alias programming="scripting"

I'm sure it's not actually as frustrating as it seems to me. Thing is, I'm used to either statically-typed languages or dynamically-typed languages that actually make sense. If I were to try to add an integer to something I'd forgotten was a string in Python, it'd immediately tell me "look, buddy, do you want me to treat this as a concatenation or an addition? I have no idea the way you've got this written." I've found that mistakes are a common thing with dynamic typing. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough yet, maybe it's really as stupid as it looks. JavaScript just goes "hey look I'm gonna tack all of these guys together and make a weird franken-string like '$NaN34.$&' because that's absolutely what we want here!" Then I run my webpage and instead of a nice numeric total like I wanted, good old JavaScript just went "Yep, I have no idea what I'm doing here I'm just gonna drop this here and pretend it's right." Now absolutely I do not expect my programming language to make correct assumptions and read my mind, otherwise JavaScript would be programming me and not the other way around. But it could at least let me know that I had incompatible types going on rather than just shamelessly going along with what it's doing. Good GRIEF, man, some of the idiosyncrasies of the EMCAScript language definition itself just make me want to punch a horse.

Sometimes you just make the stupid mistakes

I'm currently at this state:
I'm balancing out two things!
- being an idiot and doing obvious mistakes.
- being skilled and creating smart tricks to speed up development.

Everytime I learn more tricks I also get more opportunities to do obvious mistakes.

That joy of finally having them all passed.
I had stupid mistakes like: insertNewItem, but inside I use update T_T

project still fairly new, but this time I decided to write unit tests as I go instead of delaying till the end and writing nothing lol

When you're dead tired and keep making stupid mistakes...
git commit -m "ugh..."

Git is good. Even when I do stupid things like reset a commit I wasn't supposed to, it gives me the chance to fix those mistakes.

(Oops. !rant)

Not entirely dev related, but definitely shameless. In high-school we had to study CS, but it was more about knowing to use Office. We had class tests, which mean that we all had the same task and we had to finish it until the end of the class. Obviously no one wanted to do it, so whoever finished first would email it to everyone. Most people, however, were stupid enough to leave the meta data untouched, so it was obvious who was the original author. To not appear suspicious, I removed the original metadata and put my own in, and deliberately made errors in the sheet and corrected others that I noticed. I never got caught, because my work would always have "unique" mistakes.

The past few months i got a bunch of emails and calls from my previous "boss" (hes the head of the research), that he would be grateful if i helped them out. I got a few friends still working on that piece of shit project so i said yeah, i can help.

Now this whole thing is a research involving most of the big universities, lots of math phds, and is kinda secret. They couldnt find anyone to sketch up a few stupid algorithms for them so i did just that.

Yesterday i got the specifications for the task. Its the core functioning algo, the one i made from fucking discrete integer data, it took me 3 fucking months to correct their mistakes, and now they want me to create 2 similar patterns for 2 completely different...things. Yeeeah no.

So after a few struggles on my current uni assignment I’ve come to the realisation I need to change the way I write code, or at least the way I think about the code before I start.

I have a tendency to rush into coding something before I’ve planned it out properly, and over the last couple of days stupid mistakes on my part caused hours of stressing.

Are there any good methods for sitting down and planning stuff like this out, or is it just a case of getting some paper and a pen and writing out the logic etc in whatever way makes sense to you (me)?

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

Try to finish some of the projects I've started in 2018. Right now I have a todo list text file, along with multiple written lists (the written ones are more focused on a single project normally).

-Finish the startpage I've been doing off and on for at least a month now. I ended up making a lot of it command based (just need to write the scripts for the commands..). I had a little config menu but I just got tired of it and the text box is autofocus anyways, so I figured I'd make it command focused.

-Nice little root safety script as I call it. I've made very stupid mistakes as root before. I once made a typo and ran "chmod --recursive 644 /" while half asleep. I believe I was trying to run that on the current directory I was in, but as you know, the . and / are right next to each other. Basically the script would see what you're doing and echo "you're about to do x, are you sure that's what you want to do?". Something I know I could knock out in a day, but I've been putting it off for at least a year now.

-Compiling notification. I saw something similar once a few years ago, and it was so fucking cool. I remember it being a Mac, and it had a notification that would basically tell you how many files and shit you had left to compile if you were building something. Kinda want to build something for polybar.

-FUCKING RUBBER DUCK DEBUGGING TO THE EXTREME! This one was inspired by a comment someone made once months ago. Might have been here, or reddit, or in real life, not sure. Basically a big ass fucking rubber duck with LEDs in it that will like glow red if your code wouldn't compile (I think Visual Studio has like an automatic error detecting thing in there?? Maybe something similar if I can figure that out). Honestly not sure how the fuck I'd do this one, but I love the idea and I really want to fucking do it

There's more shit. These are just the main ones I want to attempt sometime in the near future.

Sometime my code is so wrong that I can almost hear the mother of algorithm crying out loud.

I just want to remove that piece of code from my project....no, from my mind, my life.

All time I try to find any interesting bug in my code but when ever I debug I find only stupid mistakes :/

Dev-tip of the day:

Always make sure that your database table fields are long enough to hold the entire third-party API client reference ID, so that the last three characters won’t be cut off..

I’ve been “crying” here while debugging for the last hour because my API function and everything else worked, but the result wasn’t showing up in the third-party application (their API returned a 200), but when I tested it with their API sandbox application, it did show up..

Sorry, but no sorry.

I don't see that it is ok to make stupid of other people. I mean, it is ok for non-IT people/non-specialist/students didn't know that HTML programmer is not a thing or we can't just turn of the problem/bugs if sth gone wrong.

They aren't stupid. They just misinformed. Just smile (or laugh?) and explain to them.

No one is born knowledgeable of everything. We even learn how to walk, how to read, how to program.

By doing mistakes.

Started out as an intern at my current employer, after a few months they made me create an invoicing system...

I should have said no.

I've had a lot of bugs with it in the past, but the data-loss one has been because I send a SOAP call to our (third party) accounting system and only if I get an ERROR do I log it....

Apparently, when you put line 1 before line 0, you get a warning, but no data is processed...

Had to write a script that updated 4 months of invoice data in one go, without errors, took me a fucking week...

Lesson learnt boys and girls, never let an intern make the fucking invoicing system!

If languages had slogans...

1) Java -- Buy one get two for free on your delicious NPEs.

2) C -- I burn way too much calories talking, let's do some sign language. Now see over there... 👉

3) Python -- Missing semi-colon? Old method. Just add an extra space and watch the world burn.

4) C++ -- My ancestors made a lot of mistakes, let's fix it with more mistakes.

5) Go -- Meh. I can't believe Google can be this lazy with names.

6) Dart -- I'm the new famous.

7) PHP -- To hide your secrets. Call us on 0700 error_reporting(0)

8) JavaScript -- Asynchronous my ass!

9) Lua -- Beginners love us because arrays start at 1

10) Kotlin -- You heard right. Java is stupid!

11) Swift -- Ahhh... I'm tasty, I'm gonna die, someone please give me some memory.

12) COBOL -- I give jobs to the unemployed.

13) Rust -- I'm good at garbage collection, hence my name.

14) C# -- I am cross-platform because I see sharp.

15) VB -- 🙄

16) F# -- 😴

I got a REALLY nice compliment from my dev team today. But first, the setup...

Tuesday night, I pushed some changes before I left that totally borked the build today when my team pulled changes (this is an off-shore team, so we more or less work opposite hours). Fortunately, my team dealt with it easy enough since (a) it was pretty obvious what happened, and (b) my commit message had enough information to help them know for sure, and they just reverted one file and were good to go for the day (they didn't fix the problem, left that for me to do, which is proper).

It was an absolutely stupid, careless mistake: I somehow copied the contents of a JS file into a JSP and pushed it. Just a simple case of too many tabs open at once and too many interruptions while I'm trying to code (which is typical most days, unfortunately, but this day it had an impact other than just slowing me down).

But, those are the reasons it happened, they aren't excuses. It was carelessness, plain and simple.

So, once I fixed it, I sent a note to the team explaining it. It basically said "Look, that was a dumb, careless mistake on my part, my bad, sorry for the inconvenience, it's fixed now."

I had a message waiting for me in my inbox this morning that said how I'm an inspiration because despite all my knowledge and experience, despite being a long-time lead, they (a) appreciate the fact that I'm human and still make mistakes, and (b) I stand up and take responsibility when it happens and then do what's necessary to reverse the mistake.

That made my day :)

To me, it's just the right way to be (I credit my parents 100%), never occurs to me to do otherwise, but the truth is not everyone can say the same. Some people are insecure and play the CYA game right away, every time. Some people act like they never make mistakes in the first place.

I don't care if you're an experienced dev or a junior, always take responsibility for your actions, especially your mistakes. Don't try and bullshit your way out of them. Sure, it's fine to explain why it happened if there were factors beyond your control, but at the end of the day, own up to them, apologize where necessary, and then put in the effort to make it right. Most people have no problem with people who make mistakes every so often - everyone does, whether everyone admits to it or not - but those who try and shirk responsibility don't last long in this or any endeavor (you know, putting aside the professional bullshitters who build their careers around it... that's not most people, thankfully).

First year on the job. Was already good at writing software, but bad at practices and administration. One such software was being tested live, while still in development. I was developing on the production database... .
Yeah.
I was working on an edit feature of sales records, in a table that already contained hundreds of subsidized sales of very expensive products. Based on that, the supplier had to compensate the shops with half the price of every item.
I forgot to add a where clause to the update. Lost all sales data. On production.
Asked the admin if there are backups and he says yes, checks to discover that the backup script failed for the last week (since it became live)

Whole thing was incredibly stupid. I made a ton of stupid mistakes, and so did the other people involved. The loss was around 1 year of my income. Luckily the client decided to brush it off as losses and claim some tax benefits and it all ended well.

I am a junior developer, two weeks ago I got a job for the first time in my life as a fullstack web developer, I have felt bad for the times that "I should have read the code better before coding", I think I am distracted and impatient. I make mistakes because I don't know how the system works in some parts and I write repeated or unnecessary code, my boss has corrected me, but I feel very stupid and I'm afraid of being fired. Is it normal to feel like this?

That I take everything too serious and it keeps downing my creativity and concentration.

I simply shouldn't give a fuck and learn through failures, because that is much more effective but I got educated to blame myself for mistakes. Stupid education. Takes time to truly understand that though.

I finally have a vServer again, now I need to fill it with 'life': secure it, build a small website and mailserver.

The main idea is to have some basics to look more professionell. I'd love any tip and idea how idk, save work before I run into stupid beginner mistakes, or things you had good experiences working with when you had similar tasks? :)

This is not a rant. Not really. It's more expressing my own insecurity with a certain topic, which somehow upsets me sometimes (the insecurity, not the topic though).

I have nearly no knowledge about security/privacy stuff. I mean, yeah, I know how to choose secure passwords and don't make stupid DAU mistakes. The very basics you would expect someone to have after a CS bachelor's degree.
But other than that... Nothing. And I would like to get a bit into that stuff, but I have no clue where to start. First getting my head wrapped around low-level stuff like network layers? Or something completely else.
This topic is so intimidating to me as it seems huge, I have no idea where to start, and I feel that if you don't have "full" knowledge, you are going to make mistakes which you might not even notice.

I sometimes get really scared about having an account hijacked or similar. Also in our job it seems to become more and more of a topic we should know about.

Anybody got any advice?
I am looking for a way to improve my knowledge in security in general for professional reasons and my knowledge about privacy for private reasons.
It's just, every time I start reading something related it seems that I am lacking some other knowledge etc...

That we all fail and for every time you think someone else is stupid or falls into mistakes, you will fall into your own mistakes and be stupid in front of someone else, no one is perfect, we are all humans and at the end our work is to tell machines what to do and if they do it wrong, it's because we told them to do it that way and we are wrong.

(I am not a native english speaker so please excuse any mistakes I make while writing this)

I know, during an internship, its good to see all different sides of the job and of course QA is one of them. Its definately good to know as a dev later how QA works, I can see that. But why the F U C K do I have to test the same 3 pages (not websites, PAGES) since 5 days for 8 hours a day even though NOTHING CHANGES?! The page doesn't get updated, I am just sitting there clicking around and wasting my time I could use to learn more PHP or jQuery or WTFEver. But no! I have to sit there for hours and hours, doing nothing but staring at a page where I already tested literally anything that can be tested 4 days ago. If you don't have a good task for me over there in QA, then STOP WASTING MY FUCKING TIME instead of forcing me to continue testing this stupid website even though testing already completed a few days ago!!! I don't even have Test Cases to follow, its just “yea look at this page and click around is something is broken“ for 5 days. There is nothing broken, your fucking website works fine. And now STOP WASTING MY TIME!!!!

The definition of programming...

Writing your code in a controlled environment and it works perfectly, then in a real world situation it simply doesn't work.

Spend 2 hours debugging and trying to find the error only to realize you were using your custom scripting language incorrectly in the first place....

Fuck that not infuriating in the slightest :-)

Sometimes knowing how to program has this weird effect where you pick apart all tech that has some cross over into your field. I rarely visit a website without seeing something that makes me think, “who the hell thought that was a good idea”.

Lately though, as I learn more about the management side of things, I can see many more reasons that stupid things end up in good products. Lack of time and trying to over-engineering to cater for some odd edge case being the 2 biggest killers.

In 2018 I’m going to be a bit nicer about silly technical mistakes.

Worked on a project form 8AM-12midnight straight and wanted to copy the project somewhere else.
My stupid brain just shift + delated the whole working project.
lmk if it's just me or have any of you also done stupid mistakes like this?
Just so I can calm my bird brain and at least think of another career path.

Currently trying to make a multi boot machine, with a lot of linux distros inside, like debian, fedora, gentoo and arch.

I know I will have to format everything a lot of time, because of stupid mistakes, I want to try to put /home in common, and play with some more SSD, and to put a preempt_rt patched kernel somewhere.

I am starting from debian,
Format counter: 3

Reason 0: because i need to install at least once...
Reason 1: I am stupid
Reason 2: I disconnected the SSD,to connect a disk with windows. Now bootloader doesn't find any os in the SSD anymore... still no clue, and in case of doubt: give windows the fault 😠😠😠

DAMN YOU WINDOWS, how did you find that I want to use debian? What did you do to break it?? (Despite it wasn't even connected?!?)

I have checked everything about secure boot, and I am sure it is disabled...

And every search online gives results about dual boot, but it is not my case... :/

It’s hard keeping your girlfriend satisfied when you’re being pressured to code with less to no bugs. I mean, doesn’t she understand that computers are stunningly stupid, and you have to explain to them every last tiny step that you want them to do, and your explanation can't have any mistakes in it. And why this is the fundamental cause of buggy and insecure software😣

I feel stupid about once or twice per day because of samll and obvious mistakes I make.

But maaan I feel dumb as fucking rock when I read the Docker documentation, I don't understand any fucking thing, and as usual, I can't find 2 websites with the same opinion about anything

I JUST WANT TO MAKE MY THING WORK, PLEASE

Okay one of my stupid mistakes (yep I had multiple...)

I had a client running a WordPress, some older people that don't know that much about computers. They created the whole content for their WordPress, but it was a very large one with a lot of pictures they struggled to place etc.

And 4 months later I get an email saying that the hosting of my domain has been deleted. And as I was too lazy to place their database on their hosting, I placed it on mine. It followed up by a complete data loss and I couldn't tell them....

Not proud of this, but I told them their server had crashed and I couldn't do anything about it.

They closed their business because of this.

I feel bad.

So recently started doing some java, not very good at java so am like totally lost when looking at these services. But i also find like am making the most stupid mistakes, forgetting to build after a change for example and i guess its fine if i realise but i only realise after like an hour of trying to figure out wats wrong. im beginning to think i might actually be retarded or simething

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If anything stick to only free!!

Whelp, I guess it just one of those days. Keep making stupid mistakes at work. On the plus side my boss is really understanding and hasn't given me a bollocking.

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.