I FINALLY DID IT!! I landed a job!! I'm going to be a firmware engineer!! Woohoo!! 😁
It only took half a year, but I finally got one, and purely off my own merit. It feels damn good when you get the job with no references or connections, just your own skills.
After a highly successful on-site technical/whiteboard interview, I was 90% confident I'd get it. The fact that my job search is finally over, is such a fucking relief. Good riddance to endless interview prep, applications & rejections.
I start on Monday. Goodbye freedom >.<

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Laravel is the worst framework ever.

Everything has to be made convenient and easy. That sounds amazing, because developers want to save time, worry less about boilerplate code, right? No more constructors, no more dependency injection, fuck all the tedious OOP shit... RIGHT?

It does one thing well: Make PHP syntax uniform and concise through easily integrated libraries such as Collection and Carbon. But those are actually not really part of the framework... just commonly integrated and associated with Laravel.

The framework itself is completely derailed: You can define code in a callback in the routes file. You can define a controller in the routes file. You can define middleware as a parameter to the route, as a fluent method to the route, you can stack them up in a service provider. Validators can be made in controllers, Request objects, service providers, etc. You can send mail inline, through Mailable objects, through Notification objects, etc.

Everything is macroable, injectable, and definable in a million different places. Ultimate freedom!

Guess what happens when you give 50 developers of various seniority a swiss army knife?

One hammers in a screw with a nail file, the other clips the head from the screw using scissors, and you end up with an unworkable mess and blunt tools.

And don't get me started about Eloquent, the Active Record ORM. It's cute for the simple blog/article/author/comment queries, but starts choking when you want more selective and performant queries or more complex aggregates, and provides such an opaque apple-esque interface which lets people think everything is OK, when in reality it's forcing the SQL server to slowly commit suicide.

With the wake of some rants shouting at Linuxers who express their opinion in a considered to be very not good way, I decided to make such a rant. Not to be annoying but because, although I get that fanboyism in that way isn't even good in MY opinion, I do think that one should be able to express their opinion.

But, If you'd like to express your opinion, I think you at least should do that with some good arguments. Not everyone might agree with those arguments but hey, that's the point of opinions sometimes :)

I don't hate windows/mac for being windows or mac. Nope.

I hate the systems for not giving the user freedom to do what they wish with the system but more importantly, for integrating their users in worlds biggest mass surveillance program AND on top of fucking that, not giving peoples the option to look at the source code aka at what's ACTUALLY going on in the system. Next to that, Windows 10's data collection is officially not legal in the netherlands so don't even try justifying their fucking data slurping.

Of course there's a chance that they don't contain any bad stuffs but since the Snowden revelations I don't trust those commercial companies anymore on their 'blue' eyes.

Yeah, I've ranted about this before, I know, felt like doing it again in combination with my reason above. I also know that I will probs receive hate for this but oh well, i'm used to that by now.

So yeah, windows and osx: go fuck yourself.

When you reach office early...

I stayed at a hotel called "Crowne Royal Plaza" for a work event in Denver. The TV in the room was a nice new '50 Samsung. Much to my dismay I discovered they had disabled the ability to change the input to HDMI. I called the front desk to compain and the pesent who answered the phone had the nerve to tell me that feature had been disabled because it was "illegal". I laughed histarically and explained the reason was actually to try and force customers to buy shitty pay-per-view content, to which he replied, "Probably".

We must put an end to such blantant disregard for hardware and software freedom. This is beyond uneccaptable. I am completely and utterly disgusted by such slimy business practices.

To the management of the Crowne Royal Plaza, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you and burn in the deapest, darkest part of hell, you scum sucking dick fucks!

Obviously an error that the application caused, and not something artificially induced by Microsoft not liking the fact that I don't have their Photos as default (which actually I do. IrfanView may have left some extensions to itself but so fucking what Microshit?!)

Freedom of choice when it comes to opening stuff with the application you like? In Windows 10, it seems to be non-existent.

Lest we forget that there is such a thing as privacy and freedom of choice.

Don't think I could love IT anymore then I do now! Currently and intern and was stressing a small bit about what I wanted to do after college (i.e. web development, mobile development, security) then came to the realisation that I can do whatever i want. I don't think any other profession has such a freedom within industry and that is why love IT so much. Looking forward to many more years of learning and developing my skills

🪙 The golden age of tech is coming to an end. We currently live in a world of tech built by engineers and great minds; both Windows and Linux are great in their own ways. PCs are the peak of engineering, both desktops and laptops because of how versatile, powerful and universal they are. They serve engineers, designers and end users. You can do anything you can imagine; because the great people who built it, did it in such way that they themselves could use and enjoy it.

📱 The tech of the future will become ever more limited. The next generation of humans will use Chrome OS gladly and not even feel limited because they never experienced the freedom provided by a true personal computer device. Android OS is already getting ever closer to restricting 3rd party APK installers. Big tech will do everything they can to limit freedoms and make everyone use cloud, where they can charge $ for every damn click.

☎️The consumer-facing tech will become increasingly dumbed-down over time. The programmers and engineers will be still able to use "true" tech, but only for work. In everyday life, they will have to be content with the dumb limited tech.

And there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Am I the only one worried with the OS wars lately? Microsoft and Apple trying to gain even more control on everything and Linux remaining at less than 2% on the desktop. People are oblivious to the fact that their personal freedom is at risk, and don't you dare tell me otherwise. Companies knowing what we search or what files we have on our computer, having the ability to control us and force us to follow their rules. We have a choice, and I'm not talking about destroying the economical system a la Mr. Robot, but moving to the Open Source world, not because it's more secure, faster or some such shit, but because it's the only way to ensure freedom on one of the biggest part of our lifes, the digital part. My concerns may be exceeding the normal, and I'll hate it to be right, but I'm afraid that if this goes on, in a few years, we'll understand that we made a big mistake...

Hi my dear fellow coders, I have a small request for you.

If you are among those coders who are working on microchipping people / quantum dot something, tracking people, classifying people, AI, ML or any other such software which is going to harm or cage us or take away our freedom. Please stop doing so.

Why I came out with this rant?
I myself am working on a covid-19 screening app which would rate people based on symptoms and if they seem high risk they would not be allowed to enter unless they do a covid-19 test. I am tracking their movement and the requirement is to restrict people’s movement.
My conscience says that this is incorrect and and I should not be a part of such things which take away the freedom and liberty of people.
I am stopping it now.

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

!rant
In the past 2 days I worked a lot, now I slept 12 hours straight. I don't have any tickets left, and the manager told me to have fun. I haven't felt such freedom in a while.
(The project will be late by a year in February, so until now I always had at least 2 urgent tickets related to topics that I've never heard of before.)

Anyone here currently employed as a perl developer? I wanted to know how your experience with the language and the environment has been? I have been going on and off in the perl world for a while know. Currently some interesting perl jobs have been comming up. I have always liked the language but I know that there is a major difference between liking a language for basic scripts and using it in a work environment.

Currently, I have experimented with a few web projects using Perl and I am really digging what I see, the code can be as hacky as you want it to be or as elegant and readable as you make it, such freedom and flexibility is great.

Is it all worth it? We feel its freedom, We feel it's just me and my phone or my PC. Is it? Is it that private? That camera you have ​on your phone, what if someone is watching you right now? That microphone you have, what if someone is listening to you right now? Those stuffs you Google, Those sites you visit, you're tracked, you're tapped. Ohh Incognito, Good Luck, there's no such thing called Incognito. Is it all worth it? In fact you're getting so much out of it. Is it all worth it? Or Am I just too obsessed? Is this Internet really that free?

It's freedom but you're compelled to use. Its freedom!
#internet_vibes

So looks like I got a job in a tech company. I won't be coding much but I guess I'd be debugging the errors and reporting them to devs.

I think I'll like this job:
1) Pay is better than I expected considering my long gap in the industry as an employee. Honestly, I don't care about the pay.

2) I like the challenge in debugging things.

3) I don't like coding under pressure and deadlines. Besides, I want to reserve my desire for coding on my side projects - mostly solutions to issues I face. If I go for a developer job, the last thing I would wanna do is
code again after the work. I'd probably go insane with such a life.

4) Recently I realised that I'm not that much of a coding geek as people around me make it seem. I had attended a hackthon and almost every single dev out there had their laptop covered in stickers. They also had grasp on diverse stacks meanwhile I'm quite picky on stacks I even care to read about.

5) I'd have to be a bit more outgoing and interactive with people than my usual self. So yeah, I'll be pushing my comfort zone.

6) Most importantly, this job aligns with the dream job with great pay and freedom that I'm eyeing for.

For most part, after realising I have freedom of implementing and structure my codebase. I have followed only this rule whenever I stumbled into new way of code format/implimentation techniques.

- Understand the structure
- Check if it's new/upcoming way people started coding
- decide should I use it just yet
- implement according.

Adding factors such as time and prefered language, it turns out to be your own personal style.

PS: yes you do follow community conversion but, there's some part of it that makes it unique to you.