I quit and my last day is next week.

Apparently management has decided that I should spend my last day implementing a new feature for a customer where I have been the only developer, and release it to production (without first implementing it in test) the same day. A feature that potentially could cripple a whole workflow if done wrong.

Of course I advised not to release untested code to production on a friday, just before the only person that knows how it works leaves the company. But no, “the customer reaaaaaally wants it before summer, so just be careful not to write any bugs”.

I’m not saying that I’m intentionally gonna write bad code - but if I do, I’m not gonna pick up the phone when it calls.

Stakeholder: There’s a bug on the site.

Me: That’s not a bug. The site is supposed to do that. Your team asked for that feature and we implemented it last summer.

SH: They did?

Me: Yes, they did.

SH: You sure it’s been like this since last summer?

Me: YES!!!

after publishing a few apps, building some websites, developing some basic operating systems, participating in a summer learning program at google and having got a job managing the computer science department’s website, today i start my intro to computer science class.

god i hate python

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

if i disappear it's because my phone has melted in this hellish summer day

Confession: I don't feel like working. At all. I'm so in need of a vacation. I spend 3/5 days gaming at home and do my sprint assignments in the last two, because I'm so fucking good at what I do. Been working like this for weeks now.

Last summer vacation I really had was fucked up by a PO calling me about the project expectations wanting me to really explain the technical decisions to stakeholders, because the schedule kept getting shorter and that caused me huge amounts of anxiety. I left the company next year. They even contacted me later asking if I had any interest coming back. No fucking chance.

Didnt have any vacation days for last summer. Now I'm in a really nice position where I don't have to really give a shit about the project I'm working on so I can just ignore work completely during my vacation. Gonna delete my email from my phone and disconnect Slack. Fuck work.

Maybe as a student my burn outs does not count so much, but i must say, i had some.

Worst part is that each kind of landed just before the ending of the semester. You know, that nightmarish part when everbody throws homeworks, tests, projects and presentations at us, while we barely have time to prepare for the incoming exams. Such a wonderful life indeed.

But this time was waaaay worst. And that only because i wanted to do so much this year, i started always early to do my assignments and so on but in the end i was so stuck on their bullshits that i barely had time to work on my things.. i haven't touch any programming project on my own since march!

And i quite have a lot of them planned. I had over the semester and i have now over the summer. But I AM SICK OF THIS. And i figured out that would be for the best to take a break from this things gor a few weeks over the summer. I like this world, the world of programming but i fear that sometimes i might not be good enough to swallow others bullshit for my living, i hope i will be able to keep myself afloat with my own projects and ideas.

Anyways, i hope you all guys have it better than me and those of you who doesn't.. well, i am here for ya!

Cheers 🍻

Pro tip: don’t accept a meeting with a potential employer for the beginning of your holidays (I know, ’muricans, you don’t get this concept where basically everyone taked paid vacation for several weeks during summer) so that you’ll end up thinking about whether to jump ship or not for most of your holidays, effectively ruining your time to potentially relax for you.

Just don’t do it.

My stupid body sweats when it's cold and doesn't when it's hot. I sleep in a long oversize sweatshirt. But during the day, it's the opposite, except for my fucking feet, this is why during the summer I wear t-shirt and stuff but with heavy winter socks.

Can you suggest a patch for that?

Since the last rant is talking about brains, I feel like this summer heat is frying my brain. It's been some of the weirdest days for me these last couple of days. I cannot focus on anything. Cannot make sane decisions or conclusions. I'm more depressed/sad. More disorganized. I don't want to eat anything. I'm sky-high anxious. I'm more shy than ever in public. I have no reason for that but I don't what's happening.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

Any non-tech hobby usually helps my coding, because relaxing breaks are far more efficient if I'm not just laying in a bean bag trying not to think about work but rather engaged in something unrelated. During the summer I was storing a really good electric guitar because the owner emigrated, so when I felt stuck I played some music. I used to play the cello in middle school but I was never really good at it nor did I care to practice properly because it felt a lot like yet another class to attend. Apparently music practice works whether you do it in one long or several short rounds as long as the total time is enough.

So, some data need to be prepared during the summer and the diverse departments' elected data processors got shared in a Google spreadsheet they will need to fill with some basic data IT needs. Simple, straightforward data entry, with nothing private nor confidential. Just another divide-and-conquer-style large amount of data to enter & organise, that's all.

Today, I received a new comment notification as the owner of the spreadsheet. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that, for some f*cked up reasons, one of the guys just wrote the super-admin username & pw for one of the main data systems we use in a freaking comment in the spreadsheet... WTF...
Oh, and also, juuust in case, he also wrote the pin code that is normally required to pass through the device-check when you log-in as a super-admin from an unknown device and/or location.

Fortunately I could catch it on time, but this just ruined half of my day.
I am supposedly on freaking annual leave. Ha Ha. Ha.

I have to participate in this retarded conference for 2 days and then I will have to join this fucking summer gathering on my weekend and that will take whole day. Fuck this fucking corporate bullshit. Better give me a fucking raise or better yet start fucking managing this scrum team because half of devs are not pulling their fucking weight.

Fucking BA too lazy to update issues with new details after grooming so each time I pick a new task I either have to somehow remember what we discussed weeks ago or I have to spam you with questions so you would run around like chicken without head while gathering answers to questions that were already discussed because you are too lazy of a fuck to compile notes. And even that is not enough, my merged MR's apparently dont cover all the use cases because your'e too incompetent to even figure out how our app works and define properly the task.

And then theres supposedly a techlead dev whos not taking a ticket when theres 3 days left till end of the sprint and he goes: "But a task spillover will happen!!!". Yeah so I guess just sit on your ass and wait for new sprint so you could pick yet again another low hanging fruit task and marinate it for weeks.

Motherfucker I checked your MR's in the last 6 weeks you did 1 week worth of work. You are a techlead but your only dev colleague is asking us for help daily because you dont even help him Fucking lazy and incompetent bastard.