Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!

We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).

*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*

"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"

*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*

*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*

"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"

*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*

We laughed so hard xD

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines

UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on ...

Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air

The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Linux Air

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

"Oh, he is asking that much money for this website? I will create that for only $250 with WordPress. He is just trying to use you"

You fucking wanker. What you don't understand is that you are pushing the companies to a fucking black hole that they won't be able to recover from.

He shows an example of a website which takes 30 sec to load. It's full of hundreds of dreadful plugins. He chose the shittiest stock pictures to make it look "pretty".

When I point out his fucking shite website takes this long to load, he says if the company wants to make the website fast, they will need buy the premium plan of CloudFlare. WHAT THE FUCK are you even talking about?

Not only that, the example website, doesn't even have any SSL. He is saying that the other company didn't want to pay for the SSL. Ever heard of fucking StartSSL or LetsEncrypt?

It's people like you who is responsible for making half of the web an insecure, slow, low-performance space which is prone to hacking.

WordPress was made for blogging. KEEP IT THAT WAY. Stop trying to make your high-performance CMS or eCommerce website with this shite.

An open letter to the guy that commented on my website:

«Function X does not work. This program is shit. I am going to uninstall it and tell everyone.»

I'm sorry that my completely open source project didn't work for you. The fact that I lost countless days and months and years working on it in my free time, without ever asking for a cent, just trying to do something good for the community, doesn't give me the right to release a feature that may be buggy.

You could have opened a bug report. But that takes time. A whole 2 minutes. I understand the urge to post such a harsh public critic on my website. That's why I was so calm and understanding when I replied to you there.

However, it's a long time I wasn't browsing devRant and I confess I felt the urge to tell you to go fuck yourself. And this is the best place to do it! I'd pay to know you. I'd love to see your face. Oooh you must be so confident of yourself. I'm sure you have accomplished a lot in your life. So here's my message:

Go Fuck Yourself Asshole

Just sharing my experience of my spontaneous interview with Facebook. I'm not good at writing these but here you go :)

- I was working as an Android dev and didn't have much knowledge in algorithms nor competitive programming, never ever interviewed with big companies.
- a random day on LinkedIn, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me
- I ignored it for few week because I thought it's so out of my league, then somehow, out of blue, I had a thought of giving it a try, so I did
- passed first round
- start studying algorithms a little for phone interview in 3 weeks
- recklessly took the phone interview
- passed
- start studying intensively (while working fulltime) for the on-site interview in 2 months
- almost got the job, they gave me one more chance by a followed up interview
- messed up the last chance real bad
- failed!!!
- Initially I just wanted to give it a try, but the fact that I failed at very very last chance, frankly, bothers me a bit. Maybe I will interview with FB or big companies if I have chance later, but I know for sure that the studying had made me a much better dev. All the code I write now is much more efficient (I think), I can and not anymore afraid of reading complicated code.
- Overall, it does takes a lot of time (~4 months studying while working fulltime), but also benefits myself a lot though I didn't get the job, so basically, good experience, but better if I got the job 😁

Oops, wanted to write a few lines and it's a long post already.. I should stop here :D

Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.

She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.

Asked her anyways:

Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.

Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!

There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

Today a colleague was making weird noises because he was modifying some data files where half of the data needed to be updated with a name field, there were 4 files all about 1200 lines big.

I asked how he was doing and he said he was ready to kill himself, after he explained why I asked why he was doing if manually. He said he normally uses regex for it but he couldnt do this with a regex.

I opened VS code for him, used the multiselect thing (CTRL+D) and changed one of the files in about 2 minutes. Something he was working on for over half an hour already.... He thanked me about a million times for explaining it to him.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you have a tedious task which takes hours, please ask if somebody knows a way of doing it quicker. Doing something in 2 minutes is quite a bit cheaper and better for your mental state than doing the same thing manually In 3 hours (our estimate)

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

Dev: This is the first version of this new app, we’re still experimenting with how it’s going to work but initial headway is looking promising. It cost very little to make, came together very quickly and is already resulting in productivity increases for users. We’re just doing a bit of code cleanup now and we’ll make a move on the next iteration.

Corporate IT: This project is being completely mishandled! In order to successfully build an app you have to determine every single requirement beforehand! It takes millions upon millions of dollars due to the complex system of governance and approval that needs to exist. Massive numbers of stakeholders need to be involved and coordinated to even make so much as a login screen! I bet your project doesn’t even have a documented list of core values.

Dev: Has you ever successfully built an app using that methodology?

Corporate IT: 😡 That’s a loaded question. I went to school to study project management and have over 25 years of experience in the field. If you had the training and experience I do you would know that tech projects are naturally very volatile and there’s nothing you can do about that!

Dev: …

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

Colleague: Hey mister IHateForALiving, I've seen you made two files for a single form
Me: I did that because these two forms have nothing in common. You can have either one or the other and do totally different things, and I splitted them because they are fairly complex, and you may want to add more of this kind in the future.
Colleague: That's not how you should handle the matter, you should have put everything in a single file and handle everything via if else if else

Yeah Helen lucky you for thinking a single file of thousands of lines handled via switch-case is a good idea, must be great living life with the IQ of a rock, please give me a call if you ever decide to stick your head out of your ass just the tiny bit it takes for some oxigen to reach your brain

Devs are my closest friends and I have learned so much from you all.

They ask some of the best questions, their skill set is ever evolving, they have the real problem solving mindset, they are critical towards any and everything in a good way, and so much more.

There was this thread asking what a bad Product Manager is and this answer takes the cake.

The point highlighted in red is the ultimate truth.

Devs are most innovative people of our times. Big shout-out to you all and thank you for making me who I am today :)

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

Fiverr, so for those of you who are fortunate enough not to know what it is, fiverr is a freelance platform that takes 20% profit from well, profit made using the platform. That includes tips from buyers. It has nothing to do with what the rant is about, I just wanted to mention it.

So I had a "gig" that was doing really well, new customers every week, the analytics stated I had 2.1k impressions(and I dont even advertise). Then recently I gkt a push notification that said I needed to edit my gig, I was a bit confused. Then almost immediately after, I got an email saying my gig was taken down for copyright infringement. That made me really annoyed because all I ever made for buyers was my own code and screenshots. I contacted customer support, still waiting for a reply.

P.s. I am pretty sure this is my first rant😀

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Why do devs hate windows (and all its products) so much? I mean yaa okay it is a shit os for you to get your development thingies done. Yaa I know its not open source. Yaa I know its not free. Yaa I know a lot of malwares are targetted towards windows. Yaa I know it takes decades to install updates which are released almost every week. And so on....

But wasnt windows the first operating system you laid your hands on? I mean me being a 90s born kid from India, Windows 98 was my first operating system and I was really in love with it as a teenager. MS paint was my playground and I used to go berserk over there. I mean come on. Being a teenager and knowing nothing about how a computer actually works, would you have been able to figure out how to run an NFS on linux? All the kickass presentations made in power point were so in during that time. The first code I ever wrote was in turbo C running on Windows XP. So whoever is bashing Windows and any of their products is a shit person because though Windows is not meant for developers (that too only some) it is a great operating system and I will always root for it in any forum/post where it is being bashed or criticized about. Not a Windows fan-boy (I dont known if there is even such a thing) but Windows is best for non-devs.

Gradle Build Running

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

At a point in your life, you'll settle down abit, and you start to think about what you've done in the past (idk) years of your life.

Then you think about your career, how everything is ever since you discovered you were good at a certain thing since highschool.

be it programing, writing random codes, pentesting (or if you had that "hacker" phase in your life) or fixing laptops and etc.

"Good"

You think about the word, and you had a thought: You only know how to do it, how it works, how its done, and how to do it.

You only "Know", it takes practice, patience, dedication and years (or months depends on you) of experience before you can really say for sure you're "Good" at it.

Me? Im no where near good. but that doesn't stop me from going there.

And i hope the same goes for you. You can do it,

Have a great day.

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

I think I'm falling in love. With TDD.

I used to be very skeptic about it. You know, the usual reasons: it takes longer to deliver, constant "flow" interruptions, etc, etc. But ever since I've tried it I'm nothing but happy about my choice :)

I'm moving forward, I'm not making any regressions, I'm no longer afraid to make any changes in my code as I know tests will show what exactly I break,.. And most importanty, I have all use-cases with corner-cases defined and "explained" in the code... No more do I have to search in Confluence for how this exact scenario should behave. Everything is here. Everything's in the tests.

It's amazing!

Yeah, it DOES take longer to deliver so if you're hardcore Agile living by "Ship it as soon as it compiles" TDD might be too slow. But if you prefer knowing when your code is covering all the use cases w/o any errors -- TDD is the way.

Is obsidian a fucking joke?

Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.

There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).

How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.

I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

A morbid realization (I am just wasting your time keep scrolling)

Unless someone takes a stand for the user, and their comfort and requirements, unless someone looks a client straight in the eye and says "no, I will not do that, and neither will my team" and denies them their request, nothing will change, good devs will keep losing their spark to save themselves frustration, good people will walk away and the tyranny that we face daily grows... unless someone stands up, someone who cannot be knocked down, or reprimanded and told they're wrong for fighting for what's right.. unless someone stands up for what is right and fair... nothing changes... and nothing ever will... poor programs, bad games and content, lower standards, frustrated users, annoyance that you don't matter as a user or a dev will never go away... unless someone says enough. But no one will, money is the boss, morality a liability, and people an abundant resource. This world is backwards, devs are carrying the blame and no one who is able, cares enough to say "that's enough!".

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

If you ever get an idea for an OpenCV project: shoot yourself in the foot, drink some bleach, do whatever it takes to get it out of your head, because it will all be less painful than the python docs for cv2.

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.

Mandatory long rant warning

Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.

When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.

Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.

I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.

If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.

I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.

Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.

Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?

Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.

FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION

End user when criticizing a developer for 'taking long' to create something of value from scratch:
(4 hours later): "What's taking you so damn long? Are you retarded?"

Oh I don't know, maybe I have to make sure that tests in my code run well, maybe I have to evaluate everything to meet the custom satisfactions of the user for his ever-so-custom requirements and I also have to make sure I discard what they don't like? And maybe it takes time to deliver a quality product, and so on?
Or would you prefer I deliver an untested product that I didn't bother to think about and I haven't bothered to make sure it matches with their requirements?

What end users don't understand is the involvement in a quality product.

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....

So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...

So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...

It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)

Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs

And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window

The fucking defective Caps Lock on Apple keyboards drives me fucking ballistic!

WHY would they ever think it would be a good idea to introduce a minimum press time for a key?!?

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. I use the damn thing it inevitably fails and I have to backspace, delete the non-caps text I just entered after HITTING THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK KEY, tap the damn thing again (harder this time) and try again. It usually takes 2 or 3 tries before it actually catches. I'm sorry, but training myself to type slower is not as easy as you think!

Who the fuck thought up this nonsensical bullshit?? And who the fuck is going around accidentally tapping their caps lock key to the point where such a delay would be needed?? Do you not know where your own fingers are??

Seriously, all this does is penalize fast typists and people who actually want to USE the caps lock key for what it was meant for.

I swear to god this one little thing pisses me off SO much. And what's worse is they don't even give you an option to disable it, AND it's bloody fucking impossible to disable yourself even through the terminal.

(Also, typing this rant with so many caps was probably not as cathartic as I was going for!) 😂

Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.

Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".

So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.

The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...

not right now.

Not a rant. But about Windows 10, because some asked "why are there only rants about it?"

The day before yesterday: When switching off my PC, I noticed the shutdown options were "Update and restart" and "Update and shutdown". I chose the latter and went to bed.
Yesterday: I switched on my PC, Windows takes some extra seconds at "Installing updates, 99% done" and... I'm on my desktop. All is well. As unspectacular as it can get.

For me, that is every update experience since Windows 7, ever.

OsCommerce is literally the most awful piece of software ever. Granted, I'm migrating a version from 2007, but even still.

The admin area has a screen to set related products to a target product.

The page takes an age to load, even longer to save and is god awful to use from a UI POV.

Why may you ask?

The OsCommerce devs decided to display a flat list, which check boxes of ALL products in the database.

So for the site in question, that's a single list of 167,000 products, without pagination. Some of the worst development/design on a single page I've seen since last week when I inherited a god awful butchered Wordpress site :|

The scary thing about burnout is that you usually don't realize you are burning out before it's too late.

Personally, at least, I've worked on projects that just felt a little intense at the time, but after taking a step back due to holidays or hitting some milestone I realize I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. One project makes my stomach drop even today every time I see the code; Not because the code is bad, but how it takes me back to how miserable I was without admitting it to myself.

The biggest red flag I look for is when I'm tempted to work on stuff in my free time. When this starts seeming like a solution there's a serious problem with the project that needs to be addressed.

So this morning something wonderful happened. One of my teams deployed some cache for our API using Redis and they didn't config it!!!
So it's TROLL-time!!! And we have some really cool troll rules if you DOS the QA stack!! So if they resolve it in less than an hour they will only have to use a funny cap all day long (even for lunch) but if it takes more than 1 hour it will be a full cyclist outfit for the whole day (over their own cloth).

PS: if you ever use Redis don't mysql it (why config it? it'll work!!!), because Redis will murder your server!!!

This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.

Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.

Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.

But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.

Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.

Reasons?

"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"

FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.

Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.

Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.

I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.

Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.

Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:

Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.

Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.

Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.

Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.

Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.

And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.

So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.

Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.

Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.

My lead loves to over engineer crap and waste weeks building complicated solutions.

And then during retro when a team member has the stones to say we should've thought about it a little more or used the input of some other teammates, he shuts them down by saying that more input would've been bad for the design. I can see where he's coming from, but he always seems to have an excuse for us. Why can't he just be more transparent and clear with us? If he has a problem, just say it. That's what retros are for.

Oh and then he takes a shot at me saying that we shouldn't have built a UI in tandem with it. I didn't even recommend a UI for the thing. All I said was that if we ever have a UI, we should consider a database setup that assists both the server and UI. But nooo, he's stuck with this "server design" approach. Everything has to be built to make it easier for the server.

I still don't understand why anyone would have their server logic influence the design. Especially the database. I just seems too targeted. It just creates these nasty denormalized tables.

Ugh... Our team is getting dragged around by this arrogant and silly man.

Have you ever installed libc++?

If you haven't then i warn you.
When libc++ installs it does a lot of tests and it takes fucking forever!
What the fuck!
What are you even testing? How long patience people have?

And sorry for not screenshoting. I dont want to accidently interupt their "testing"

I've been working like a mad woman in a startup for 3+ years now. They feel like 10. Or at least the tech stacks we went through.
Never, ever join a startup, regardless of compensation, unless you know you can emotionally and mentally recover from that startup failing as if it is yours, not your bosses. Otherwise, it's just a shitty short experience.

My long experience is shitty, but man. I don't know.Those who built google, wanted to make a search engine. Did they know they're gonna be good? NO. This is the result of them being good. They now have that great product that succeeds and is able to become a self-referential piggy bank. You cannot be a self-referential piggy bank based on a fucking belief and idea, and a bunch of VCs who already put money in you. You know why? BECAUSE GUESS WHO IS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUSTAINING YOUR START UP NOW?

The bloods and passions of youth, that join your startup, thinking they can make a difference, and you just undermine them constantly thinking that no engineer can make a difference if they can't ensure compliance with your dumb funding strategy.

Don't even get me started on the fact that most people who work for startups, rely on either laziness or passion. It's like a bunch of kids in art school, whose professor doesn't like anything they make, but they still kinda like it hoping one day they leave and become artists themselves. Then they discover that this shit professor actually taught them nothing about creativity in the real world, and what it takes to push something out.

And, it finally fucking hit me.

The reason startups will never work in this year, and beyond, AND TILL I SEE A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE IN 10 YEARS.....

The market won't fucking allow it with the current strategy tech companies are a fan of: hire a bunch of passionate devs who wanna learn a tool through doing our unique work. Doesn't matter. DIVERSITY. THE UNION IS THE PASSION. That's dumb as fuck.
Why?
Here:

- Passionate people do not have to use passion as an incentive, the passion was there, and them getting their idea made or money is the incentive
- If you hire a passionate person - even if they are the fucking best - you just made their passion a tool, in getting your PRs done and shit epics scoped AT BEST, and so the tools you're teaching them to use are getting away with doing less impactful, productive, creative work.

I AM SO DEPRESSED.

I know its been quite a while since ive posted last but it is safe to say that i am back! And boy do i have some stuff to bitch about.

This semester, Im taking mobile app development as a class. I chose to take this class over the introductory c# class, so that i wouldn't need to work with Windows or really do anything else to touch Windows. Well the joke is on me. Here i was thinking that we would be using a bit of Java from time to time while only really learning best practices and concepts.
Never did i think that this class's curriculum would be entirely based off of Xamarin.
Seeing as I need either this class or the two c# classes to graduate, I had to bite the bullet and just accept that my semester would be full of irritation during this class.
Its been about seven weeks in, and i have turned in 8 assignments.
All 8 of those assignments have been Windows Form Applications doing simple shit like dividing two numbers.
We have not made anything for multiple devices. We have not made anything for even one mobile device. We have not even discussed how to do this in the class.
This wouldnt bother me so much since these are typically easy programs that take about 30 minutes to make and test and submit for grading. It does insanely bother me, however, that it takes Windows so FUCKING LONG to boot, or when it freezes every 2 minutes because i clicked into another program, or it just HANGS ON THE UPDATING SCREEN AT 36% FOR THREE DAYS, or when it took 4 different reinstallations of Visual Studio 2017 before i could actually open without an error code.

College, Ive learned, tests my patience way more than it has ever tested my knowledge.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

I, after a very long time, had to use Windows.

My Ubuntu system died yesterday with faulty hard disk. Good for me that all my data is on cloud and I dont lose anything apart from the software installations. I have ordered a new hard disk and it will come in 3 days time.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to continue my work and I have my wife’s Windows 10 laptop. She doesnt use it often ever since she got a Tablet last year. It was a good chance for me to try out Windows after a while.

The laptop hadnt been used for a while now(probably Dec 2020) and when I started it, I got all sorts of notifications for updates - Windows update, Browser Updates, other Application updates. Coming from Ubuntu world which has a single notification for all software updates, this was just too many notifications. Plus, for some applications you dont get the update notification till you open them.

And by far the biggest frustrating part of this is the Windows update which takes like forever to first install update after all applications are closed, and then installing and configuring some more when the system boots up. And all you do while this happens is watch the screen with progress indicator moving 1% every minute. The system is not usable and even more so, I dont know what application or package is updated.

I started this activity today at 10AM and its 11:53am now, and I still havent been able to use the system to actually do the work. Its a half an hour work on a Google Doc and I have been waiting for it for about 2 hours now.

Its so amazing that Windows system is so screwed still. I dont know what will it take for Windows to have a consistent package and release management. Its so frustrating to update each application on its own.

Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.

A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.

My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.

Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!

I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?

But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.

I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.

And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.

It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?

It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?

By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.

Here we are, three years later. Our system breaks down at the slightest load. An architecture is hardly recognizable anymore. The code consists of methods that have been refactored beyond recognition. The so-called architects came and went, leaving behind an ever-growing fiasco. Wrong decisions are concealed, criticism of them dismissed as ignorance. Our clients are on the verge of having us all killed. Daily crisis meetings are the norm. The remaining developers skulk around the unmaintainable code like emaciated ghosts. Everyone who has even the slightest chance to escape takes a parachute. Our dailies are made up of lies to cover up yesterday's lies. Our Mondays have become days of dread, because that's when the weekend disaster news has to be analyzed. Yet there are still developers who turn a blind eye. Who recommend this and that workaround in a good-humored tone. The code consists only of workarounds. Sarcasm has replaced any normal discussion. Reasonable suggestions on how to basically refactor the whole thing are rejected for cost reasons. In the process, our entire budget is eaten up by maintenance costs. Middle management should be put up against the wall. Why am I still here? This deceptive feeling that one could still turn the tide. This is eating me up.

Aws Lambda and serverless framework. Yes FaaS is cool. Love it. But it is pain in ass when you have the only way for you deploy is zip the fucking code with all the dependencies. Comm'on AWS you can do better. Look at azure functions. Please give me a git deployment support. Please I beg. Each test iteration takes like for ever. Also no proper local emulator. Fuck you AWS. Fuck you serverless.

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

So we use SAP for this little thing.

Booking your work times in a self service. And guess what?!
That shitty piece of software cant handle such an easy task. I mean seriously what the heck?!

They load everything from the slowest server the world has ever seen.
It litterally takes 2 seconds to click a button and something happens.

I need at least 1 minute for one entry! ONE!!!!!

Not to forget to mention it is down like all the time. Hey there are more than 4 users?!
Lets burn the instance down to the ground. Yeah thanks SAP cloud. Great job!

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Dads of DevRant: Will I ever be able to work on personal projects again? I have a half-complete project that was going really well, that I have immense enthusiasm and drive for, but I just can't get to it, kids/family takes up 100% of my time & it's honestly depressing me. I'm finally at a stage in my career/skills where I could complete this; the technicals and business are all within my grasp, but I've fucked myself by having a family, my life isn't mine any more, I gave it up. Not their fault. But will it ever get better? Maybe someone out there understands this pain; nobody around me does, I keep it inside.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

my brain feels like an AI. It just slices things it sees and layers them over and over again. It doesn’t even change things, leaving them pristine and intact, it doesn’t filter stuff out. I cite memes exactly, word by word, with the exact intonation, because I literally just lip syncing to that meme playing in my head as if I was watching a youtube video. Some days I’m not even conscious of my surroundings, I don’t realize where I am, what I do, I’m just caught in that process I can barely put in words. People ask me to do something for them, I do it, and they’re like “no! it’s not what I asked for, well, it is, but not in this sense!” If they asked me if I could make their company the most profitable one in their niche, my brain will probably decide to instead sink and destroy other companies there. All that unspoken, “common sense” knowledge, I don’t understand. I feel detached, as if everyone else was “in” on something, some common notion, meanwhile I’m alone with my perfect things. I feel like a perfect Haskell codebase trying to interact with biker bar gloryhole dirty equivalent of an API. I want things to be exact, I want things to be precise, I want words you say to have specific meaning that I can understand, and I’ll ask you even though it takes overcoming my anxiety and guilt for asking “stupid” questions. If you throw in some clue, my brain will generate a Vsauce video worth of elaboration on that, and I’ll just tell it to you. Sometimes I feel like I just don’t fit, I can’t have fun at party with other people, if there are more than five of them, I’ll probably cry for no apparent reason. My consciousness operates smoothly, and then it don’t, it overheats, crashes and burns, then comes the numbness and derealisation.

I’m not okay. Now more than ever, I sometimes want to just end it.

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

Having gone to a bank to reset a password again today (Yes, I forgot it for like... 3rd time, don't judge me, its my backup bank account I need to access like... once a year), I was once again made to think - I come in, give them my state ID by which they authorize that I can even make a password reset request.

Then they give me a tablet to... sign a contract addendum?

Its not the contract part that always makes me stop and think though - its the "sign" part.

I'd wager that I am not the only one who only ever uses a computer to write text these days. So... My handwriting got a lot jerkier, less dependable. Soooo... My signature can be wildly different each time.......

And if my signature varies a lot... then... what is the point of having it on a piece of paper?

I know its just a legal measure of some sort... And that, if it came down to someone impersonating me and I'd go to court with the bank, there would be specialists who can tell if a signature was forged or not... But...

Come on, the computer world has so much more reliable, uncrackable, unforgable solutions already... Why... Don't all folks of the modern world already have some sort of... state-assigned private/public keypairs that could be used to sign official documents instead?

It costs money, takes time to develop etc... But... Then, there would not only be no need to sign papers anymore... And it would be incredibly hard to forge.

The key could even be encrypted, so the person wishing to sign something would have to know a PIN code or a password or something...

tl;dr: I hate physical signatures as a method of authentication / authorization. I wish the modern world would use PKI cryptography instead...

Anyone else ever been through an identity crisis? This shit is intense. For the first time in over a decade I'm questioning who I really am and how to be happy while interacting with the world around me.

I used to not give a fuck what people thought about me, my semi-haggard appearance was just part of my persona, but as time marched on and my hair got longer, I get nothing but shitty looks from people 40+. I feel like nobody takes me seriously anymore. I'm honestly debating just chopping off most of my hair and dressing nicer, essentially 'growing up'. Just kind of rolling over and blending in with everyone else. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." - I'm tired of getting hammered. I just want to retreat to my quiet little corner of newfound adulthood.

Wow WTF!

So for a new client, they have their domain on a registrar that has the most ugliest and confusing UI ever.

So I decided to transfer the domain to somewhere better.

Guess what, it takes 5 days for them to release the domain. The site would be down and I won't be able to proceed with my work until transfer is complete.

In hopes to speed up the process, I tried to create a ticket. There is no ticket system and their only available contact email listed is sales@shittiestdomainregistarever.com

I mailed them yesterday evening hoping for a reply.

Few hrs ago, I received a bunch of automated email on some ticket I never created.

The biggest WTF is that the To: on that email is some other customer's gmail address and I am CC'd along with a bunch of other customers gmail and hotmail addresses.

Seriously, WTF is this?! I'm glad I took the decision to move from them

Lua users, have you used moonscript?

It's a little language that has it's own interpreter or can be compiled down to Lua and it's absolutely lovely (currently using it with Love2d).

Of course, as with most things, what I love about it also royally pisses me off sometimes.

For starters local has to be declared for variables, unlike lua.
Otherwise the variable goes to _
Also note, that some tutorials literally tell you the opposite.

all variables are local by default
unless you don't declare them
then they go to _ (throwaway)
Some tutorials get this wrong too.

all variables have to be declared local
except tables. failure to declare a table WITHOUT a local will cause things like
table.insert to fail with "nil" values for no god damn reason.
No tutorial I could find mentioned this.

Did you know we call methods with '\'?
By the way, we call methods with '\'.
Why? Who the fuck knows.
Does make writing web routes more natural though.

Variables in the parameters of new are declared and bound for you. Would have loved to know this before hand instead of trying
to bind to them like a fucking idiot.

Fat arrows are used to pass in self for methods.
Unless you're calling a method. Then you use backwards slash. This fact is unhelpful when you're a beginner and dealing with the differences between the *other* arrow, the backslash, the fat arrow, and the fact that functions can be called with or WITHOUT parenthesis.
And on that note..

While learning all this other shit, don't forget parenthesis are optional!
Except when they're not!
..Like when you have a function call among your arguments and have to disambiguate which args belong to the outer call and to the inner call! Why not just be fucking consistent?

But on the plus size, ":" is now used for what it should have been used for in the fucking beginning: binding values to keys.
And on the downside, it's in a language thats built on top of another language that uses it for fucking *method calls*, a completely
different fucking usage.

And better still, to add to that brainfuckery thats lost in the mental translational noise like static on a fucking dialup modem, you define methods with the fat arrow. Wait, was that the single arrow or fat one? Yeah the fat one. Fuck. But not before you do THIS shit..

someShit: =>

yeah, you STILL include the god damn colon just so when you're coming from lua you can do a mental double take. "Why am I passing self twice? Oh right, because fuck me, I decided to use moonscript." It's consistent on that front but it also pisses me off.

A lot of these are actually quality of life improvements disguised as gotchas, but when you're two beers in to a 30 minute headscratcher it sure doesn't fucking feel like it.

Nevertheless, once I moved beyond the gotchas, it was like night and day. Sure moonscripts takes a giant steaming dump all over the lua output, like a schizophrenic alcoholic athena from the head of zeus, but god damn, when it works it just WORKS.

Locals that act like locals? Check.
Sane OOP? Check.
Classes, constructors, easy access to class methods, iterators? Check, check, check, check, check.

I fucking hate ceremony. Configuration over convention is for cunts. And moonscript goes a long ways toward making lua less cunty.
If you've ever felt this way while using lua, please, give moonscript a try.

You'll regret it, but in a good way!

Just got a lovely update on Windows 10. It pops up on login and informs me of this great new browser called edge. Then it fucking takes over the screen and gives me one fucking option: "Get Started". I cannot escape, I cannot close the app, I cannot right click the app icon on the toolbar and close this POS. My only option is to fucking ctrl-alt-del and kill this piece of garbage. You also cannot uninstall this shit either. I even found a thread where the MS guy was trying to help them uninstall, but the end result is that you cannot on newer Windows 10. So I have this POS thing that keeps updating flash and other shit periodically that is nothing but a security hole. Now I never want to ever run this garbage.

The irony is this. I have read a lot of good things about Edge. I was considering it as an alternative to Chrome for specific use cases. Now I absolutely no longer want to run this fucktard pos software. This one experience has now tarnished any gains MS has in the browser arena. It is just more overbearing malware being pushed by assholes. Tech these days is defined by assholes. Apple is assholes, Google is bigger assholes, and MS is still the classic assholes.

Microsoft LET ME FUCKING JUST WORK! Is this not the pro version or what?

Fuck you edge and your pos os.

Now I feel better!

Edit: That was a rendition of the evil caption Kirk from episode 27.

Fuck UPS and their API Documentation. Has anyone here ever integrated their API ?
Their API documentation doesn't mention any sandbox or testing accounts.
If I click on their create access key button, it takes me to a form which requires a real payment method and address which seems like it's meant for real stuff not testing.

android development is shitty af, it will make you super zombie computer nerd that sit on his chair for fking several hours just to find the where the fk is null pointer exception is coming from not only this but for all kind of errors,logcat looks like someone just hacking nasa, you know what im the one who is shitty af i would have opt web dev instead of android dev , this retarded studio and emulator takes too much time to just load a simple fking thing & if i make some change in it i've to install that application again ,it's so pathetic and horse shit thing i've ever encountered , kotlin is fun it's actually great language most of the features are so helpful in it,but the google codelabs,it's all documentation , adding dependencies whole concepts are trash imo, why can't we install the dependencies using terminal what's problem in that ,but no they chose the hard way for no fuking reason, i've successfully wasted a year learning this shitty tech stack, hopefully this NY i will choose different stack , will work till ass off .gonna build some cool projects and will eventually try for internships and all. done with android dev, idk how senior dev's are alive in this field

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.

And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.

He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.

He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him

He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.

You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.

I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.

I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.

The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .

He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.

You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.

I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .

Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.

I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”

I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.

You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.

I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

Does anyone of you fellow devs ever pushes to production during working hours?

I have the luxury to do so and at first was uncomfortable, as this of course takes the system offline for a few seconds, and next web requests from a user are painful due to cold start of web server (and we have 40-100 active users at any given time)...

...but you know what? They all complain SharePoint is slow (it is) anyway, so. I do it.

Sometimes it fucking fails, so I do have all of the historic deployments handy, ready to revert. :)

I currently work on a legacy system for a company. The system is really old - and although I was hired as a programmer, my job is pretty much glorified data entry. To summarise, I get a bunch of requirements, which is literally just lots of data for each month on spreadsheets and I have to configure the system to make it work, which is basically just writing a whole bunch of SQL scripts.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because whoever wrote the system originally really wrote it backwards, and in fact, the analysts who create the spreadsheets actually spend a fair bit of time verifying my work because the process is so tedious that it’s easy to make a mistake.

As you can guess, it is pretty much the most boring job ever. However, it’s a full time job with decent pay, and I work remotely so I can stay home with my son.

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

There might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email etc, but overall, I spend probably 1-2 hours per week on my job for which I am getting a full time wage.

I really enjoy the free time but would it be unethical to continue with this arrangement without mentioning anything? It’s not like I’m cheating the company. The company has never indicated they’re dissatisfied with my performance and in fact, are getting exactly what they want from employing me.

URG!

I cannot think about a title, so just story:
in my position as multi headed chimera one of my ongoing task is it to dedust old excel sheets, processes and other super inefficient relics that steal time. Mostly i solve those with some tiny vba scripts, bigger vba scripts or a tiny java applications. usually that takes a few hours or maybe two days, depending on what i think is necessary.

the current task at hand is for our (physical) production, work time is noted on a sheet of paper and later given to the production head. Who then proceeds to type it all in excel to do his thing. The guy is starved of time by a huuge margin.

So, crafty kangaroo that i am i think: a barcode scanner, some raspberry pis with touchscreens and some mediocre php/mysql/javascript will make our worries go away. of course this will be a longer task but there is no need to have it done immidiatly. So crafted a working prototype, presented it in the weekly company meeting and got it "greenlighted".

The other day our CEO-like guy was ranting that nothing in this company gets ever done and that people wasting their time with useless projects and named my project among them.

I dont get humans. First he gives thumbs up for this, knowing that it will probably take me 100 hours or so to create in a working manner but later he calls it "a waste of time?" I presented the use (reducing expensive mantime, paper waste and room for fudgery) and yet he calls it useless? (well, his point was that there are other problems (which are out of my reach anyway))

they guy normally is pretty nice and has an ear for problems, but when it comes to higher computer stuff (>excel) he really struggles.

:/

i really like my side project, gives me room to flex some muscles and test stuff. Also playing with raspberry pis on worktime.

On a sidenote, anyone ever tried raspi mesh networks and knows where i get working >10 inch capacitive touch screens?

So I have a friend. One of few who I can freely speak with using my natural language (so that means, narrow down topics to IT, mix some of my native language, mix in lot of english and mixture of our favourite languages terms (don't ask me how it works, but it works brilantly and its actually easier to communicate)). And its true friend, seriously.

But when we meet, 80% of time we spent together, every, single, fucking time we argue (in cultural maner, its more of discussion) about what enviroment and what languages have advantages against others. And it pisses the fucking hell out of me, when he takes his enviroment, takes his problems with exac his enviroment, and applies his favourite solutions to it, and goes on how they are fucking awesome and brilliant, and than I reply, sure in my enviroment if I ever had XYZ problem, I wouldn't say use mongo DB becouse I can do it my way, and it would work well too, but it's not really the way I really should solve XYZ problem, becouse in my enviroment you dont have it in the first place. And he will fucking go on, but at least he understands my solutions and finds various details where HIS solution works better. His solution to his problem vs my solution to non-existant problem.

But that's actually an example of much grander thing that I want to rant about. You see, that's not all that bad, we keep it civil and we somewhat enjoy these discussions even if often times, they are pointless. It's like playing games and shit like that, so it's not the point, I just used the example to make it clear what I mean later down the line.

So, to the actual point. What the living fucking fuck is wrong with people, for living fucks sake they cannot physically, mentaly, virtually or otherwise change mindset and point of view if they are telling YOU what to fucking do, what's better to do, etc.
What the fuck! You have around 0.1% of context that is in my head, and my solution works with most of it and your bearly manages to deal with your given 0.1%, so kindly please for living hell, fuck off telling me what to do, what is better in my fucking situation etc. You don't know most of shit I know about my own situation (dosent apply to people with coma and heavy mental issues, sorry its not 100% universal) that I know, yet you have something in your brain that fucking allows you (dosent tell you "its no-go lol") to try push thru your shit to me like it was your fucking life. It's not.

And to be clear, before someone gets sad becouse I was to broad and generic. If you giving advice you can do it properly. And there are people who legit have mindset "well, if I was you and known what you told me, I would do XYZ", but for what the living fuck reason most of people I know have more mindset of "Do XYZ coz fuck you if you dont, coz dat is my opinion and shit and I dont give a living fuck if it does what you want"

Not using all my time. I really don’t apply myself sometimes. Sometimes that means not using work time efficiently, sometimes that means I get stuck on a simple problem for too long because I don’t think through it. Also, I’m trying to love coding more. It takes a lot of code to get a small result sometimes, and that’s ok. I got hooked on being able to do big things with little code from the start. As we get better we know there’s more that can be done, but we are more familiar with just how much work it really is. At the same time we are more capable than ever of doing it. Just gotta embrace the suck, then love your finished product.

I tend to be a perfectionist, and I have a hard time coping when I feel like someone isn’t happy with work that I’ve done, or when I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own standards.

I’ve been at my current job for a little more than a year, and for the vast majority of that time, my supervisor and coworkers have seemed very pleased with me. My performance reviews so far have been completely positive. But I’m aware that over the past month or so, I’ve run up against more challenges than usual. I’ve taken on some new projects that I haven’t felt entirely confident about, there have been some organizational changes, and because this is a busy time for my department, I don’t always feel like I can easily get help when I have a question about something.

To make things worse, I struggle with anxiety, and while I’ve been working very hard to manage it, all it takes is a few bad days to put me behind on things. I really want to step up to the plate, and I’ve been worried that expressing concerns would make me look like I’m not capable or like I’m a complainer. But the truth is, I’ve been getting in over my head a bit, and I worry that it’s reflecting poorly on me. I haven’t made any terrible mistakes, but it’s taken me longer than usual to complete or follow up on tasks and I haven’t been as organized as I usually am. My supervisor hasn’t gotten upset with me, and she’s expressed understanding, but I’m worried that she has less confidence in me than she used to.

To be fair to myself, over the past couple weeks I feel like I’ve been doing a good job at catching up and getting back to my usual level of efficiency. I feel optimistic about my ability to handle things from here on out, at least for the most part. But I’m scared that a few “off” weeks will damage my reputation and workplace relationships, and that people are thinking poorly of me now. I think because I’m so hard on myself (I feel guilty whenever someone praises me, because I don’t feel like I deserve it), it’s hard for me to have an accurate perception of how things actually are.

Also, do you have any tips for addressing challenges when they come up? I struggle with asking for help or clarification sometimes because I don’t want to come across like I need my hand held. And do you have any suggestions for how to deal with it when things just aren’t going smoothly? I know that in the workplace, what matters is results. The fact that I might be having a bad day due to anxiety or a late night with a sick pet isn’t an excuse. But while I think I’m generally good at managing stress and anxiety and that bad days are uncommon, I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever go through a tough time and that that won’t impact my focus at all.

One day I will learn that step 1 of debugging this project is "blow away the whole thing and recompile". But that seriously takes for fucking ever.

WHY does Shopify not give you any information about the image files used? In ANY other platform, if you go to the managed photos section, they would have some sort of indication that the files that were currently used in the store / theme. Shopify doesn't even allow you to search for photos that are currently used!

This is super problematic when you have clients that want you to keep altering photos, and you have 10 images uploaded that look almost identical. The thing that shits me is that you CAN'T EVEN SEE THE FILE NAME on the Shopify "customize" section in the theme editor. When you click on a photo, instead of giving you any useful information, it just takes you to the image gallery and doesn't even highlight the currently selected photo!!! And again, the manage photos section, there is no "status". How the f*** are you supposed to know what image is being used if there isn't a visible status? Also the search feature is a joke. Their "advanced" search has fields that are file size. lol. NO ONE would ever search for an image by file size. Put something useful on there, like a status.

As a developer, I am furious. The fact that I can't easily work out the freakin file name that is being used on the homepage of the Shopify storefront is... baffling.
Also their documentation is shit and it is lies.

bye. I'm mad

Ever since I started learning about React with Typescript my respect for design patterns that restrict how state can change has grown massively. On the web, nothing happens when you say it should happen; everything always takes a while to execute and there is always a transactional period between validating an action with client-side state and receiving the result from the server, and if you want to account for that everything becomes infinitely more complex and you eventually end up with mutexes.

I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.

I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!

The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.

Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.

Conclusion:

- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.

- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all

- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use

So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils

Lately I read post from democracy developer how we are unable to run democracy in direct way. We know something in some fields and are si fucking dumb in others. Sure we could make research, but it takes time which most of us don't have, so we could chose as we feel which could be more less correct, but even doing research could lead as nowhere. But it isnt only fucking democracy, same goes with medication, food, raising children and there goes fucking shopping. We ass people don't like shitty things or more correctly we don't want ti fucking know it and don't want expensive things, middle is the best, but when you could afford best quality it us easy to associate it with price which is so fucking lie. There is this ios and android battle and a lot of others and it is fucking insane. Why? Because everything is advertised as fucki.g awesome, cocksucking shit which could you eat, shit and eat again. It makes you full, well feed and slim, also makes you boobs, penis, ass of whatever bigger than average (always bigger no matter how much average is).

You want to buy coffee? Our brand is fuckj.g best roasted, best seeds from best plantation and costs only 7$ per kg, fuck you because it tatses like shit and makes me vomit. sure obvious scam, but what with 20-30$ coffee? It is well roasted, freshly roasted and do they fucking know how to do that?

Fuck coffee, go to buy t-shit which one isnt fucking cut off efficiency which also make t-shit stretched as ass after naked night in prison?

Laptop? Fuck you each one is fucking best for everhtbing, 4GB of RAM, slow HDD, shitty CPU and windows 10 onboard? Beast of performance and also mobile, the best laptop ever. Obvious scam, sure, but 1000$ laptop? could be decent? Fuck you, shitty hinge and case so it is like fuckenstein monster.

Why couldn't we have honest advertising? because noone will buy it, shitty shit. Even fucking numbers don't always tell you which is better... fucking shit.

Have a nice day ;)

So. My new machine at work has decided that running visual studio is too hard and our build script has decided that building vcxproj files is too hard. And our one sysadmin for our team of 100+ is the only one allowed to fix it.

Luckily I have an old box that *only* takes 45 minutes to run our build, a hangover, apparently I am going through early manopause because it is hot as fuck in this office, and today is the day that everyone wants to loudly ask every question ever.

I guess what I am saying is I blame everyone else for my bad decisions and project them into my you-me instead of focusing on my me-me. Also I really don't want to talk to the S.A. He is difficult.

How can not one, not two, but many many things JUST be so wrong!? like..
Windows. (Yes. THE OS). Why? well... we begin with the garbage, right? the BLOAT.
cortana
mspaint
internet explorer <- wh..WHA?! wh?!?!
ms edge <- okay.. (I saying okay as in a figure of speech I would like to remove it honestly)

why can't I remove internet explorer, and they make another internet explorr called microsoft edge - you guessed it - I can't remove ms edge either.
What's next?! :D
bloat umbruella version -0.1? :D <- a new internet explorer. for 2042.

Cortana. <- some might say "that's not Sooo bad tho". It might not be, but if if it is for me - I would like to remove it.

Okay. okay. moving onto the software.
`V`-Yeah you guessed right. on the first letter.
VISUAL STUDIO.

my face: 😲
I compare visual studio to windows xp to internet explorer to windows overall. they share so much in common...

forced updates,
fixes,
BLOCKS you to compile programs because of NUMEROUS REASONS LIKE..
comment out "CRC303030 whatever" to ignore this message.
you need the build tools vx.x.x.y.x.y.x.t..z.z.z.(100 billion digits later)..x.x.Z OR alternatively you could re-target your solution by (...) (and now today I had enough, I dont see the retarget solution - And I am sure, WHEN I SEE IT - it will just be another problem..

... 💥

I am surprised how windows can run so fluently, with all this crap. Fluently as in actually being running. I am a fan of linux instead though but..
(question to me would probably be why you use windows not linux then?) sometimes I code on windows.. 🤦‍♀️

and it is a pain.

workloads,updates,options,BILLION OF OPTIONS, BILLION OF BUTTONS, stuff I never ever use, takes time to reinstall,install,remove, - windows also needs to restart after each simple thing.... (!?)

sorry. this was nice to write this rant. PHEW! thank GOSH this site exists! 😘 😍

Oh for fucks sake!

Suddenly I couldn't use my mic. Windows is always a bit retarded, so I decide to restart. Ofcourse Windows FORCES me to install their shitty upgrades ("We have installed: Killer Control Center - check it out!" (Like hell I will!!)). This takes 5 min, which is usually not a lot of time, BUT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE IN A VOICE-MEETING DAMNIT!

Windows shaped up. Every thing works.

2 hours later: "We have an update for you, we will restart outside of active hours". WHAT?! NO! That means I can't leave my work up on my computer because I can't trust my fucking OS to not throw away my work! And also YOU JUST UPDATED YOURSELF WINDOWS!!!! HOW DO I TELL YOU TO PERFORM ALL UPDATES AND NEVER EVER RESTART WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!!!

I'm an iOS developer and I cringe when I read job specs that require TDD or excessive unit testing. By excessive I mean demanding that unit tests need to written almost everywhere and using line coverage as a measure of success. I have many years of experience developing iOS apps in agencies and startups where I needed to be extremely time efficient while also keeping the code maintainable. And what I've learned is the importance of DRY, YAGNI and KISS over excessive unit testing. Sadly our industry has become obsessed with unit tests. I'm of the opinion that unit tests have their place, but integration and e2e tests have more value and should be prioritised, reserving unit tests for algorithmic code. Pushing for unit tests everywhere in my view is a ginormous waste of time that can't ever be repaid in quality, bug free code. Why? Because leads to making code testable through dependency injection and 'humble object' indirection layers, which increases the LoC and fragments code that would be easier to read over different classes. Add mocks, and together with the tests your LoC and complexity have tripled. 200% code size takes 200% the time to maintain. This time needs to be repaid - all this unit testing needs to save us 200% time in debugging or manual testing, which it doesn't unless you are an absolute rookie who writes the most terrible and buggy code imaginable, but if you're this terrible writing your production code, why should your tests be any better? It seems that especially big corporate shops love unit tests. Maybe they have enough money and resources to pay for all these hours wasted on unit tests. Maybe the developers can point their 10,000 unit tests when something goes wrong and say 'at least we tried'? Or maybe most developers don't know how to think and reason about their code before they type, and unit tests force them to do that?

Alright, it's before our midterms in second year PU. Our teacher tells us to teach an entire chapter on databases ourselves and splits us up into groups to teach parts of it. This isn't uncommon. In our college some teachers would give out printed notes written by themselves for particular chapters.
Our CS teacher tells us to write our own printed notes for the DB chapter and distribution among ourselves and assign the task to the same groups. Not many of us refer printed notes anyway (especially CS) so we just copy out stuff from our textbook and put in a Word document we're supposed to submit to him...
Goddammit ... The guy takes the file and then goes full fucking retard. Forces everyone to PAY FOR A COPY OF THE NOTES WE FUCKING WROTE and tells the class rep to inform if anyone doesn't take a copy. He then tells us that the money is going to the college meal program and if anyone has a problem they can ask him for the receipt.. Donate to the program fine and all but he could have told us before hand and he still forced us to do it and no one ever asked for the receipt because we guessed he was bullshitting us.

ScalaJs React compiles Scala to React.js.
There's some cool typing involved but I haven't done web front-end since nested tables were meta, so there's lots to learn.

There's exactly one senior dev at my company who is fluent in this ScalaReact, so I tag him in the PR for my project. Every day at 10:00 am, slack publicly posts a reminder with @mention that he hasn't reviewed my PR.

Three days later I haven't heard anything so I send a DM over slack asking for feedback... No response.

Four days after the PR I beg for 10 minutes of pairing time, because something in my component hierarchy smells funny. He doesn't have time for me until 5:00 .

I've now built almost a weeks worth of work on the original PR and the feedback I get is 'this works, is performant, and has no obvious bugs, but you can't merge it until you restructure the underlying component hierarchy'

It takes me and another senior dev an entire day of pairing to implement the changes without breaking anything. But, I asked for the feedback because I wanted to learn and write good clean code so I'm irritated but willing to move on.

Yesterday I posted in slack that I was having a hard time following my callback chains to find where the color was assigned to a <td (because I had to add a coloring rule). I wanted to know if I could change the type signature of a component from Tagmod (one or more HTML tags) to VdomTagOf[TableCell] so that it would be clear where the color was assigned.

Instead of just telling me 'no' and giving some context, the react dev gives me:

"Why would a dev need to know about the type unless they’re actually trying to use the thing ? Those are all great questions, but id suggest trying not to prematurely optimize for those until they actually come up"

I flipped my shit. After you couldn't make time for me for a WEEK I had to justify to the CEO why I was spending a day on PURE refactors to accommodate your PREFERENCES. Meanwhile when I'm being VULNERABLE and exposing that I am confused and struggling to complete my task you DISMISS my concerns and attack my motivations.

Unfortunately, this is all happening in the public slack channels and I start defending readability and my premise while triggered. Now I'm riding the shame train for fighting in public slack and trying to pretend none of this ever happened.

TLDR: Read the post.

Part of me watches the day fly by as I work through the various stories and issues my company has as we walk through the various phases and clean up of their own stupidity of outsourcing. I guess it would be unfair to say “stupidity” It was really a money thing. Excuses aside, the alcohol today tastes amazing as I work through the issues, nothing is ever the same, nothing is ever redundant or boring. There are times where you want to pull your hair out, jump off a building and question why the hell any one would write code, specifically Laravel this way.

I watch the internet from now and then and see the cry babies whine and complain about GitHub and Microsoft jumping into bed and their favourite, and mine too, editor falling into Microsoft’s hands.

It’s disgusting and completely childish, but I digress. The last time I was here the alcoholism and the loneliness had begun pushing me towards the Nicotine and suicide. I have managed to obviously push through and watch the money come in only for adult life to take it away, I guess that’s life. Complaining about it will do nothing other then show others how much control you lack in your own life. You quiet your complaints and bury them deep inside your mind where they fester and stir and become drowned in alcohol.

Dating is even harder, especially when you work from home, so much so that I have completely given up there, any semblance of social life is buried in Final Fantasy 14 online, where pixels and text other people write have become my friend, at least for a moment or two before the work takes over and I sit in a room blaring music and watching the code I write, appear on screen like some savant who has high functioning autism but can create amazing works of art. I don’t think I am autistic though.

The truth is I don’t mind my job, I love the money and the freedom as I stated before.

Code for me is like a seed of anger that starts deep in my core, festering, eating away at me, killing me slowly and branding me a fool. The problem is the best feeling, when there is a problem I can solve it with code, when there is a problem that cannot be solved by code I take solace in the problems that can be. I don’t like people, I hate offices and I despise dealing with my own personal issues, I would rather drink and vape until the nicotine and the alcohol has made me sufficiently numb.

Code is a place I can escape, a place I have control, a place where I don’t feel like blowing my brains out at the stupidity of other people. Have I mentioned that I hate people?

The internet is full of idiots, people ranting and raving about this and that and how it affects them oh so much, when they don’t even let their own code, there own programming problems, and in most cases shitty solutions, affect them. Look at this GitHub thing, the idiots are running around with their heads cut off, waiting for the world to end or in most cases acting like it has. Companies get bought, bill get paid, people leave each other – Shut the fuck up and deal with it.
I guess if you look back at what I have written you could say the same thing to me, boo-fucking-hoo working from home sucks sometimes, grow up and deal with it like an adult. Fair enough, I’ll take my lumps. Excuse me as I continue to drink this post away and watch the downvotes come in. I guess honesty comes with a double edge sword.

And yes I would rather use alcohol as a solution then deal with the issues.

dear amazon,
would you please be so kind and explain me, a native german speaker, how to give more german responds within my german skill to match the german language?
also are you fucking kidding me presenting new unheard silly issues every new submission and needing four days to answer? you don't want to be alexa sounding and acting natural, do you?
your fucking silly certification process takes the whole fun out of free-of-charge-enhancing the use of your own product.
yours cincerely

for real, coding skills is fun, but never ever promise a client any deadline. amazon will definitively screw you. dumbasses.
FUUUUUCKSHITDAMNARSEHOLESSILLYBITCHES

Why do companies waste serious cash in office parties? I'm talking about those hundred-thousand-dollar extravaganzas that major tech companies seem to be addicted to.

Poll after poll finds that most employees would rather have the cash, so "kissing the collective asses of tech staff so that they won't leave" is not an explanation that holds up.

The "Roman Triumph" explanation also does not make any sense. If rich assholes want to flex their immeasurable riches, why would they invite mere mortals that do not put a lot of effort in being famous or pretty? Couldn't they invite the entire Victoria's Secret catalogue of models and the NE Patriots? Surely it would make for much more impressive photos of decadence.

The "Michael Scott" explanation also falls short. Companies spend serious cash on consultants and professional party planners, that are sure to know a lot of people. Money can and often does buy personality, so no rich asshole is ever a party dud.

Why else do they force most of their own staff into what they perceive as a "do not relax or you may get fired" loud and poorly lit meeting that takes hours to dress up for? What am I missing?

Dunno if anyone else has ever used it or if most people just the browser, but the Twitch smart TV app is hot garbage. It takes several seconds to process every remote control input, even just navigating the menus.
It’s the only app on my TV that performs so badly. YouTube/Netflix/Prime all work perfectly, but for some reason Twitch acts like its running on a Windows Vista toaster

I. FUCKING HATE MY STUPID ASS UNCLE. HE IS SUCH AN ASSWIPE BRO ISTG he moved in with us and like I didn't think it would be such a big deal but HIS ASS SCREAMS AT ANYONE WHO DISRUPTS HIM WHILE HES LITERALLY DOING POT IN THE KITCHEN AND LIKE.. BRO DISRESPECTS HIS MOTHER WHO KEEPS THE ENTIRE HOUSE STABLE. HE TAKES ALL HER MONEY and doesnt lay her back like EVER?? And HE FUCKING RUINS EVERY HOLIDAY WE HAVE. And i cant even say anything to him because i have to respect grownups like man.. he aint even man enough to be respected 😹😹😹 he thinks hes scary bro like no. hes just a self centered lazy ass bitch. Im waiting for the day he moves out lmao.

So this situation happened a while ago, but I am still pretty angry about it. I am learning Haskell, and it wasn't working, so I asked someone for help. Turns out, he had only been learning how to program for a couple weeks now, and as soon as he saw it, he burst out laughing.

He was making fun of me in the sense that I had only written one line (What?!) OKAY, first off, does this kid know what Haskell can do in one line? Much more than his beloved python, in which, the most complex thing this moron has made was a for loop. And second off, this kid is just like those retarded coworkers and bosses that measure productivity by lines.

I'm not gonna hate the kid because he's learning, but I can see he superiority growing a couple weeks in
God forbid he EVER takes this as a career option, else he may be the most arrogant, annoying human being alive.

I have seen dumb people in this industry. But this one guy specifically takes the award for being the dumbest one I have ever met. So Today... [read more]

Adobe Illustrator worst program ever!, Need to get measurements from a webdesign and it takes for ever to load, missing images and fonts fuck this shit.