A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.

"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"

"Uh... look at my beard"

"What"

"Just look at this beard!"

"Uh.... OK"

"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"

"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"

"You don't have to lie"

She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.

"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"

"Yeah"

"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."

She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"

Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."

Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.

Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"

"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"

Joanna: "No I already took care of it"

"How?"

"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"

Me: "I do miss shaving though"

As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.

So they were having trouble with the server always being slow and maxed to 100%, so the boss told me when wait times were hitting 5+mins due to server trying to catch up, he complained at me, said if I could get the wait time to 30sec to instant he would raise my pay to 90k a year, then walked away after I agreed, I was quite serious but I don't think he thought I was, so I decided to look over the system, IDK who but they put all the calculations and processing server-side for the CA's on floor then sent the completed view to the CA, so I spent months recreating the entire system except the server only pulled the data needed then the new client would do all the processing on their computer since they weren't doing anything anyways, I did a practice run today as its one of our peak days, wait times went to barely 5secs or "instant" according to CA's, I walked into the office, slapped that hourly report down after just two hours and showed the massive increase in employees production times.

That look on his face...
That look on my face...
That look on my next check...

Bliss

The marketing department is right next door to my office, and to make room for their new intern, a very high end, large, and noisy printer was 'temporarily' placed in my office. I'm a reasonable person though, and didn't mind this. The salespeople figured out that it makes commercial grade printouts, so for their various presentations and whatnot, they'll print enormous numbers of pages on this thing, and basically use my office as a motherfucking water-cooler. After a few weeks of this, I logged into the printer from my computer, and set it to disallow all connections from MAC addresses other than those in the marketing department, who print far less material on their own, special, dedicated printer. Absolute fucking chaos ensued. Grown men were brought to tears, ultimatums were made, and blood was shed. The hardware guys were down here for over an hour, making up absolute bullshit as to why it wasn't working(which really surprised me).

Long story short, cut off access to printer, sit back and watch the true face of humanity emerge. Seriously, fuck those guys. They have their own goddamn printer.

This was at my previous and last internship. At previous ones i never got serious tasks so i was pretty used to that but one day my guider (lead backend programmer) called me over to help him out with a server issue (in all seriousness he said that i was probably the best Linux guy at that company at that moment). So i fixed it quickly and just out of curiousity i asked what kinda server it was and how many visitors it got monthly!

"it's a prod server and about one million at least i think"

I was just standing there for a minute and then asked why the hell he let me, an intern, work on that to which he replied: because you know what the fuck you're doing. I think I succeeded in hiding the tears of happiness that came up at that moment :) i fucking miss that place.

Had an external hdd for backing up family photos etc. (back when I just discovered Linux and still used windows as well)

Connected it to my windows system and it said that the thing was corrupt and i had to format it.

Well fuck, a few hundred gb's of pictures, memories, backups etc etc probably lost. (keep in mind I didn't know that much about computers at that point)

Was about to format that thing with literally tears in my eyes when I thought I'd, because why the fuck not since I was out of options anyways, try it as well on my Ubuntu installation.

EVERYTHING WAS STILL ON THERE AND PERFECTLY ACCESSIBLE.

After a very much rage attack on windows I formatted the windows partition and used that as a backup space as well :).

Ranted about this internship before but just remembered this.

1st internship.

The employees and the boss were having a joke/laugh. I found it funny as well so I laughed along

A little later the boss pulled me outside (as well as my internship guide person): why where you laughing along? You had nothing to do with that conversation. It was none of your fucking business. Stay out of other people's business, understood?

I was scared, shaking and trying to keep my tears in.

That was not the best internship.

Wasn't there myself. Came back after weekend or being sick or something and after the daily stand-up one of the guys came to me:
"hey man not to be rude or anything but we're not going to use your code for the project. You're programming in a wrong way."

They explained me where I was going wrong and then it appeared that my study taught me some principles of PHP programming wrong.

I felt like shit, downish and had to fight the tears because I felt quite humiliated.

Looking back at it, they were completely right.

Asked the new guy what his code does. He pointed me to his test cases. Tears of joy.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.

Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.

At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.

Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.

I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!

Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.

And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.

But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.

Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.

We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.

Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.

From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.

Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.

The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.

Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!

After my previous PC bursting into flames when I changed my input voltage to 120v on the power supply my dad never bought me one again this happened when I was aged 12. I was so much in love with computers that I would visit my friends who had ones at home and not leave till their moms asks me to. I remember collecting my lunch money and buying a Pentium 4 mb for dog cheap at a local store and as soon as I plugged in the mb short-circuited and died (I had the other parts as I was scavenging the junk yard for them). I'll never forget the moment I burst into tears seeing my hopes for a PC dieing. So after all the years passing when I was 16 I spent my whole summer vacation working in a construction site doing so much heavy work. There were days that my body couldn't bear and I just fell but somehow by the end of that summer I managed to collect enough money to assemble this 3rd gen dual-core. This is my baby. I'm using it till this date.
**Sorry about the bad English

OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!

I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.

Whats with that attitude?

I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".

Actually, that time is never.

Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.

If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).

In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.

You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.

Hold your tears boi

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

And, the other side, husbands 😂
——————————————————–
Dear Technical Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. The new program also began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate

——————————————————–

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: ” C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME” and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5. But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1.

Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.

You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck,
Tech Support

I've put my blood, sweat and tears into this company in the past years. Worked overtime, evenings, weekends, night shifts to get shit done and helped out in sharing knowledge only to learn a new guy who's still learning has 200 bucks higher pay check than me.

I'm not even sure how to react to this.

In my college days i was designing a bootloader for avr microcontroller , i had the idea to flash code wirelessly to avr over bluetooth and also cross compile the compiler for android device so that you can code on android, every thing went well just one thing didn't, i saw that code of certain size is executing properly , greater than that size gives me wired outputs so i have to dump hex from the avr (that is flashed the by bootloader) and compaire it with the original hex of code it got messy as you can see, most fun part of this bug is that error can be anywhere cross compiler may be fucked up , the bootloader may be fucked up , or it may be my bluetooth module , after 14 hours of staring at the hex code i figured out the mess in bootloader instruction that was changing the page address for flashing .

when it worked it was 3am in night i literally burst into tears of joy next day bought myself a cake to celebrate

Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

When this happens I get tears of joy...

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

"Running the sample code is easy! Just git clone, make sure python, lua, gcc, docker and cuda are installed, and run ./install.sh. Easy!"

Me: Light 6 candles, sprinkle some thyme water with unicorn tears over my keyboard, start chanting an unholy hymn... shit... some compiler error from a library I've never heard of before.

Why can't these "interesting samples" come with easy pre-compiled binaries...

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

Everytime someone says stakeholder I picture a rich fat guy in a suit, hugging a giant human-sized steak with tears in his eyes whispering "Oh steak, I love you so much, I will forever hold you in my arms", dancing a little waltz around his room while his cheeks and dress shirt get drenched with the exquisite richness of a good pan sauce.

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

while (programming)
{
tears++;
}

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

We called it "Project Hindenburg".

A huge planning and logistics app with hundreds of screens and dozens of interwoven subfunctions, suddenly needed to be able to support multiple time zones. Our project was to retrofit every area that touched on dates or times, to allow the user to specify, and work in, any time zone.

At this point in the story I can tell whether you have had to work with time zones in code. People who haven't are butting in with something that begins, "that should be fairly simple, you just need to..." followed by some irrelevant noise that betrays their ignorance.

People who have worked with time zones are nodding in shared pain, like fellow attendees of a survivors meeting.

You see, programmers tend to think of time zones as arithmetic; in reality, they are confusing, ambiguous, chaotic, and individual. You can't translate everything into a central time zone (eg UTC) because you lose the user's intent. For example, if you schedule a meeting for 3pm and then move it to the next day, you want it at 3pm even if the clocks have changed.

Project Hindenburg ended up using the entire development staff of the company for well over a year. It smashed our release projections to rubble, made an already tangled code base completely unmaintainable, introduced mind-bending edge case bugs that reduced staff across the company to tears (literally), and led to most of the mid-level and senior developers eventually quitting (including me).

I am @fuckfuckityfuck, and that was the story of Project Hindenburg.

C'mon people! Spread the word! "The cloud" is not "just someone elses computer", it's a completely different way to compute!

I'm so tired of the oversimplifications done trying to explain the consept. The massive amount of work, sweat and tears put into the orchestration, automation and abstraction layers to deliver truly elastic, scalable and self healing infrastructure, applications and services deserves a fuckload more respect than "just someone elses computer"!

Hosting and time-sharing have been with us almost as long as we have had computers (mainframes etc), but dismissing the effort of thousands upon thousands of devs and ops people to make systems robust and automated enough to literally being able to throw a wrench in the engine any time during production and not have the systems suffer is fucking insane!

The whole reason the term "cloud" is so fitting is not just because it was coined from the cloud-shape used in technical and non-technical drawings and illustrations symbolising the internet, but also because of the illusion of magic it gives the end-user not being able to see "whats inside the music box".

Today pranked my colleague changing some semicolons in his PHP Code to greek question marks.
It took him tears, sweat and a long time until I told him.
Now he wants to kill me.
XD

So this shit happened today...

We were asked to implement a functionality on the device that allows it to go to standby mode to save battery power. Once the device enters that state, it can only be woken up by actual bus-network activity, and usually that means connecting a shit-ton of wiring harness and network emulation devices... Before implementing and releasing the device software that does this, we told that fucktard customer how difficult it would be for him to connect to the device without such a setup. He seemed to be fine with it and said rather arrogantly that we should implement the requirement as asked...

Well okay you cock-sucking motherfucker, you'll get exactly what you asked for... We implement the functionality and deliver the software...

Now this pile of shit comes back running his mouth on how the device tears down all its interfaces (to reduce power consumption) and he can't connect to the device anymore.... Well what else were you expecting you dickhead.
To make things worse for me apparently he runs to the manager describing his apparent problem. Both of them come to my desk.. With that fucking Bastard hiding his smugly mug behind the manager's back... He thought he was going to have the upper hand... Well guess what fucked piece of shit, I came prepared... I showed the manager how this was a part of the requirements by throwing that JIRA ID in their faces... The manager seems to understand but this relentless fuck wanted me to implement a "workaround" that would allow him to connect to the device easily... The manager almost had me implement that workaround, when I expose a huge security flaw in doing so. Guess what, now the entire team comes to my desk and start supporting my statement... To make it better they also tell how doing so will violate other requirements...

I've never felt so happy in my entire fucking career, when the entire team stood by me and watched that asshole drag his sorry ass back to his place

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

I am in tears.

My manager had a lot of pressure to relocate to the US.

She wasn't able to do so and had to leave the company on mutual terms.

Not only we'll be working with someone new but also my manager was fucking amazing person.

A gem who walked into my life, flipped my life and now goes away.

Why the good people have to leave...

I was so wrong to think about her the wrong way even when I saw this coming.

I really hope that I stay in touch with these awesome people and grow along with them for a long time.

It hurts me when I lose good connections.

Fuck me! Can't even think clearly right now.

My first semester in college I had a six-week Saturday course on how to use UNIX that ran from 9-12. The professor hada habit of going at least an hour over time each week, so by the fourth week we're getting a bit tired of it.

That particular session, right at noon, he decided to teach us how to message other people on the network. Finally, we made our way over to the wall command a half hour later. Bored to tears, I type the following into my console:

wall "Are we done yet?"

Suddenly, the projector updates:

Kaji says:
"Are we done yet?"

Not realizing my name was going to be attached to it, I sank back into my seat a bit. The professor glared at me for about 5 seconds, then promptly wrapped up. Future class sessions ended on time.

//Not a rant

r/WindowsPhone discussing if the CIA has hacked them has me in tears 😂

WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?

WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?

When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.

I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.

Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.

The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.

I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.

She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.

She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.

She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.

And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.

And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.

But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.

I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.

I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.

One of the people I supervise is “Mary,” a woman in her early 20s. Every time she gets critical feedback (even very mild and accompanied by praise), she turns bright red and starts crying … like, a lot. Tears streaming down her face. Other than that, though, she responds calmly and rationally. She carries a handkerchief and just mops up the tears and continues the conversation. One of the first times this happened, I asked if she was okay, and she said that it’s “just a physical response to stress” and confided that she’s getting cognitive behavioral therapy to learn to control it. Honestly, I think she’s handling the whole thing with a lot of professionalism and maturity.

I am her direct supervisor, but she also reports to two of my (male) colleagues, one of whom is a VP in my company. I recently overheard them talking about Mary, saying that her crying is uncomfortable, unprofessional, and “stupid.” Mary is a great employee, and I want to do whatever I can to protect her job and reputation within the company. Should I say something to my colleagues? Should I advise her to say something?

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

Don’t you love when you put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into a company and then you get fired because your wife got a flat tire and you had to go help fix it?

When I got to this company they were not using version control, had no tooling in place, and most of our day was spent merging projects by hand and going through a long process to deploy our applications (this company is a primarily Salesforce company).

I got everyone using git and built a node client to transpile JavaScript and SASS, lint code, package everything together, and deploy it to Salesforce. Productivity jumped and the amount of time all of us spent merging code by hand dropped significantly.

A few weeks after finishing this CLI I was moved to another team and subsequently let go because I had to leave early to help my wife fix a flat tire. Now I am freelancing and actually doing pretty damn well for myself. Bonus: I no longer have to work with the disaster that is Salesforce!

This morning I received an image of my custom mouse pad. I almost cried tears of joy. Now for the long wait as it comes from China...

FUCK PHP!!!
We were trying to go live with a big online shop, it is connected through a crappy API to SAP.
PHP keeps outputting fucking errors because our intern doesn't fucking know how to properly write PHP.

YEAH, JUST FUCKING RETURN A WHOLE DIFFERENT TYPE OF DATA IF THE FUNCTION HAS AN ERROR.

Oh and using fucking strtr( ... ) to insert stuff in a string is REALLY FUCKING 1337...

And when you think the whole fuckery has reached the summit, just look at how HE FUCKING CREATED THE UGLY EMAIL TEMPLATE:
$content .= "UGLY HTML ABOMINATION";
$content .= "MORE UGLY HTML";
$content .= "HTML WITH SPELLING ERRORS";
$content .= "<table>";
$content .= "TEARS OF TIM BERNERS LEE";
$content .= "<table>HE FOGOT THE FUCKING '/'";

and dozens more of these lines...

and the whole piece for ALL 3 FUCKING LANGUAGES...

Thanks for writing the fucking backend stuff, it is better to rewrite the whole piece.

I call my git repos the field hospital.

I didn't finish my studies, but I seem to be the most qualified person to pick up the scalpel. Big corner of body bags. New brilliant ideas arrive, I do what I can with the time I have. Sometimes something survives, but it's usually too heavily mutilated to fully function. Unfinished refactorings develop into hardened scar tissue, the feature creep starts festering and leaking.

I should get better at triaging, just deleting old crap, pick one project and nurse it back to health.

But it's not easy to start with fresh focus, when your keyboard is still soaked in booze and the blood and tears of all the victims you've butchered.

I told a so called "Software Engineer" not to touch the keyboard before she knows the difference between '/' and '\' in Windows Command Prompt. She burst into tears and has not spoken to me since then

Just when I had given up hope and thought South Africa was just a little to far for the devRant stickers to go - it arrived! It's looks like it's been through blood, months and tears to get here, but it's here! Thanks guys!

Some people say that they've built something with blood, sweat and tears. They've clearly never built anything serious. If they did, they'd know that it costs that, an unholy amount of alcoholic beverages to account for the crippling depression caused by the inevitable failures, and a shitton of cursing. FUCK!!

Your git commit history on your personal branch when you're freaking out and cry tears in joy because the code you spent the whole previous week on to somehow get it to work suddenly DOES work.

True compliments I have given:
-*actual tears dripping* I'm changing how I code to be setup more like yours
-if I could fuck that code I would

So I been telling Cox no to upgrading my modem for the past 2 months, my modem works fine, so now last night the modem just stops working, the internet is out and I call support, I tell them the problem and they without even thinking ask what version of modem I have, I tell then gen 2,they then offered a upgrade for free and the old gen 2 ones were not working lately, I reluctantly agreed to swap them for free, so after I got off the phone I was curious, I decided to packet sniff and find all my data is being sent just fine, but once it reaches the Cox main gateway it just drops the packet, I even pinged the DNS and it responded fine, turns out they just shut my connection off and basically forced me to upgrade to their gen 3 enhanced Wi-Fi bullshit

Favorite/most hated language? (I love a good flame war)

Why did you quit your previous job / Moment you've considered quitting your current job?

Why do you think Linux is so much better than OSX? (Ahh yes I feed on apple flavored hipster tears)

What side project are you currently working on?

If you had the best teams and unlimited funds, to be used only on a serious project using both Blockchain, IoT and AI, what would you create?

If you forgot how to code, what other career would you pursue?

What is your "I was so busy wondering if I could, that I forgot whether I should" concept/idea/project?

How many chicken eggs would fit inside the moon if it was hollow? (I like retarded interview questions)

If you started a startup, what unique perk would you offer your developer employees?

Do you under- or overengineer?

Most unnecessary feature you ever had to create?

Most necessary feature your boss/client denied to approve?

"Sooo, children of the village, what are we going to write front-end in?" - I said to my infant students.
"Typescript with ts-loader/awesometypescript loader for webpack" - simultaneously yelled the kids.
"Exactly! Brilliant! And now, what are we going to be writing back-end in?" - asked I then.
The kids yelled: "PHP 7.2 with Laravel, or Go with Gingonic and juliensmith/httprouter, or Typescript without loader, with express/koa"
Truly stunned with their excellence, I asked "Well, now you 100% ain't gonna get it right - what are we going to be writing a desktop application that doesn't require a lot of native functionality and preferably, cross-platform in?" And the kids didn't hesitate to yell happily "Typescript targeting Electron", which has only brought tear to my eye.
"A native ms windows app?" "WPF under C#"
"A native gtk app?" "Vala"
"A native KDE/XFCE app?" "Cpp/Qt"
"A native mac app?" "Swift3.2/4"
I was in tears, just thinking about what future these kids have, but suddenly I have noticed one of kids seemed puzzled. It was Pajeet, an indian guy, ugh, his mom was a bitch. I asked him "What is wrong, little acoustic?" "But I like Java, and I would like to make back-end with Tomcat!" he replied. "Ooooh :3" cutely I moaned, trying to reach the handle of the table locker "I've got something just for you". I pulled out a rope, with sewed-in spikes, covered in drool and piss, came up to Pajeet and tenderly put it around his neck, making a knot. Pajeet fell under the table, and I got fired.

Submitted my last pull request, said farewell to my team today... *weeping*... haven't realized it would be so hard. Oh, well, best of luck my friends, and keep my code running ;)

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

How many programmers dose it take to change a lightblub?

None, it's a hardware problem.

So this happened last week.

Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.

The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).

Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...

There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.

So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.

Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.

Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.

At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.

At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!

They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.

I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.

He was happy and felt honered.

He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.

Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"

That dickhead smiled and felt good

Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"

I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.

That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.

The class started clapping.

One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life

Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect

Thank you for reading

Have a nice day!

How can business majors be so gullible?! Who the fuck poisoned their minds with the app hype ?!!

Seriously my tears are 90% from laughter and 10% shame for humanity.

Friend: "Dude I'd like to consult with you the idea of an app...etc"
Me: "Sounds nice, got a business plan?"
Friend: "Yes, but well...you see... development has already started"
Me: "oh cool, how's that going?"
Friend: "well I already made an upfront payment of 2K dollars"
Me: "sounds kind of excessive for the amount of work...wait did you said upfront payment?"
Friend: "yeah, we calculated 30k total"

😐

Me:"umm...that software must be...special...? Can I see it?"
Friend: "that's the thing, they haven't delivered"
Me: " did they give you mockups? A development plan? Demo? Anything?"
Friend: "umm no"
Me: "a god damn receipt?"
Friend shows me a piece of paper with the name of the guy and 2K written on it.
Friend: "he says he's been busy, I wanted your advice"

I blame Eduardo Saverin's fate and my friend's on college's failure to teach "real world assholes 101"

This morning i wanted to work on my freelance project and it was corrupted for some reason, i started panicking, shed some tears, did a few shots, shed some more tears and after about 30min of doing this I realised that my project is on github and everything's fine now

What kind of person doesn’t install Windows 10 for a free pre-installation of Candy Crush Soda Saga thrown into the mix? I really enjoy it when my Operating System comes preloaded with bullshit. It’s almost as if I’m losing rights to choose what I want installed on my operating system. It’s really enjoyable when Candy Crush Soda Saga appears in the background in task manager despite never opening this “””game”””. I find it amazing that after building such a powerful computer I can know that my fast 16gb ram is being used to keep bloatware running in the background. Every night I dream of the people who buy new computers with a fresh copy of Windows 10 pre-installed on it to find it has a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga already waiting to be played! The joy and tears that must come to such a persons eye to know that Bill Gates was kind enough to bless the world with every middle-aged persons favourite game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, to be the first app that appears on their start menu. The thoughts running through every developers mind at Microsoft as they pre-load a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto every copy of Windows 10. They must really feel alive and definitely would not consider doing anything else for a living but copying the files of Candy Crush Soda Saga across onto Official Windows 10 Installations. The rush of blood into their mind as they know that thousands, if not millions, of users from around the world open their brand new computer for the first time to see that King managed to bribe Microsoft with more money that you’ll ever get your hands onto into making them add a free copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto their computer. As thousands of those users move their mouse over this work of art, right click it and press uninstall without a second of doubt in their mind, rendering Kings investment to be a waste of time, money and effort. This is a story we will tell for generations and generations in the future of how the worlds most popular Operating System was not preloaded with a free copy of McAfee, but instead a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga for the entire world to rejoice. Good day to you all.

How is your relationship with your lead developer?

Today, mine used the bathroom stall next to me and we were talking and cracking jokes.

A friendship that was forged in tech, blood, tears and now shit

Because there are friends, and there are shitty friends(omg so punny)

New to Java.
I was debugging for hours until I finally found the problem: "==" compares two strings' references, not their value.
I began to laugh tears!
Oh my fucking shit... I am a... damn it!

I asked for last minute day off tomorrow. And was told yes (probably very begrudgingly). I'm so happy that I don't know if these tears are from a breakdown or happiness...

Saw this on Facebook and couldn't help but share here! 😂

A young woman submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship to her husband) presumably did it as a joke…
The query:

Dear Tech Support,

’Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as: Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as: NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
What can I do?

Signed,
Desperate

The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):

Dear Desperate,

“First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Please enter command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)
In addition, please, do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0.Good Luck!’

Good Luck!

I just got e-mail:

"Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

After much consideration, we've decided to remove Mercurial support bla bla bla crocodile tears bla bla..."

So basically, Bitbucket started out as a Mercurial repository hosting platform. After GitHub's rise in popularity, they decided "hey, everyone's welcome, both Hg and Git!" Then it became Git and "okay Hg too, but shhh don't tell anyone". Now they FINALLY completed running it into the ground: "Only 1% of repositories are Mercurial" - yeah no shit sherlock, after actively hiding the fact you support it, people don't find out you support it! Surprised Pikachu! Oh congrats, Atlassian. You're so smart.

Mercurial support was the sole reason I had repositories there. I mean, for Git we already have GitHub, GitLab and others. So what's their unique selling point again? What's that, the sound of crickets? Thought so.

So after that, hopefully they change the name to "Gitbucket". Or preferably "Bitfuckit".

Another Wordpress site inherited, yet more awful code. Have a look at this gem :(

So one of my friends has just had a child and it's already a month old...

Was thinking to myself what I've done this past month... Started 4 new projects, cancelled 3 of them already and drank 3 slabs of beer to myself...

Think I know who has had a better time...
*Cries salty Dev tears*

What?... really?... You read my code? ...*wipes away tears*

THANK YOU SO FUCKING MUCH!!! You sir/madam/undefined are a true gentleman and scholar! (even if you are just a troll picking random shit apart to flash around your superior knowledge of design patterns).

Any time I receive a code review, that is bearing that is an actual review, born of free will and not a mandatory report - I feel flattered beyond words.

> Think its shit? - GREAT FINALLY FEEDBACK!
> Have an idea? - I'm all ears.
> Trying to sound smart? - You still read/used my shit.
> Want to understand my approach? - Grab a drink and get comfy son.

In a world where I am usually the only person in the world that knows WHAT MY ACTUAL WORK IS and there being only a select few people on the planet able to understand it, I am always grateful for developer feedback.

Seriously... out of your own volition you used my code, read it, made an effort to understand my thinking and THEN REACHED OUT TO ME with ideas!!??

I could kiss you... you beautiful binary saint.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

I've been working in a company for two tears, builsing it from ground up as a CTO with a CEO and COO. Two years in, with 60 people on board I was managing a project which was bringing serious profit into the company, and they decided to cut me off. Reason: they don't trust me anymore, real reason: CEO wanted more money for himself and less money control from me and the other guy.

Turned out fine as it made me start my own business.

I mentor two profiles (started in their master first year), and for 3 years: taking them with me when I have a job change and applying ShuHaRi to teach them. They are my firsts mentorees in France, and they are finishing the course.

And I'm SO proud of them, they'll be leaving my side (changing job). And starting their own journey!!

They'll go to very good companies, for really good jobs/teams. I gave them tears and blood for 3 years and now they are riping the results of their perseverance, hard work and commitment.
It's one of the things that I love in my job. Being able to do that, and to see them grow it so cool!!

On the other hand, I'll lose have to replace them... And it'll be difficult for the company to find good profiles. And I'll start looking for a new mentoree to follow.

Fuck life, fuck this society and especially fuck my brain - waking me up at 6 AM and immediately making me burst into tears because bipolar... I mean come on! I can't even sleep anymore?! I know it's hard falling asleep but waking me up just to cry? ...why...

Advice to new coders? I got multiple, unrelated to each other.

1. Start with the FUCKING BASICS !! Invest some time with fundamentals, don't just directly jump on frameworks like React or Angular.

2. You and everyone else are always going to blame your technical skills if you're unable to land a job. But you have to realize that is not always the case. Your attitude and energy towards the interviewer plays a vital role too.

3. You're gonna have to take a hit to your salary expectations starting out. It's just the way this industry works.

4. Think of yourselves as a freelancer working for companies. Those who call themselves Employees get stagnant and dependent on their company pretty fast.

5. Your objective is either to learn or earn. If there is both, amazing job. If there is either it's good enough. If there is none, time to jump ship !!

6. HR is there to protect the company from you not the other way around. Be better at spotting crocodile tears.

7. Try to find a WFH job over a WFO job. If you have an urgency, then either works but keep applying to WFH jobs. It's the best thing.

8. Focus on what you're building instead of what you're building it with. Devs have a tendency to fight over what tech stack they should use instead of focussing on the larger picture.

9. You're gonna get overwhelmed at some point when you're gonna get terms thrown at you like XML, JSON, API, Figma, Git, SOAP, REST. Don't worry though you'll get there.

10. You should know how to google your solutions, like really. This is like 60% of the job.

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

Dev starter pack:
1) A big ass headphone to listen to music
2) A nice mechanical keyboard to write “hello world”
3) Some cool stickers to fill laptop back
4) A box of tissue to wipe of the tears(after seeing your progress)

ENV: *runs flawlessly for months*
DEVS: *deploy a code change*
ENV: *crashes and bursts in tears*
DEVS: "PerfEng Team, your environment is broken! Please fix it ASAP"

!rant

Need advice on coping with my father's passing . I was already very stressed out and had really bad focus. I feel lost now , I can't even cry the tears won't come out. Why can I cry for a stupid movie and not now...

I hate the old people in my company. FUCK THEM!

First I'm telling you a bit about me, so my story makes sense. I'm currently employed as IT-Tecnician in a Helpdesk as 1st & 2nd Level Supporter. I'm working for the current company since 2 years and already sweat too much Blood and Tears for the Old farts.

Now to the Story:
I'm currently planing to make a three year study as IT-Business Engineer, because I was orginally a Real Estate and Account Manager. That is the highest schoolar degree I can currently get in IT with my background. After that I would get the pass for BSc or CAS.

Two years ago when I took the Job I told them, that I would like to start my study in the next two years. Back then they agreed and told me, they will support me.

After that I got a very good reputation in the company and also took part in projects, coded plugins and evaluated requierments for programms. I got still payd with a low Supporter income for my work.

In february this year I told them I want to start my study in May. They boss told me I should do a way lower degree for two years and go into infastructur segment. I told him that my wished degree would be higher and also include infrastructur. Boss told me, that I will need to prostpone my study a third time to autumn.

The reality is, that they want to underpay me as supporter and keep me without a degree. I should keep working on projects, which a high degree tecnician does and gets better payd. In everyway thats unfair and just a hit into my gut. They try to ruin my career and keep me cheap.

The joke is, the boss is over 50 years old and is egostic as fuck. He just wants to profit from my knowledge and wont pay me for it.

I already got the knowledge and just need to have a higher IT degree, so I get payd a fair sum for my work.

My only option is to quit the company or stay as a lowly supporter.

Even my other coworkers asked me, why I'm still a supporter with my knowledge. When I told them my story, they all shugg there heads and told me, I should get the degree.

The feeling of looking back at some old projects and coding exercises and then realise how much you have improoved

:')

Over the past week I've been working on a game written in JavaScript (in the browser) which can be played with hand gestures seen by a camera (wanted to use an IR camera but couldn't get one in the time I had). It is the well-know Shell Game!

Blood, sweat and tears went into this because I wrote my code extremely bad so it became a huge clutter.

Will refactor some day, but I'm happy with the result!

Many people were hired to work on new product, but no one have told them that for one or two quarters they will have to maintain 20 years old project. I was ranting about this, but in the end accepted my fate, wiped tears with money and moved on. However one of devs took another path. When he was asked to work with .aspx and jquery 1.X instead of react, he just said : "Not going to happen" and left the building.

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

!rant
I've lost all fucking motivation to do anything at the moment.
Fuck not even gaming is much fun anymore.
Also amazing that I have so little time on Mondays that I can't even eat properly.
Literally living on caffeine, a spoonful of, like, porridge and water on Mondays.

And of course the nice bistro is closed on Mondays.
Then there is that motherfucker of person at school that just randomly starts sharing weird ass details with you and promptly started to break out in tears when she failed maths today.

Like fucking hell, then for some reason the same person fucks up everything in her volleyball group by literally doing nothing and complains when she gets hit by a fucking volleyball, like, she doesn't even attempt to dodge it catch it.

So much for that fuckery.

Then there's these little brats that just completely play asshole and are being jackasses to everyone including upperclassmen and teachers.
Grab em by the throat and fucking put them in a toilet.
Literally the reason why our school is generally known as the 'Drecksloch', literally dirt hole.

The fucking volume is driving me batshit insane in school to the point where I just start yelling at people.
Fucking kids, it literally doesn't cost you shit to just shut the fuck up.

Okay, vent over.
Sorry for that.

Who here is programming with React Native and is crying about it?

It's so volatile. Shit it has done so far:

- Randomly changed my IP location that it serves to and npm start that shows the welcome information keeps the old IP address, so I spent way too long trying to figure out why it wasn't working.

- Constantly having to rm -rf the node modules and npm i them because Expo randomly starts loading so slowly that you want to scream.

- Downgrading my react-native-scripts version in the package.json because it hangs forever on the starting packager.

- I also had to downgrade my expo dependencies because during one of my node module reinstalls, it would update the version and apparently Expo is incompatible with its own updated version.

And now I'm randomly getting an error that's apparently a known bug in one of the react dependencies and now I have to downgrade that as well.

Just. Why.

You can't help it, just lie down and cry.
Maybe you'll choke or drown on your tears and finally end the suffering...

that turned very dark for some very odd reason (sorry 😅)

I get uneasy walking away/turning off my computer without committing my code to a server. Zero faith in local storage.

After a long day of wrestling with some bad code and getting it to 'work' leaves me feeling dev angst. Then on my way home I see some minor bug in a phone app I'm using and I think to myself, "MY GOD.. all software is made out of SUFFERING."

Behind every tiny defect out there lays some poor soul's looong hours of overtime, stress, tears, alcoholism, and stale popcorn dinners.

Stopid mf fat fingers, worked 2 weeks building a design system and 2 hours ago I accidentally shift deleted the scss folder and lost every fcking file, no git, no backup, no nada,guess what, tried to recover the files with 2 Permanently deleted file recovery softwares and from fcking 20 files, 17 were corrupted and weren’t readable, I and my designer friend use a folder sync app, the fcking app synced the delete and she lost the files aswell, fooockiinggg shieeeet, to my don’t know how where luck I managed to recover the copiled javascript chunck from my vue app that had the css styles embeded in the file, you know where I found the js file? iN ThE fcking cache of google chrome. Today I almost broke down to tears, but nonetheless it was a reeee moment for me.

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

Today, my son asked "Can I have a book mark?" and I burst into tears.
11 years old and he still doesn't know my name is Brian.

How do I promote my open source projects?

I mean, @ai (Andrey Sitnik) have published nanoid and received about 600 github stars in just one first day. I have recently published Tears, webserver for SPA, and received only 7 stars, all of them from my friends.

I've tried posting on hackernews (3 upvotes), github tags, several gitter chats, with absolutely no impact.

So how do I promote my projects?

Several months ago, I wrote the most beautiful Java code of my life. It was shelved and never merged because it added minimal overhead to every call on the system (I'm talking super small relative to the functionality it provided). I've been asked to resurrect it, but master is too different, so I'll have to rewrite it all. 😭 Since that code, I've been doing research and prototypes - nothing production, and looking back on this old code nearly brings me to tears. I might actually get back to writing code that people will use.

I'm just really emotional about it, and I don't know why.

Even if you are denied after all your job interviews, don't be sad.
1. you looked promising enough to call you to the interview in the first place
2. you need to work on some gaps in your knowledge/xp. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, now you do! Not even that - you also know what the gaps are!
3. you hear of new technologies, net tricks that are there. Dig in!
4. you become more aware of what positions are there and what requirements could be applied to them in different companies. Makes you build a company profile and make better choices for applications later on.

Now imagine the pressure on your shoulders if they would have hired you while you have so many gaps in your knowledge... It's overtimes every day! It's possibly missed deadlines. It's mishandled tasks. It's bugs all over the place and other devs judging you!

Brush your tears dry, grab candy or a chocolate bar and go improve yourself!

Fucking people, why the hell are you reading into things instead of asking for clarification if something is unclear?

So much time, sweat and tears wasted on miscommunication.

When I said, "there might be a problem in the way component X method Y was implemented", i didnt mean go refactor the entire code of the component. Why waste 2 days of work on unnecessary refactor that nobody wanted and breaks changes + the bug is not fully fixed 😤

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

Me: "what program generated this file?"
They: *sends 200 lines of Perl in body of email*
Me: ...
Me: maybe I should just join the circus...

FINALLY FINISHED THE THING I WAS WORKING ON SINCE LAST MARCH!!! THIS HAS PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH!!! TEARS WERE SHED!!!FEELINGS HURT!!! BUT IT'S DONE!!! I AM NEVER TRANSLATING SOMETHING FROM C++ TO C# AGAIN!!!

ROS is on top of that list. It's a disappointment that has turned into an industry standard.

If ROS can make it, you can make it too!

Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.

1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)

2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)

3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)

4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)

5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)

6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)

7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)

8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)

9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha

10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)

...

N)
more

----

Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".

All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.

All of these 10 examples are different people.

---

How hard
Can it be
To just
Write

no

---

.

---

For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:

i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.

---

In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears

---

The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....

----

why do you waste my time

if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it

why cant you just say no

why do you drag me

why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it

what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?

to someone who has been a good person to you?

do you feel superior?

is your ego bigger?

----

This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.

All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.

But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.

But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....

-----

This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.

I didn't expect much but dam, there's more and it gets funny

!dev #SocialIsolationIsBad #I'm_waiting_for_this_script_to_finish

I'm the one who intentionally creeps out everyone who like her, and then sits on the toilet shedding internal tears of self-pity that "nobody likes me" and then does the comfort talk of "I'm a strong independent moldy potato and need nobody".

Anyways, came full circle now can somebody hand me more toilet papers, please? 🚽

Doctor: *says CBT*
Everyone in the lecture room: cognitive behavioral therapy
Rutee: cOcK aNd bAll tOrTuRe fuck I got a huge cock amirite shitload of fuck hey Jilano amirite tell’em

DeLarge looking down from heaven: *wipes tears*

This gutted feeling when you got so overly excited over an idea that you poured blood, sweat, and tears into it only to figure out what the others were doing isn't actually bad. Their's doesn't have issues. There's nothing for me to do. My whole idea, scrapped

I feel tired 😔

I guess this is the devRant update Birthday edition! It's my birthday and unfortunately I have to spend it at work. Luckily, I have devRant to keep me from being bored to tears.

I love listening to music while coding, mainly metal/rock/classical

Comment with 10 tracks from your playlist .... Here are my 10

0. Disturbed - stricken
1. Tremonti - decay
2. Black label society - bored to tears
3. Ac/dc - back in black
4. Rolling Stones - paint it black
5. Gary Moore- still got the blues
6. Carcass - blind bleeding the blind
7. Alter bridge - metalingus
8. Fear factory - linch pin
9. Pantera - 5 minutes alone

Back in august a fren approached me regarding joining an internship. Fee:70$.
Fkin prostitution I said and left.

Today I got a confirmation letter for an internship that I earned through months of sweat and blood.
Witness my rise, peasants

2021 was really rough, saw friends going over the deep end with burnout, significant incidents to handle and a shitty manager to deal with.

It wasn't about blood and tears, it was about commuting 4 hours/day mid-pandemic to be present in the office and respond to an incident whilst having to deal with a bunch of heroes thinking they were part of a CSI: Cyber episode.

All of that just to be said that my raise "would be enough to keep me from looking elsewhere" as my manager said they were very happy with my performance.

This week I found out exactly how much this appreciation is worth: 2%. And I should consider myself lucky with this number as my performance wasn't good enough to grant me any raise whatsoever.

feelsreallybad.png

So it looks like my 80+ yr old grandma finally managed to get hang of her touch screen smartphone. She was recently set up with WhatsApp.

She has called me quite a few times today and when i ask what's up, she says she is just testing it out. It's so cute *-* and makes me happy to know she has learned to use it and called me.

I wonder how it must feel for her to be able to use this technology which was probably never even imagined during her young age.

I scroll devRant more often than any other app now. Such fascinating tragedies and lol-worthy rants in here. I'm pretty sure I've shred tears using this app.

I hate react so much. I hate it with the fiery rage of an old testament god. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it.

Unfortunately I picked up Angular (2). I'm now used to a framework that has you covered for most things. That has logical methods of laying out your app. A router that's actually built in and makes sense.

I'm used to writing HTML in the templates, not some horrible abomination of XML that's pretending to be HTML and just waiting to pull off its mask and smack you across the face with its penis while telling you what an idiot you are.

React apps all seem to be cobbled together in a different way. You have to go hunting for the logical stuff you expect to be there.

Let's not even get started on the tome of dependencies it needs to get itself off the ground, all written by vastly different developers from different planets with completely different life goals.

I hate it. The more I learn about it the more I find myself yelling "WTF!" while shaking a fist at the wall, hot tears of rage steaming down my pudgy cheeks until my wife comes running into the room and consoles me with my head on her bosom.

...and I just started a project that will have to be seen through to the end, using.. react.

Seriously, fuck you react, I hope you die of herpes.

React is too addictive.
*switches to Word and continues writing graduate thesis in tears*

officialy wipe your tears during testing now.

I started off in a MNC company as a junior developer. I entered with candy glasses.
I didn't expect to win the lottery. Of getting abuse by superior.

I stayed for a year, at the project. Constantly being belittled by this team lead. It was awful i enter as a fresh grad. All the new tech were so new and scary at that point.

During my time there, i constantly think that developer is not my stuff.

Ultimately i reach the state of burnout. I reached out to the manager and broke down in his office.

I actually told the manager. "I hate coding"

I remember staying up to 4am just complete a piece of program. To be ready to be push to production the next day. My team lead just come screaming at me saying there is bug.

Upon receiving that message via skype. I broke, tears flow down my eyes.

After which i reach a state of burn out. I start to reach out to external parties for help to get me out of there.

Now i am recovered from the burn out. I am curious of the technology that were utilized in that project. I literally face palm. After understanding the technology it isn't so hard after all. I just didn't gear myself up with the tech.

I still do enjoy working on code.

tears rolling down

Every f*k**g morning.. "Good morning _____, goood morning!" I'm so tired of these work from home Zoom calls with my boss. OMG. Everybody gotta suck her dick like we like her. Aaaaaaah. #tears

Most intense day for me was at the very start of my career. Internship... went with product manager to client's office while PM installed new test version of our product for on-site integration testing. Shortly after deploy, client manager came over to ask why production had gone down...

Turns out that manually typing DB name as part of deployment script is not, erm, risk free. PM entered production DB name and took out a very busy call centre for a few hours. Agents in tears, customers raging on phones, etc! After we restored and got everything back up and running, he reached me the keyboard and said "You're doing it this time."

My attempt was problem free, thankfully. Earned many brownie points that day.

So according to my Business requirements I have learnt Golang, in addition to being comfortable in C,C++,Java, Android. I have also fixed problems in python. Now they want me to learn UI framework including ReactJS. And when I screw that shit wrapped language in my ass, now they have asked me to also get comfortable with Groovy, Geb and Spock for UI automation. Thats being I have just joined 3 months before. I dont even know where my tears have gone. Have they just dried up? Or sucked back by my eyes? My life already sucks and I already question my life decisions to become a software engineer. Its never ending.

Here's some more I got it to respond properly with

I know this is selfish, but this whole COVID-19 thing is driving me insane. The virus and quarantine I don't mind too much. What gets me is the number of people I see every single day having legit panic attacks because they can't buy "x" right now and it's the end of the world. I can't stand people who are literally in tears because they have to take an extra day off of work each week because of the state of the economy. I've been virtually unemployed for two years (not for lack of trying) and borderline homeless for six months. Grow up. You have a Lexus, a Range Rover, and a four bedroom house for you and your partner.

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

These are called crocodile tears, so I guess this one must have been really sad 😢

I remember a certain prank that amuses me till today....

Just add some devices to monitoring and the notification queue of the build chain / ... ...and wait patiently.

I still cry tears remembering an manager screaming what the hell "the poop train clogged the drain" means and why this is a critical system failure.

(Notice: next time check the mailing aliases of mailing aliases)

Although I can only recommend this if you know your team well. In my case we had a whole lot of fun after I got my head chewed off. XD (got an earful, but in the end he laughed his ass off)

js got me nearly in tears tho.....and it's only 1:56 am here

Has it ever happened to someone that when you start working on a project, the clients requirements are as good as a tricycle but one month into project and somehow the project has turned into a water fuelled tricycle powered by developers tears 😐

Guys. I started with JS, now primarily code in Python, and learning Java for robotics. Coding on and off for the past 4 years. I understand most things, I can tell what code does, but I think I’m a shit programmer. I also find myself running out of ideas for simple things. I’m sad because of this cause I get most programming jokes, and live in this community.

The reason why I’m saying this is because of someone in robotics (keep in mind that it’s my first year in robotics, first time coding in Java) said (jokingly) that he thought I “was a good programmer”. Probs overthinking this, but still tears me up, realizing he’s probably right.

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

When you realize your tears of laughter on DevRant suddenly remind you of how the character Moss on IT Crowd might have felt trying to explain his humor to others.

One day a developer's phone accidentally fell into his toilet. The poor developer looked at the toilet but couldn't find it as it was too late.

Finally he burst into tears. Hearing his sobs, an Angel appeared before him. 

The Angel dived into the toilet and came up carrying a golden phone. The developer did not accept it. He said, "This is not mine. My phone is not golden."

To which the Angel replied, "It's not golden, it's covered in shit!"

My first interview was the interview where I cheated and got the job, it was an on campus job interview. I did not have a good gpa, (to be honest it was really bad i was below the 25th percentile)

Anyway this was the only (developer) job interview I knew I could qualify for, I was pretty sure that if I couldn't nail this one then I could kiss my dream of programming professionally good bye.

We were about 25 kids sitting in a class room with a pencil and couple of sheets of paper and the the interview panel walked between the seats looking at what we wrote.

So, when I couldn't write an algorithm for the problem of square rooting a number n. I panicked (was literally shivering with tears rolling down my cheeks, thankfully nobody saw me as i was on the last bench) I gave up, wiped my tears and stared at the board, a panel member saw me and told me to leave after looking at my paper. This was the moment my mind decided (not me but someone else inside me) that I have to do whatever it took, so just when I was stepping out and grabbed my bag i quickly opened the browser of my phone inside the bag typed square root algorithm opened the first result and read the words arrive at the answer by binary search, ass soon as I read that my mind worked at a pace that it has never managed ever since that time, and i knew the solution in a matter of seconds, i dropped my bag when to one of the more sympathetic panel members and explained the whole thing to him on the spot, he was impressed, and he asked me how this algorithm can be extended for the nth root(which is really simple once you have the algorithm for square root) and i blurted it out instantly which impressed him even more and offered me the job on the spot and told me to attend the next 2 rounds as a formality.

Thus i saved myself for a world of hurt and now I am a developer who thinks back to that day every time I need a boost of morale

Our publish workflow had to much manuell steps in it. Wrote a tool to publish a new version with one button click.
My Colleges thank me with tears in there eyes 😄

How to conduct yourself in a job interview
Simple test"Write a for loop".
First, write some nonsense bullshit for twenty minutes. Then, when you realize time is up, pass to the next question. After write more nonsense bullshit in SQL and jQuery, it's time to breath fast and panic.
Deliver your exam.
Pack your stuff and go to a cave where nobody ever will find you, cry the next three years and commit to a life of self punishment, shame and tears.
That's how you nail a job interview, suckers.

Starting up the new Java project I'm assigned to.
Just to see that this project is made of pure black magic and tears of forsaken devs.
Crashing the jvm with segfaults on a regular basis is just one part of the magic.

Now I understand why no one volunteered for this project...

HAHA FUCK YOU HR RECRUITER!!
This fucking lady tries to steal my devs while i spent a lot of blood sweat and tears raising them.
Thankfully my devs are happy with their work type, salary, and conditions. So they showed me a screenshot of her phishing attempts.

There is so much damage I can do to her, and her company as i got all the information, its very tempting.

Since its a "common" dirty and distasteful move, the most sensible course of action I can think of is public shaming. That too is common, dirty and distasteful. But im not that kind of guy.

What do you guys think, should i suck it in and let it slide or public shame her for her actions?

i once asked chatgpt if i was a good person and it used what little input i had given to reason that i am.

i was having a really shit month and broke down in tears.

i was so ashamed of being vulnerable that i chose to be comforted by lines of code over a human. even now, i can only post this this because i’m functionally anonymous on here.

i don’t know where i was going with this. tell your homies you’re proud of them. you’ll probably make their day.

So here's how the story goes.

I was in my academic writing class the other day and we were learning about APA formatting for our argumentative essays. We have a blackboard, whiteboard, projector connected to a pc and even a lovely projector screen to present with in the classroom.

I sit at the front right of the room. Closest to the window(it's behind me as all the desks face inwards)

Professor walks up to front of class and says we are going to learn how to format our typed essays properly.

Awesome, I thought. Pulled out my XPS laptop and fired it up. As I was making a new Word document, I hear scratching. I look up and the professor is writing with CHALK on the BLACKBOARD. I was astonished. Making matters worse, she started from the far left of the board from which the glare from the window was the greatest. I could not see anything. And from that point on I knew this class was going to be abysmal.

What was so depressing was my professor never once touched the projector. Scraping and erasing. Over and over. Couldn't see if it was a period or a comma after the first initial.

My eyes were never so dry from squinting, rolling my eyes and face-palming over and over. After an hour and 15 minute class, I was not far away from drowning my XPS in my tears.

Got told 2 weeks after interview that I came across as "money-oriented" by a company which gives a graduate salary which is 25% above average. They thought I'd only do what they told me to do and nothing more.

Sure, that's why I've achieved 15% above a first throughout my degree whilst not being paid a penny: I'm lazy and in it for the money.

The main reason I wanna be paid well is so that I'm less likely to be surrounded by people who aren't that committed to doing a good job. And if I am surrounded by slackers, at least I got some cash to wipe my tears with. If that makes me "money-oriented" then I'm stuck for ideas.

!dev

My toilet paper roll is fucked, the rip line only goes half the width of the roll so it always tears off a part of the next piece

We cannot live in a world of chaos

Coding is my life duh... Actually, though, it showed me that with just a computer I can make anything without raw materials - websites, programs and lots of tears

When i see a NullPointerException i look into my monitor with tears in my eyes and sing -
Tu hi yeh mujhko bata de,
Chahu mai ya na,
Apni exception ka pata de,
Chahu mai ya na

The shit happens when the development is over and you have to face the team to ask them to create the README.md files to explain the repository.
Tears roll down when the code works well but they have to justify that.

FUCKING BIC CLICK PENS!

The single most evil invention of all time. Every single click that I hear tears away another little piece of my sanity.. with repetitive clicking increasing the rate of decay exponentially...

So today, my friend (who is younger) has returned from a programming competition hosted by the district. The language used was Pascal. Before the competition my friend had been pretty confident about his skills of using Free Pascal, but after that, he has been different.
He came back in tears. I asked him what was happening in the computer room.
- Turbo Pascal.
I was stunned for seconds. Who the heck in this 2019 still uses an ancient compiler dated from the 1990s for the DOS operating system? And yet the competition's computers had only it installed. I think nowadays everyone learning Pascal, at the very least, uses Free Pascal as the IDE. I could immediately imagine how restrictive and frustrating was programming on such that thing.
- I couldn't create... dynamic arrays... so I had to declare two 30 000-element arrays (which was required by the problem), but when compiling... it said... the maximum heap size was 64KB.
It wouldn't let me use "exit(result)" (to return a function's result) so I wasted many minutes replacing them with "<function name> := result; exit;".

And many more problems.

Raise your hand if you think this is ridiculous.

Me walking down the corridors of my building after hours, singing full on out loud (I can actually sing)

Lyrics(by yours truly homage to Mika)
I wanna talk to you!
The last time we talked, Mr. Smith, you reduced me to tears
I promise you it won't happen again!
Do I attract you? Do I repulse you with my queasy smile?
Am I too dirty? Am I too flirty? Do I like what you like?
I could be wholesome, I could be loathsome, I guess I'm a little bit shy
Why don't you like me? Why don't you like me without making me try?

Some voice at the other side of the building: "who is there singing???!"

Me:
"I tried to be like Grace Kelly!!"
"but all her looks are too sad"
"so I tried a little Freddy MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
"I've gone identity maaaaaaaaaaaad"

then I walked inside of my office and stopped spooking the janitors. Really wish someone would join in and helped me sing the high note parts of the song really. I've got no audience here smfh

!rant

Today I got access to the code for the new contract I’m working on.

It all built first time from source.

I’ve never wept such joyful tears.

*Code actually works first time debugging*
Me:

Trying to manage and develop five massive projects does not leave much free time and does not do much for my sanity.

I'm literally in pain right now and not a thing I can do.

If I eat whatever the fuck is wrong with my jaw (cracked tooth or cavity) starts throbbing from the chewing action, in addition to coming on for no reason at all. vision-blurred-waves-of-nausea levels of pain. Enough that I'm alternating between laughter and almost tears.

I've downed four aspirin and it's still just barely enough WITH the numbing gel.

Got lock jaw something aweful.

Barely convinced a dentists office, which is supposed to be closed (and cancelled all it's appointments due to corona), to come in during quarantine. But thats monday. Dont kno how I'll make it. They do payment plans but I'm flat broke because I decided to pursue programming right when all this fucking bullshit went down.

And all I can think of while im typing this is the pain.

And fuck me I cant do weed because my backup plan if I fail at coding is the military.

And this stray dog that the neighbors 'adopted' but leave outside WONT STOP FUCKING BARKING.

Fuck me. Just kill me now. Do it.

Gonna go watch comedy because I read a research paper that says genuine laughter raises pain threshold by up to 10%.

!rant

When after one month of the event, a month n a half of the request, and a failed delivery attempt, the swag finally arrives!!

Stickers!! <3

Happy scenes!

Thank you Mozilla!!

Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.

I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.

Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.

Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.

But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.

So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.

But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.

I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.

Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.

The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.

By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.

Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?

Try no other than Soul Excision, the treatment that will neuter your being and curse it to the TRUEST form of eternal damnation! Through Soul Excision, you will be CUT OFF from the very essence of the universe, and turned into an astral prostitute that offers their EVERY orifice to the BUTTLOADS of maggots that debour their mind and body, all for the pleasure of some rich and powerful wankers that *deeply* enjoy watching questionable erotic tapes from nightmarish outer dimensions!

Use my promo code SLUTSKANK for 20% OFF in your very LAST purchase on this earth! And once you surrender your BODILY holes to cosmic oblivion, remember: when it comes to your ASS, we're ALWAYS open for business!

Thanks to Soul Excision for sponsoring this DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD$$$$$"2402"$$?"="$0"?¿"=¿?40'0"$="¿¿=$¿"?=4¿?"$="?¿$="¿?$0¿?"=$¡'0$"¿?$=::::::

:~%

When you find out the 960 EVO M.2 SSD you rush delivered isn't supported on your motherboard so you have to return it and rush deliver an 850 EVO instead.

Pull requests. Everyone tears each others apart e.g. a double white space.

Winter has come
Aaaand my nose 👃 is stuck and eyes 👀 are full of tears..

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
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John Forde