To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

thanks to @stuxnet i have to proudly say, that i have went outside and after 21 years, asked a girl for her number in real life, of course got rejected, this probably sounds pathetic as fuck to all of you, which i do agree, but because of the hell I've gone through and blood I've left behind out of struggle the life caused me, i have finally gathered bravery to take a risk and do it, yes i technically haven't achieved anything but i have finally tried at least once and this is the furthest I've gone with girls in real life... what a fucking relief... i think its gonna be much easier now that i finally broke the ice...

> TeamLeader1: I just discovered SQL is actually super fast! The low responsiveness I've experienced comes from our ORM!
> IHateForALiving: well of course SQL is blazingly fast. SQL has been refined by the best engineers in the world for the past 50 years, its performances are unparalleled for everything you could possibly need, unless you want to scale REALLY big. Sequelize, instead, is an Active Record ORM, so it's bound to struggle with huge amount of data, because every single row will get attached a significant amount of black magic to make sure everything syncs correctly. Why is that?
> TeamLeader1: I have a problem with this frontend component, it doesn't allow pagination. I tried downloading the whole DB to bypass that, but the ORM is slow... so I will bypass the ORM and download the whole table with a raw query. Look at that! It works like a charm, it's super duper fast!'

This mf is downloading some 35 thousand rows every time some user loads a page because he doesn't know how to paginate the fucking table with Angular, there's no way these people are real.

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

The struggle with installing opencv is fucking real!
FUCK YOU PIECE OF A SHIT

Need help. I feel so fucking retarded Everytime I use Node/NPM for any development. I'm on Win10, which may be part of it, but every tut I find is not straight forward. Errors here and there. What's the best way to learn and keep up with Node/Npm and this flavor of the week (for me) Angular? Trying to create a PoC PWA. The struggle is real. Thanks in advance for any tips.